¶ … intended public audience for this opinion piece includes stakeholders in the healthcare industry, including educators, researchers, nurses, physicians, and hospital administrators. One of the goals of this opinion piece is to persuade members of the healthcare industry to embrace a new paradigm in which creative thought is welcomed and encouraged, rather than shunned and mistrusted as it currently is. Consumers who are willing to pressure their physicians to improve quality of care are also a primary target demographic, as all Americans will at some point in their lives avail themselves of medical services. All Americans are likely to have had, at some point or another, a negative experience using medical services. Therefore, my goal is to persuade the audience of consumers to demand a higher standard of care.
The popular television show House helped draw attention to the need for, and resistance to, creativity in the medical practice. A lack of creativity in the medical field has been detracting from quality of patient care, as physicians have become "slavish ... to standardized treatments," and their decisions have become "increasingly determined by mechanical and algorithmic processes," (Jones 1). An assessment published in the Harvard Business Review accuses medicine of being "chaotic, expensive, inefficient, and often ineffective," (Morse 1). Medicine is not just any business in need of innovation to bolster profitability; it is a field in which quality of care means life or death. As Jones points out, practicing medicine without any creativity "can do more harm than good," (Jones 1). Therefore, medical schools need to start altering their admissions procedures, changing the way medicine is taught, and training doctors to be creative as well as critical thinkers. Hospital administrators and medical review boards likewise need to inject a healthy dose of creativity into the medical profession by hiring doctors who think outside the box, instead of favoring only those who...
Moreover, health care institutions themselves need to take a more innovative approach to the ways services are promoted, delivered, and offered to patients in order to create the most robust medical system possible.
Resistance to creativity in the medical profession begins at the earliest possible point: medical school. Rojahn points out, "those likely to see (or at least attempt to see) connections between disparate subject areas are likely to be weeded out in the medical school application process," (Rojahn 1). Dissatisfied and dismayed with what they have experienced in medical school training, an increasing number of researchers, scientists, and physicians are using new media vehicles like the creativity-driven TED talks to stimulate discussions about how to promote a more innovative medical profession. By embracing creative thinkers at a young age, the medical fields can draw the best and brightest instead of losing top thinkers to alternative fields.
The problem with lack of creativity in medicine continues immediately after graduating from medical school. Idealism and enthusiasm for the field quickly fades into the reality of a profit-driven, creatively stagnant field. A case study can best illustrate what happens when young doctors eager to provide top quality care for their patients are cut down by a system that prefers a robotic approach to medicine. When Jay Parkinson graduated medical school and established his first private practice, he opted for an innovative business model used by few to no other physicians in the United States. He decided to establish his practice almost entirely online and based on house calls: an idea that brought his website 7 million hits in the first month alone (Parkinson). Using his streamlined business model and reducing overhead costs to only 10% of his operational budget, Parkinson set out to revolutionize the medical practice.
What should have been a catalyst…
