Problem solving sometimes requires us to look at things from a totally different perspective.  For example, look at the new and innovative idea that Dr. Kristian Olson and his colleagues came up with to fight preventable infant death in developing countries - after they changed how they viewed the problem.

The idea? How about putting babies in incubators made from standard automobile parts instead of expensive high-tech incubators donated by rich western countries? Sounds crazy, right? Here’s how it came about. Dr. Olsen was visiting a tsunami-ravaged town in Indonesia and watched helplessly as a 7-day old boy died after lying on a cold cot in a room with six donated high-tech incubators that did not work. At that moment, Dr. Olsen decided to find a solution to this problem.

It seems that the real problem with incubators in developing countries isn’t that they don’t have them. Rather it is that they don’t have the parts nor the technical expertise to repair them. Enter Dr. Olson and his team from the Global Health Initiative at the Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology, or CIMIT, a nonprofit consortium of Boston teaching hospitals and engineering schools.

Rather than trying to solve the problem of how to fix high-tech incubators, they changed the question to: “How can we make an incubator for the developing world that will get fixed?”

The answer came when another member of the team, Jonathan Rosen, director of CIMIT’s technology implementation program and a staff member at the Boston University School of Management, learned that no matter how remote a location is, there always seemed to be a Toyota 4Runner around. Which meant that parts for cars and people to fix them were also available. Therefore, if an incubator could be made from car parts, both the parts problem and the repair technician problem would both be solved.

So, the CIMIT team figured out a way to build an inexpensive ($1000 vs. $40,000) incubator from car parts. And the technologists to fix them? That would be the car mechanics and other repairmen readily available in the local community.

Notice that the CIMIT team applied three important problem solving techniques to solve the incubator problem:

1. Ask a different question
2. Look for new ways to apply old technologies and ideas
3. Look for new connections

For more details on this project, see the New York Times article. You can also check out the CIMIT blog or their website. Even though my focus here is on problem solving, if you are interested in some other interesting health related blogs, check out these 100 healthcare blogs.

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