Ku says that his medical training prepared him well for being an emergency room physician, but not for thinking about the larger medical system:
The easiest part of my job is to take care of the sick patient in front of me… The hardest thing is to think about how am I going to improve the efficiency of this system, that there's patients waiting six hours in the waiting room and how they're going to decrease that wait time, how to improve their experience of being a patient. And I did not learn any of those tools in medical school or residency training.
But having these tools of design thinking, of being able to look at a problem and figure out how to develop a solution, has been extremely impactful. If I were to design this differently how would I do it? And also seeing as seeing some of these intractable problems as a design challenge gives me an opportunity to go, whoa, maybe I can change this.
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