The Center for Healthcare Applications of Descriptive Psychology (CHADP) is a community of people interested in advancing healthcare, healthcare systems, and health. Descriptive Psychology concepts and tools make important contributions to our efforts.
The Center’s mission is to help Participants illuminate and move ahead with the difficult problems, projects, or challenges they are facing in the practice, design, or policy aspects of healthcare.
The Descriptive Psychology Institute’s mission is to make widely available powerful and practical methods that are informed by Descriptive Psychology.
Our Center engages in on-going dialogue on how to clearly describe, lead and change healthcare practice and healthcare system design. We make characteristically difficult problems or tasks clearer and easier through the application of Descriptive Psychology concepts, opening new paths forward that release energy in “stuck” areas. Areas of application presently include:
- Creation of clear and consistent conceptual systems, vocabulary or lexicons for immature and emerging subfields of healthcare, e.g., for “collaborative care” among medical and mental health clinicians; palliative care; and “patient-centered medical home” or “advanced primary care”.
- Medical leadership development, including harmonizing clinical, operational, and financial perspectives, and the clinicians, administrators and financial experts who must work together to do so.
- Clinician collaboration and team-based care across disciplines, including better integration of biomedical and psychosocial healthcare and the different kinds of healthcare clinicians increasingly being asked to work together.
- Leading culture change in healthcare organizations—making visible and then shifting the hidden assumptions for “why we have to do things the way we are already doing them”.
- Approaches to clarifying or simplifying the representation of multiple change projects commonly done simultaneously in healthcare organizations so that “initiative overload” and “change fatigue” are minimized—making healthcare system design changes hang together coherently as a thrust, rather than as seemingly separate unrelated projects or “fad du jour”.
- Group facilitation and “meeting hygiene” for moving forward any of the above areas in groups of diverse professionals and other healthcare stakeholders.
We have an abiding interest in the “craft” involved in making concepts and principles useful in actual practice. We strive to help Participants supply the “implementation details” between good ideas and principles, and one's own work “on the ground”.
How to Participate:
Feel free to browse the papers and resources available through the links to your left. Our publication and downloading policy can be found here.
You are welcome to participate in the on-going dialogue in the Center for Healthcare Applications. A password is required to read and comment on the dialogue. Click here to request the password.
Who We Are:
The Dialogues and Papers are created by CHADP Associates along with the Center Director. CHADP Associates are all experienced practitioners who are adept in applying Descriptive Psychology to heathcare applications and who have committed to participating in the Center's Dialogue.
