Improving health and health care
How to improve health and health care with the Meta-Problem Method
Our Physical and Mental wellbeing touches every aspect of our lives. Improving it is an incredibly nuanced and complex issue to tackle. It doesn’t help that our healthcare system treats mental and physical health separately instead of as the tightly linked topics they are.
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Individual and societal health decisions are intertwined. Layer in government or corporate choices which can promote or detract from peoples’ health, and you have a recipe for complexity, confusion, higher costs and worse outcomes.
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We have limited resources, so the question becomes which problem (or cluster of problems) should we choose to solve? Which will give us the best bang for our buck?
This issue can be solved using the Meta-Problem method. A meta-problem is about choosing the best problem to solve, but only after you’ve defined the goals you care about, explored your many options, and weighed the trade-offs. To learn more about the meta-problem approach, click here.
The importance of individual choice
The Meta-Problem Method is all about deciding which problem to solve.
Depending on your circumstances you might be facing choices about your own individual health, supporting people around you, or changing the health care system.
When you move past your own choices to tackle societal or systemic change, it’s no longer your own preferences that matter most. We can still ask important questions like how to structure an efficient system which limits the costs to serve populations well. Health decisions are deeply personal. Any system we design needs to honor those choices and individual needs.
This is part of the challenge of separating how we treat physical and mental health – and one of the best opportunities to improve our current health systems. Individuals often use up their limited resources fighting certain battles, some inside themselves, some external, leaving little energy for the rest of their needs. If we design a system that supports good individual decisions like following your doctors’ orders, we will improve overall health.
Health systems
Once you shift to considering more structural questions, the approach changes dramatically. We ask questions like:
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How can a limited number of doctors, nurses, hospitals and supplies best serve a population of patients in need? How do we weigh the trade-offs between allowing same-day visits and delaying scheduled visits?
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Pollution and work environments can have a marked negative effect on population health, but the resources to prevent or remediate that damage will come at a cost to either society or profit-driven corporations. How do we balance the costs with the benefits?
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Health care is a human right, but a dollar spent in one part of the world can have a dramatically larger impact than in other regions. How do we design a system that reflects our values while serving all needs?
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What am I willing and able to do? How can I apply my skillset to this problem? Which options will provide the greatest return compared to the effort involved?
Are you really helping?
The hardest thing with human health is to understand if you are in fact making progress towards your goals.
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At an individual level, someone struggling to exercise may just need encouragement. Other times what they need is a doctor to take their ailments seriously or mental health support to make their other tasks more manageable.
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At a population level, things are in some ways easier since you can use studies to understand what works in general. Still, any plan which doesn’t account for the individuals (including both patients and providers) who make up a healthy system will underdeliver on its potential.
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Choose an example below to learn more about the meta-problem framework and how it can help guide your choices.