Dr Scott Page: Diversity in Healthcare Improves Patient Outcomes

Having healthcare professionals with different sets of experiences or different training can help create better solutions and improve patient outcomes, explained Scott Page, PhD, the Leonid Hurwicz Collegiate Professor of Complex Systems, Political Science, and Economics at the University of Michigan.

Transcript

How can diversity be levered in healthcare to improve patient outcomes?

If the question is how does diversity give better health outcomes, I think you have to make a distinction between experiential diversity, training diversity, identify diversity, there’s lots of different types of diversity. What happens is when people have had a different set of experiences or filtered the world differently or have been trained differently and then a patient comes in and they’re resenting in a particular way that’s complex, then diversity turns out being really useful in terms of coming up with better solutions.

For example, the Vermont Oxford Network, which is a group of people who work in neonatal medicine. They get together and share ideas like what did we learn here, wat did we learn there. So, I think this is an interesting combination of being trained in different ways, having different patient experiences, and having different personal experiences where you maybe look at the world through different lenses that allows you to sort of see a particular presentation in greater granularity, different dimensionality, which I think leads to better outcomes.