Archive for 2013
Google Glass – Day 1
July 7, 2013
Guest tag for Glass
Today I went
to Google New York to pick up Google Glass. I arrived at Chelsea Market in southern Manhattan. On the 8th floor is the headquarters for Glass on the east coast. We were issued guest tags The setting is loft-like with a small bar (we were offer drinks) and sat at one of several tall tables on stools with a mirror.
After an extensive orientation, I was ready to try them on my own.
Right next to the Chelsea Market is the Highline. Tired out photos and video which both worked well.
Highline
As I was warned that unless you are connected through the MyGlass website to an available wireless network or an open network that does not require authentication. The other alternatives is to connect through your phone’s bluetooth or better yet, enable your phone as a wireless hotspot, but that is an additional cost.
Later in the day, I was in Grand Central Station and took photos and videos from the balcony, aka, Apple Store.
Grand Central
Conclusion from Day 1 – There is a learning curve for Glass. managing the menu and voice commands. Learning to share photos is pretty straightforward. Adding apps like The New York Times can add a lot of content. Finding Twitter and Facebook deep in the menu can be a challenge. And remember, sharing photos or messaging are through Google+. Also, the Glass app is for Android devices only right now. So between the learning curve and the dependence on Google Apps means a change in orientation compared to managing apps through an iPhone. But the process is still interesting.
Does Glass have uses within healthcare? a growing number of users think so but it is up to the first 8000 Glass Explorers to determine its usefulness and prove that it is more than a toy.
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Healthcare IT professionals you should follow on Twitter
June 4, 2013
There are actually many people to follow in this category but I was privileged to be first on this list by MedCityNews last week. Also, it put me in some good company, most of whom I already follow, such as, @jhalamka and the infamous @histalk.
This made me think of writing a brief post about how I use Twitter. I was an early adopter of Twitter starting just before attending Medicine 2.0 in Toronto in 2007. Meeting an energetic group from the US and Europe who were live tweeting at the conference got me hooked.
Now I have 5500 followers from Europe to Australia and follow about 1100. I post 3-6 times per day and more often at conferences. My focus in tweeting is health IT, health care social media, mHealth and apps, innovation in healthcare, conferences I attend, articles I read (newsletters and journals) and some notable Cleveland Clinic news. I try to share quality information and almost always include links. I use my favorite hash tags #hcsm, #mhealth, #HIMSS, #EMR. Have not gotten into the habit of using #HealthIT or #HITsm yet.
I also promote some of my favorite people, such as, @berci, @healthythinker, @lucienengelen, @nicolaziady, @ReginaHolliday,@ahier and many others.
Overall, I try to provide quality information that I think is important and not get bogged down in criticizing others or off-color remarks.
I hope I can continue to earn the respect of the wild world of Twitterland. See you there.
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Big Data and Data Sharing – Going Places?
April 5, 2013
Several recent publications have focused on big data and data sharing in healthcare for secondary use of EMR data. First, the American Society of Clinical Oncology announced CancerLinQ. CancerLinQ is a proof of concept project which demonstrated the ability to integrate data from several cancer centers using existing tools (some open source) for research. While there are critics of this project in terms of it’s scalability and ability to integrate large amounts of data of different cancer types, its approach of attempting to simplify data integration. I commented on CancerLinQ for the iHealthbeat newsletter.
Second is a report from the Institute of Medicine on Sharing Clinical Research Data. This workshop report included pharmaceutical companies, academic researchers, and government agencies whom each have large amounts of research data and are beginning initiatives to make that data available for shared research initiatives. This is a hopeful trend and I hope to see followup on the presentations from this workshop.
Third is a report from McKinsey on The big-data revolution in US health care: Accelerating value and innovation. This report does a good job of focusing on the value of big data in health care, specifically: right living, right care, right provider, right value, and right innovation. Some see McKinsey as a late arrival in the big data realm but the report is a help addition to the discussion that cuts through some of the hype around big data.
Share this:Jack Dorsey on Innovation and Life
March 1, 2013
Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and Square, spoke at Cleveland Clinic last night. Certainly a humble guy but also highly focused on using technology to solve problems. Here is the twitter stream from the presentation. Also, check out this cool 360 view.
As you can see, some very quotable lines, such as, related to the blocking of Twitter by Syria, Iran and China, “Information, like water, will always find a way.” And who does he like to read on Twitter – his mom and mom’s dog as well as his favorite authors.
Other quotes:
“The biggest thing I learned from Steve Jobs is that you can’t follow in someone else’s footsteps.”
I love this principle of showing not telling. Doors open when I show, not tell.
@jack was asked whether he’s more artist or entrepreneur, he said artist but can never really call yourself one!
“When we drive over the Golden Gate Bridge, we don’t think about it. It’s a utility to reach destination.”
“The most precious thing we have is our health, and it’s the thing we understand least.”
“Design is immediately presenting the function through the form. Determine what is the most meaningful thing and focus on that.”
“Design is more than visual, it’s a practice – process”
“The power of the message to bring value to the receiver. ”
Great quote from @jack talking about social media making people relatable. “The small details of life are what bind us together”
“I want to build things that will last, that are timeless…”
“Some view programming as a practical, mechanical interface, but I see it as very beautiful.”
“I believe we should build technologies that will disappear.”
But most significant was his business philosophy: Square and Twitter both founded on the premise of being a tool that “gets out of way” so people can focus on important stuff. That made me wonder about health information technology and particularly EMRs. Many (especially providers and patients) that the technology often gets in the way of the encounter instead of disappearing. How can that change? Mostly, I think in the user interface and device level. Can the EMR be mobile rather than having a desktop computer in the exam room? How about the provider being able to dictate and have that information inserted into the record. Are mobile apps for patients and quantified self transparent enough that they get out of the way or are they as clunky as large EMRs?
I think we need @Jack to teach us about the “art” in the UI and to think from the users perspective rather than starting with the technology.
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Understand IBM Watson – Bring Artificial Intelligence to Clinical Decision Support
February 26, 2013
IBM Watson is going to medical school at Cleveland Clinic. What Watson has to bring to medicine is the potential for advanced clinical decision support. Specifically algorithm-based, Bayesian decision analysis, rule based and expert systems. Several hurdles exist to accomplishing this: acquiring and validating of patient data, modeling of medical knowledge, keeping the data up-to-date, validate and integrate with the workflow. This process fits well with the Learning Healthcare System concept from the Institute of Medicine of taking research on evidence-based medicine into clinical decision support.
IBM Watson’s process in medical school will be to improve the inference graphs based on current data through human intervention. Providing clinical decision support is based on EMR data and the medical literature using DeepQA.
“The DeepQA project at IBM shapes a grand challenge in Computer Science that aims to illustrate how the wide and growing accessibility of natural language content and the integration and advancement of Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval, Machine Learning, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, and massively parallel computation can drive open-domain automatic Question Answering technology to a point where it clearly and consistently rivals the best human performance.”
Welcome Artificial intelligence to medicine and specifically clinical decision support.
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Data Mining, Algorithm Medicine and Skeptics
February 21, 2013
My recent Perspective on iHealthbeat focused on the uses of data mining of EMR data which are yet to be fully exploited. My thoughts were provoked by a New York Times article titled, Mining Electronic Records for Revealing Health Data. Although data mining in healthcare has gotten a bad reputation, an approach which respects privacy and a focus on research discovery can yield important results. The potential uses of EMRs in research is another opportunity yet to be realized.
A new article in The Atlantic, The Robot Will See You Now, discusses IBM Watson and other initiatives moving medicine toward what I call Algorithm Medicine and Artificial Intelligence. The potential of mining EMRs to generate real-time clinical decision support has exciting possibilities. However, there are skeptics, especially when the predictions expand to entertain the idea of replacing physicians. Realizing the limitations of technology must be acknowledge. For instance, the concerning problem of copy-and-paste in EMRs would have a negative affect on data mining those records. Also, data mining has presents real challenges both in defining research questions and finding the correct data to answer those questions.
So data mining shows promise but a realistic approach without wild predictions can lead to real discovery and impact on practice.
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Many Predictions but Which Hit the Mark?
January 6, 2013
I was happy to have the opportunity to contribute to the iHealthbeat titled “11 Experts on Health IT Progress, Frustrations and Hopes for 2013″ with some very good company. I noted the growth of EMR adoption and mHealth. But I neglected an area which I will be more immersed in this year – Clinical Analytics which is one of the strongest growth areas in Health IT.
Another key set of predictions is by Lucien Engelen. Specifically, the trend toward changes in staffing in healthcare, specifically that more women are becoming physicians and more are looking at part-time work and flexible hours. Also, there are changes in location of care as length of hospital stays decrease and more care is done virtually through remote monitoring and remote communication.
Predictions about technology trends like mHealth need to be placed in the context of other changes in healthcare and there are many including the growth of the ePatient movement.
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