Waze

Get the best route, every day,

with real–time help from other drivers.

Waze is one of the world's largest community-based traffic and navigation apps. Join other drivers in your area who share real-time traffic and road info, saving everyone time and gas money on their daily commute.

If you're not familiar with this app called Waze, I highly recommend it. We discovered it this summer when we drove from Cincinnati to New Jersey to Pennsylvania to Connecticut and back to Cincinnati. The reason that I bring it up is not to discuss traffic, but to think about something like this in the context of healthcare.

How can we create a Waze for healthcare? I think that it's everything that we need. It's consistent in that it always gets us to where we need to be. Waze understands my goal - to get from point A to point B. I have input. I can tell it to avoid highways, take the shortest route, or pass through certain cities. It recognizes that we have more power when we're moving together, and doesn't suppose that it knows all the answers. It's collaborative and iterative. Issue identification and solution creation is ongoing. And then there's the rewards! In the Waze app, you earn points for reporting accidents or confirming that a suggested workaround has achieved your goal. They're truly inconsequential in my life, but it feels good to get them, and they keep me engaged and contributing to the system, trying to find my way to the next level. 

I need a healthcare system that is consistent. What's "best" is relative. I don't always know what's best for me and for our situation, but the ability to plug in my goals and have confidence that there are many paths that will all lead me to achieve them is important. I need a healthcare system that I can learn from and that can learn from me. We all have very valuable knowledge and experience to share, and when we combine it all, together we can do great things. I need a healthcare system that gives me access to real-time, trusted, reliable information, from my community, my care providers, from other stakeholders with goals similar to mine - to improve health and care. I need a system that shows it's appreciation for my participation. Recognize my proactive approach to managing my health and reward me by taking away pre-authorizations or co-pays or other barriers to access and engagement and adherence.

The best part of this story is that I'm doing it. This is actually happening. This is what a Collaborative Chronic Care Network (C3N) for Cystic Fibrosis will facilitate. Email me if you want to be a part of this. I'm completely serious - erin (dot) moore (at) cchmc (dot) org.