"health care" entries
How we can consumerize health care
The Zero Overhead Principle can bring lessons from the consumer space to health care.
Recently I wrote about one of my key product principles that is particularly relevant for designing software for the enterprise. The principle is called the Zero Overhead Principle, and it states that no feature may add training costs to the user.
The essence of the Zero Overhead Principle is that consumer products have figured out how to turn the “how-to manual” into a relic. They’ve focused on creating a glide path for the user to quickly move from newbie to proficient in minimal time. Put another way, the products must teach the user how they should be used.
Just this weekend, I downloaded a new game for my son on the iPad, and he was a pro in a matter of minutes (or at least proficient enough to kick my butt). No manual required. In fact, he didn’t even read anything before starting to play. This highly optimized glide path is exactly what we need to focus on when we talk about the consumerization of the enterprise.
This week, the first Strata RX conference will focus on bringing data and health together. Just as in national security (the place where we came up with the Zero Overhead Principle to help combat the lack of tech adoption by overloaded security analysts), there is tremendous opportunity to apply lessons learned in the consumer space to the health care sector. We know the space needs disruption and it is a way to make constructive disruption with a rapid adoption cycle. Read more…
Open source software as a model for health care
A doctor looks to software communities as inspiration for her own research
(The following article sprang from a collaboration between Andy Oram and Brigitte Piniewski to cover open source concepts in an upcoming book on health care. This book, titled “Wireless Health: Remaking of Medicine by Pervasive Technologies,” is edited by Professor Mehran Mehregany of Case Western Reserve University. and has an expected release date of February 2013. It is designed to provide the reader with the fundamental and practical knowledge necessary for an overall grasp of the field of wireless health. The approach is an integrated, multidisciplinary treatment of the subject by a team of leading topic experts. The selection here is part of a larger chapter by Brigitte Piniewski about personalized medicine and public health.)
Medical research and open source software have much to learn from each other. As software transforms the practice and delivery of medicine, the communities and development methods that have grown up around software–particularly free and open source software–also provide models that doctors and researchers can apply to their own work. Some of the principles that software communities can offer for spreading health throughout the population include these:
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Like a living species, software evolves as code is updated and functionality is improved.
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Software of low utility is dropped as users select better tools and drive forward functionality to meet new use cases.
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Open source culture demonstrates how a transparent approach to sharing software practices enables problem areas to be identified and corrected accurately, cost-effectively, and at the pace of change.
Sensor-laden glove brings medical examination to the masses
How a sensor glove can benefit the patient-doctor relationship.
Recently a group of three young entrepreneurs showed off a prototype of a glove that contained sensors useful for medical examinations. Their goals were not merely to make diagnosis easier, but to save the doctor/patient relationship from the alienation of modern technology. Medical student Andrew Bishara came into O’Reilly’s Cambridge studio to discuss the glove’s capabilities, how the creators were inspired to design it, and how they plan to productize it.
Here’s the full video from our discussion:
Highlights from the conversation include:
- Introduction to the glove and its purpose in bringing touch back into medicine. [Discussed at the 0:31 mark]
- Some of the purposes of the sensors. [Discussed at the 2:00 mark]
- Software on the device and in the cloud. [Discussed at the 7:58 mark]
- Creating a marketable product from the glove. [Discussed at the 9:54 mark]
- Open hardware. [Discussed at the 13:39 mark]
- How the developers were inspired by Singularity University. [Discussed at the 15:03 mark]
Discovering genetic associations using large data
David Heckerman's research uses big datasets to tackle essential health questions.
David Heckerman from Microsoft Research presents a summary of his work in the session “Discovering Genetic Associations on Large Data.” This was part of the Strata Rx Online Conference: Personalized Medicine, a preview of O’Reilly’s conference Strata Rx, highlighting the use of data in medical research and delivery.
Heckerman’s research attempts to answer essential questions such as “What is your propensity for getting a particular disease?” and “How are you likely to react to a particular drug?”
Key points from Heckerman’s presentation include: Read more…
Combining patient data sets for better medical research
Datalanche and the Practice Fusion challenge
I find Datalanche’s upcoming search application interesting because its database mixes public health data with patients’ clinical data from a private vendor. Practice Fusion opened up their data set of de-identified clinical information for a challenge that Datalanche won last week.
Advanced analytics for all in the health care system
Arijit Sengupta on the benefits of making health care analytics widely accessible within an organization.
Arijit Sengupta presents a summary of his work as the CEO of BeyondCore in the presentation “Advanced Analytics for All: Enabling business users to act on length of stay patterns at a leading hospital system.” This presentation was part of the Strata Rx Online Conference: Personalized Medicine, a preview of O’Reilly’s conference Strata Rx, highlighting the use of data in medical research and delivery.
Sengupta’s vision is to bring analytics to people throughout an organization who can use them in their work. He hopes to bring analytics that have traditionally been available only to those at the top of a large organization down to those making everyday decisions. Users of analytics should not need to know statistics or computer science. In this presentation, he shows how hospital employees can correlate the length of a hospital stay with other variables.
Key points Sengupta’s session include: Read more…
Privacy concerns and regulatory challenges in personalized medicine
Ann Waldo examines obstacles to patient data and offers specific reforms that can help.
Ann Waldo, a partner in Wittie, Letsche & Waldo, LLP in Washington, DC, presents a summary of her work in the webcast “Overview of Privacy Concerns and Regulatory Challenges Concerning Personalized Medicine — and Some Modest Suggestions for Change.” This was part of the Strata Rx Online Conference: Personalized Medicine, a preview of O’Reilly’s conference Strata Rx, highlighting the use of data in medical research and delivery.
Waldo highlighted how HIPAA regulations and other laws passed by federal and state governments contain restrictions that make research with patient data unnecessarily difficult. She offers several suggestions for reform.
Key points from her presentation include: Read more…
Challenge to Meaningful Use by House leaders highlights difficulty of asking incumbents to be innovators
Working too closely with an industry can undercut innovation
Four leading members of the House Ways and Means Committee tore away last Thursday at the polite, cautious, incremental approach that the Department of Health and Human Service has been taking toward key goals of HITECH act that was meant to drag health care into the 21st century.
Specifically, the House leaders signaled their disappointment at the Stage 2 Meaningful Use rules, promulgated last August by the Office of the National Coordinator and the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services. The Congressmen isolate certain rules that appear to be less stringent than Stage 1, point out that the key goals of interoperability and data exchange are weak, and most notably ask for a total stop to payments made to health care providers under Meaningful Use.
Assessing the real risks of re-identifying patient data
Controversy over a famous privacy research project
Daniel Barth-Jones, an epidemiologist and expert on health data privacy, has published an examination of the sensitive issue of re-identifying patients. This is worthwhile reading for anyone interested in the use of patient data for improving health care. He has blogged about his key findings, but I suggest reading his full paper for the recommendations he makes.
Visualization of the Week: Forecasting disruptions in health care
Envisioning Technology mapped out how we can expect the health care space to be disrupted in the coming decades.
The health care space is ripe for disruption (that’s a topic we’ve covered recently) and the disruption will surely touch everyone. But what will this disruption actually look like?
Speculating decades into the future, Envisioning Technology’s Michell Zappa and Patrick Schlafer along with Prokalkeo’s Colin Popell put together a map of when we likely can expect particular health disruptions to occur and what forms the disruptions will take.
