Ariadne Labs is prepared to address the next decade’s most pressing challenges in public health and health care.
By Erin Lawler and Stephanie Schorow
Ariadne faculty and staff plan to continue pressing ahead in core projects, while expanding to address new challenges in health care. Asaf Bitton sees the lab as a model for change across the global health care system. “We’ve realized that after 10 years, we have this successful flywheel where we can identify and make more visible the gaps in systems, design scalable systems solutions, spread them widely, and attract the people we need to implement those solutions,” he said.
“I see Ariadne continuing to foster the spread of the solutions and tools we have already developed and ensure they get to the patient bedside, wherever that may be,” said Kit Nichols, Ariadne Labs Chief Administrative Officer.
For example, there’s an effort to bring serious illness conversations to more diverse populations. That won’t be easy, said Stacey Downey. Serious illness conversations have historically been more accessible to White, higher-income populations. The Serious Illness Care Program is working to change that through revisions to their guide and training modalities that will make the program more accessible.
“These conversations don’t happen in isolation with just a physician and a patient, you need to involve the care team,” Downey said “A lot of that involves accessing resources and making connections to how these conversations impact the system goals overall.”
The Home Hospital team is also using innovative methods to continue to spread tools to patients. The team recently applied Scrum methodology to create more than 20 tools in 40 weeks that can be used to implement a home hospital program, allowing patients to access high quality medical care regardless of their location.
“I think helping a woman who lives in a trailer home in the middle of a cornfield, in the middle of nowhere without cell service, get hospital level care in her home because that’s where she wants to receive it is a very meaningful thing,” Levine said, speaking on the team’s work on rural home hospital models. “I believe very strongly that home hospital care is the equitable way of delivering acute care.”
Ariadne intends to continue to expand work into new clinical areas to address emerging needs in health systems. “Over the next ten years, Ariadne will continue to use our approach to innovation and our approach to testing and spread to solve for some of these big problems of health care,” said Benjamin.
Recently, several of the lab’s programs have begun to explore opportunities to apply their tools and methods to the current behavioral health crisis facing the U.S. to ensure that all people have the opportunity to access safe, effective behavioral health care. Work has also begun to develop educational tools to help save lives and reduce suffering in areas of conflict.
“There are some really fantastic new projects that are starting at the lab, and some of them will have a really profound impact. That’s what I’m looking forward to seeing in the next 10 years,” said Singal.
Said Kim, “I see a lot of public health and health care challenges ahead in the next 10 years. But Ariadne Labs is built for those moments. It’s when our health systems are in crisis that we respond the most and our impact is the greatest. We have the right people, right teams, right community to be able to tackle these challenges.”
Whatever the challenges that lie ahead, Ariadne Labs’ structure, culture, and methodology have uniquely positioned the organization to respond quickly. “Some of the work we’re going to do we can’t even guess at now, which just serves to highlight how important it is that we maintain our agility,” said Nichols.
Perhaps one of the greatest tools to spread from Ariadne would be its own model.
“We have a very unusual and rare example of true cross collaboration,” Bitton said. “I think that in the next ten years we may want to focus on not just finding the next program, the next project, the next way to replicate, but actually focus on spreading impact through spreading our approach across different parts of the university ecosystem, across different countries, across different parts of health care and public health.”