Understanding the outcome on health and lifestyle
There’s one driver that will benefit a person’s health even more, as we learned earlier, and that’s lifestyle – that is, preventing an individual from becoming a patient. We will explain this using the health experience shortened as HeX, similarly to UX for User eXperience in the DevOps world. This HeX is the first reference model we will use to understand each other.
First, we need to explain what the HeX is. It refers to the health activities of a person, varying from participating in daily life to being treated and (chronically) nursed as a patient. We use omniversal care to represent the lifetime journey through which a person, as a patient, travels in terms of required care from the cradle to the grave.
Note
We are using the word omniversal: omnidirectional and universal. This applies to all health activities from every direction at the same time.
The following diagram shows the omniversal care in the HeXagon for health experience:
Figure 1.3 – Omniversal care HeXagon to represent the Health eXperience (HeX)
The basic model is firmly patient-centric, with the activities of the person as a reference. At any given time, the person is participating in the daily life of society, conducting – more or less – prevention activities such as sports or walking, and getting regular check-ups or tests such as for colon cancer. A patient will probably visit the General Practitioner (GP). If required, further medical diagnosis is performed along with treatment such as intervention with medication, exercises, or an operation. The patient might receive either short-term or chronic nursing care. This can be for one or more diseases (co-morbidity).
The goal of any person is, implicitly or explicitly, to stay active on the upper half of the hexagon: participation, prevention, and early detection. That has a direct relation with lifestyle. Over the past few decades, medical science concluded that a healthy lifestyle is preventing a lot of commonly known diseases. An unhealthy lifestyle can lead to obesity, which, in turn, can lead to all sorts of health issues such as diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, or orthopedic problems.
Let’s get back to the demographic changes that have had an impact on global healthcare. In the first section, we discussed the rise of noncommunicable diseases in economically rising countries.
A study by Thomas J. Bollyky is a good example and reference for this topic. In his study, he relates the increase in cancers, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, chronic respiratory illnesses, and other noncommunicable diseases in low-income countries to the increased prevalence of key modifiable behavioral risks, such as unhealthy diets and tobacco use, and reductions in the infectious diseases that disproportionately kill children and adolescents.
Worse still, these are also countries that are not well prepared to deal with these diseases because they hardly have any access to proper healthcare. However, again, it shows the major effect that lifestyle has on health.
Note
The full study, entitled Lower-Income Countries That Face The Most Rapid Shift In Noncommunicable Disease Burden Are Also The Least Prepared, is available at https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/full/10.1377/hlthaff.2017.0708.
The examples of Buurtzorg and Amazon Care can also be depicted in the omniversal care hexagon. The first extension of the HeX shows the principle of Buurtzorg.
The HeXagon on the right-hand side of Figure 1.3 shows how Buurtzorg is creating an inner supportive hexagon to avoid outer professional care, if possible, and rely on the local community.
Amazon Care is organizing the care ecosystem around the family of their employees to optimize participation, as shown in the following diagram:
Figure 1.4 – HeXagon of health experience showing the care ecosystem
Combining the two leads to the complete Omniversal Care HeXagon representing the patient-centric care ecosystem of self, social, and medical care. The hexagon on the right-hand side shows the complete HeX, the hexagon for health experience. Support comes from the social (the yellow or light circles) providers and medical care from (the blue or dark circles) providers.
HeX is the representation of the complete individual healthcare ecosystem. Every citizen on earth should have such an ecosystem available. So, that’s the stage on which we set our transformation challenge.