HARNESSING THE TOOLS OF HEALTHCARE TECHNOLOGY, MANAGEMENT, AND DESIGN TO ADVANCE HEALTH EQUITY AND JUSTICE
WHAT WE DO
HEALTH CARE TECHNOLOGY INNOVATION
Clinici.wiki is a new one-stop crowd-sourcing effort to help trainees and primary care providers more easily practice patient-centered, evidence-based medicine during clinic encounters by bringing the best quick-references to one place.
Busy PCPs should be optimizing time with patients, not stressfully googling that guideline they heard about that one time in residency.
CLINIC OPERATIONS MODERNIZATION
The [Your Clinic] Wiki is an effort to bring private sector quality knowledge management support to frontline clinics, regardless of budget, management infrastructure, or tech literacy.
Behind the scenes operations management is essential to providing quality care to patients. We're working to help clinic administrators adopt and adapt these digital clinic support practices at no cost.
HEATH CARE MANAGEMENT IMPLEMENTATION
There are extraordinary strategies to maximize staff well-being, communication efficiency, and coordination of care. But too often, the teams providing care to those most in need don't have the front-end resources or training to implement the strategies that yield long-term benefit.
No more! Let us know what challenges you're having and we're here to help! (Also, keep an eye out here for some upcoming free resources and trainings).
HEALTH CARE EXPERIENCE DESIGN
Health care should be conducted in places of healing. Interacting with health care services shouldn't add to patients' anxiety!
But often we feel like we don't have the time, money, staffing, or experience to think about making health care experiences pleasant ones.
Well we're here to help guide, advise, innovate, and create. We can't wait to be inspired alongside you!
ADVOCACY
All of our work starts upstream. Aaron regularly gives lectures to healthcare learners, participates in health design workshops, engages in local policy discussions, marches in non-violent protests, partners with community-based organizations, and is available to lead workshops on both clinical and non-clinical topics. Current projects center around housing instability, sex work, opioid overdose response, and healthcare worker job condition negotiation.
His most recent opinion piece can be seen published in the Washington Post, titled, D.C.'s Mental Health Policies Lack Compassion.
WHAT IT MEANS
We have a concept in medicine called the differential diagnosis (DDx). For every problem that a patient presents with -- cough, headache, abdominal pain -- we think through every possible source of that problem.
Someone’s cough can be from pneumonia, COPD, heart failure, and the list goes on.
We seek out targeted information, we rank what's most likely, we jointly decide on first steps, and then we evaluate and iterate. This is the foundation of medical diagnosis, treatment, and management.
This iterative process exists in essentially every other health care service line, too: procurement, app development, architecture, knowledge management, interior design, user experience, etc.
Differential Design gives a name to the work we do every day in each and every health care services line. We then implement this philosophy to bridge the quality care gap and improve receipt of quality health care by all people, regardless of income, race, zip code, prior abuse experienced by the capitalist healthcare industrial complex, or health professional shortage area score.
Health care technology, management, and design can be extraordinarily powerful tools to make sure everyone receives exceptional care with dignity and compassion. But too often, those of us who are already burnt out working at the front lines doing our best to provide quality care don't have the time, resources, or training to engage with these powerful tools.
My hope is that this initiative inspires many to reach out and see how these tools can help us all work smarter, not harder, and with a whole lot more joy.
WHO I AM
Founder, Principal
Photo courtesy of Richard Greenhouse Photography
Aaron Shapiro
MD, MPH, AAHIVS, EDAC
Aaron Shapiro, MD, MPH, AAHIVS, EDAC is a primary care doc focused on providing quality healthcare in underserved communities.
He received his Evidence Based Design Accreditation and Certification (EDAC) from the Center for Health Design to better create environments of healing for patients whose health systems have historically not prioritized the impact of the built environment.
He received his Master of Public Health degree with a focus on Health Leadership and Management from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. His practice focuses on interprofessional collaboration to systemically improve healthcare delivery and patient experience. He has led quality improvement initiatives, created open-source tech-based knowledge management solutions, led workflow efficiency initiatives, and spearheaded digital communication optimization initiatives for clinics in urban health professional shortage areas. He strongly feels that the tools of health technology, health care management, and patient-centered design can be powerful tools of health justice work.
He received his Medical Doctor degree from the Alpert Medical School of Brown University and is completed his residency training in Primary Care Social Internal Medicine at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, NY. He is currently a primary care doctor at a Federally Qualified Health Center in Washington, DC. His clinical practice is centered in providing person-centered, non-judgmental primary care based in harm reduction and liberation medicine to offer holistic health care to people struggling with substance use disorders and chronic pain; people who have experienced incarceration, unstable housing, and sex work; as well as providing reproductive health care, care for people of transgender and gender non-conforming experiences, and complex chronic medical and mental health care management.
He has experience in nonprofit management, has served on two boards of directors, worked in federal government as well as the private sector, internationally and domestically. Aaron gets excited at any opportunity to discuss how we can improve people’s experiences engaging in healthcare at every point of connection.
Check out interviews Aaron has done with MDisrupt, Rootwise Leadership, and Planned Parenthood.
CONTACT US
Differential Design is dedicated to bringing rigorous support to healthcare practitioners in all domains of healthcare professions.
There are broad differentials that inform patient satisfaction, workplace efficiency, quality metrics, community engagement, and employee wellness. There are many professionals who speak different professional languages and have different professional skills, all working to provide the best care possible to the same patient population. We are here to serve as advisors and intermediaries to improve efficiency and outcomes of that collaborative interdisciplinary work.
All of the resources described above are available open-access for free.
If you have a specific project you'd like me to consult on, I work off of a liberal sliding scale depending on organization budget and mission.
Want to stay in the loop and be notified when we launch something new? Get on our contact list here.