Quote from weekend reading - disruptive health innovator-types, read. Rinse. Repeat.

"703.08 While the building business (cross out - insert HC) uses safety factors of four, five, or six-to one, aircraft-building employs only two-to-one or even less because it knows what it is doing (Buckminster you rascal you). The greater the ignorance in the art, the greater the safety factor that must be applied. And the greater the safety factor, the greater the redundancy and the less the freedom of load distribution."

"We have a mathematical phenomenon known as a geodesic. A geodesic
is the most economical relationship between any two events. It is a special case of
geodesics which finds that a seemingly straight line is the shortest distance
between two points in a plane."

Steps for hospitals:
1. Map out every. Single. Care. Process. Start with med admin. Nodes are people, lines between are steps. More than 1:1? Not a straight line? Fail. Redesign.

2. Yes, this probably means you should get an Info Architect, Service Design, IDEO type to come in and show you how to perform the process-mapping equivalent of drawing on the street with sidewalk chalk.

File this little nugget away like an acorn: Pay attention to tensegrity and geodesics.

These kinds of concepts will reappear as the web evolves us towards ubiquitous health, or the Nexthealth version - complete semantic interoperability of healthcare ("consumers will be able to access healthcare goods and services, online and offline, at will").

Tensegrity should be part of healthcare's 'straight line approach' to connect with advancements in semantic web/cloud computing, which thus cyclically informs service interaction design in brick and mortar healthcare.

That said, feel free to start with lucrative real-world care process redesign (house it in your CQI arm), especially if anyone on your executive team thinks the 'semantic web' is some pop-multiculture-ish sequel to Charlotte's Web. 

Why is this important? Semantic web/cloud computing will make 'tensegrity' in healthcare delivery possible.

You don't have to suffer through any more of my mixed metaphors - I'm not really saying anything new here - just restating theories like Doc Searls' Big Zero and Kevin Kelly's One Machine.

Google those guys, who have learned to write up tech theories about which they are passionate in a not-quite-so-schizophrenic fashion. I'm still a bit like a freshman liberal arts student sitting in on her first lunchtime debate, blurting things out in random order and occasionally spraying some poor tablemates with partially-masticated food in the process.

Here's how geodesic design will apply to health...We'll become, cyborg-anthropology like (a la @ambercase), floating islands temporarily and technologically docked to SaaS+web-based platforms. We're in the early Pre-Cambrian/Archaean age with telemedicine and health apps for the iPhone. But we're all still drifting aimlessly because someone has to construct the magnetic core.