HEALTHCARE DISRUPTS ORDINARY LIFE
People are often managing complex social and logistical worlds when they get sick. They might have a family to feed, pets to take care of, friendships to maintain, and a work-life to manage. In this project, we sought to understand how the traditional, facility-based model of healthcare disrupts ordinary life and how we can re-imagine healthcare to reduce such disruptions.
Twenty ethnographic interviews and observation sessions with former and current patients revealed numerous ways that the traditional, visit-based model of care can cause friction and sometimes upend carefully-crafted routines.
Routines, we learned, are not dispensable. They are profoundly important means by which people maintain a sense of what's important. When healthcare undermines routines, a deeper existential stability can also be lost.
The fieldwork period revealed the critical importance of this challenge and ways we can fix it. Our multi-platform solution relied on an ecosystem of partners to fill critical gaps left by traditional care and move care delivery closer to patients’ normal lives.