Could creativity transform medicine? These artists think so

In 2016, Emily Peters became, as she puts it, a "statistic in the maternal health mortality crisis." While giving birth to her daughter, she had an amniotic fluid embolism, a rare and life-threatening complication that landed her in the intensive care unit.

Peters eventually recovered. But she says she was disturbed by the dysfunction she witnessed during her hospitalization, "all these little cuts that are so demoralizing." For instance, her healthy newborn daughter was discharged from the hospital while Peters remained in ICU care — she and her husband had to pay for a private nurse so they wouldn't be separated from their days-old infant.

Peters, who works as a health care brand strategist, decided to work to fix some of what's broken in the American health care system. Her approach is provocative: she believes art can be a tool to transform medicine.

Medicine has a "creativity problem," she says, and too many people working in health care are resigned to the status quo, the dehumanizing bureaucracy. That's why it's time to call in the artists, she argues, the people with the skills to envision a radically better future.

In her new book,