Information and tools in untrained hands: crazy, right?

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Value in medicine depends on information – as I said in Let Patients Help, “People perform better when they’re informed better.” It follows that to make patients and families more effective in care, they need to know more.

But one of the most stubborn barriers to patient empowerment is the cultural assumption that since the way professionals learned was hard, you must need to be really smart, and you need to be taught in a carefully thought out, methodical sequence.

Now take 22 minutes and watch this captivating video by Sugata Mitra, winner of the 2013 TED Prize. He gave a computer to slum kids who’d never seen one, and came back a few months later:

What’s going on here?? Well, three years ago The Power of Pull made clear that life has become non-linear: you can go googling for something without knowing what it is – and find it. In a real sense, you pull what you need, rather than having it pushed to you. The whole process assumes that youknow what you’re looking for, and at every fork in the road, you decide which way to go.

Now think about it in medicine. Imagine people with no background at all, learning what they need in this fashion – not top-down, but in what Mitra calls a “self organized learning environment.”Crazy, right?

As crazy as giving slum kids a computer.

What if it worked? What if we found ways to get information – medically useful information – into the hands of people who need it, without adding burden to the people who work in clinics? So that families were better informed on their own, and more aware when they need clinicians?

What if learning what we need became a Self Organized Learning Environment?