“Personalized information works.”

Thomas Goetz: It’s time to redesign medical data is TED talk with a simple, but powerful idea. Thomas Goetz is an MPH journalist with a strong interest in health care.  He presents a simple but novel idea – that that we should redesign medical reports so they make sense to patients (not doctors).

The idea is fairly straight-forward and makes sense when you understand how adults change.  If we want patients to really make changes to benefit their health, we need to let them know where they are starting from, explain where they want to get to (and why) and provide a clear path to get there.

Along with the graphic designers at Wired magazine, Mr. Goetz designed a new style of medical report that not only provides patients information about their data but also explains what the data means and what simple changes they could implement to improve abnormal values.   It’s an idea that could be adapted to almost any medical clinic – and one worth thinking about.