Opinion: Approaches to complex care innovation are ‘naïve and insufficient.’ We need systems and design thinking

I was a second-year medical school student when I encountered my first patient with GRID — gay-related immune deficiency. The year was 1982, and the disease that would soon be called AIDS was an epidemic still in its infancy. With his skin shedding in sheets, the man was dying in an isolation room. Alone.

Though we didn’t quite know what to do at the time, we knew that our systems were failing him — our medical system, with so few options for treatment; our social system, stricken with fear toward those affected by the disease; and our political system, reluctant to address both the stigma directed toward people with the disease and the urgent need for investment in research on it.

I eventually went on to help lead AIDS teams at Jacobi Hospital and Montefiore Medical Center, both in the Bronx. Like many