Yesterday, I went down to DC to visit the US Dept of Health and Human Services - and presented to their Innovation Council (a cross functional working group on innovation) about opportunities to bring “networked thinking” into the health space. This is clearly such an important area, with huge opportunities for personal and societal benefit. It’s also one that has been on my mind a lot lately (both Cescalouise and I suffer from chronic conditions: chrons, hashimoto’s / thyroid cancer, mysterious blood clots; my second puberty; two small kids, etc). In prepping my remarks, I ended up re-watching John Wilbanks’ awesome TED talk on the idea of a health data commons — a mechanism for becoming “data donors” for medical research. The talk is great. I actually ended up using an idea from Johns talk to frame my presentation, which is this:
health = body + genome + choices + environment
My talk was about “peer networks” and health — and the framing I used was that peer networks (networks of people connected via the web) have dramatic impacts on power and relationships. So, what if we look at each of these dimensions of health through the lens of how individuals’ power and their relationships to one another might change given a networked approach: