Posts Tagged ‘Disruptive Technology’
Health App Development and Innovation
July 13, 2011
Two quick notes:
HHS kicks off $5M ‘i2′ Health IT app development program – contracts awarded for this, more innovation opportunities looking to:
- Allow an individual to securely and effectively share health information with members of his or her social network.
- Provide patients, caregivers and/or clinicians access to rigorous and relevant information that can support real needs and immediate decisions.
- Allow individuals to connect during natural disasters and other periods of emergency.
- Facilitate exchange of health information while allowing individuals to customize the privacy allowances for their personal health records.
Also announced, the Cleveland Clinic Medical Pavilion on Innocentive and the first challenge posted.
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Can Social Media Save Lives?
June 23, 2011
This provocative title of a webinar to be held next week is part of the growing optimism about the potential for social media in the process of health care. Some recent examples come to mind:
- Report from the Change Foundation in Toronto on Using social media to improve the quality of patient experience (I was on the advisory board for this report)
- An App that Looks for Signs of Sickness – Mobile-phone activity can provide a warning of disease flare-ups.
- Community Health Data Initiative – more on this later
- Case Study: Radboud Hospital Supports Young Cancer Patients With An Online Community
We are witnessing a shift from social media for pure marketing toward engagement and beyond, to changing the care process.
Share this:Innovation Opportunities Abound
June 16, 2011
A new conference has been announced by the NIH: Crowdsourcing: The Art and Science of Open Innovation. Speakers incude Tim O’Reilly and ” will focus on the key aspects of this new approach that include: how to identify problems that can be solved through open innovation; how to communicate a scientific problem across disciplines.”
Another open innovation opportunity has been recently announced called Merit Awards which is offering $50,000 on the topics of citizen engagement, defense, emergency response, entitlement reform, work force management and motivation, back office operations, results achievement and waste.
Another opportunity is a developer community called TopCoder “revolutionizing the software design and development process by tapping in to our unlimited global community.”
Will open innovation become the primary source for new ideas and products/apps in the future?
Share this:More on Innovation – The Need for Actionable Ideas
May 25, 2011
An excellent post on Venture Valkyrie discusses why Innovation is not enough in healthcare. The author views that “there is no doubt that innovation is necessary to respond to the challenges of our current healthcare system” while “over-breeding of ideas that are innovative but not actionable.” It is important to consider innovation not just a good in itself, especially in healthcare where we are trying to impact personal health, as only good if it leads to real change. Some innovation will always fail, so the encouragement toward innovation should not have barriers that are too high, but realistic evaluation of these ideas, testing their viability, needs to occur.
Another note on innovation comes from the site udemy, a site which enables the creation of courses. Check out Ideas Come From Everywhere, a course by Marissa Mayer of Google, Inc. which she gave to Stanford Technology Ventures Program in 2006. It is certainly not dated and presents some of basic concepts of success through innovation that have made Google a success. Worth watching this short clips.
See this article from Forbes on Gladwell on Innovation: Truths & Confusions which tells a brief history of innovation but also distinguishes between innovators and creators but ends on a positive note that creators (who may come up with ideas but not successfully implement them) can become innovators.
Also posted at WikEhealth.
Share this:Promoting Healthcare Innovation through Challenges
May 18, 2011
Innovation in healthcare is now pervasive. To continue the wave of innovation, hospitals can now earn new incentives based on competitions. These are government-sponsored, industry-sponsored challenges, and even have the potential for becoming business ventures. Here are some competitions hospitals can enter to help expand industry innovation:
- Health Challenges at Challenge.gov – These include video challenges, National Library of Medicine apps, Flu apps and more. Many offer monetary rewards.
- Health 2.0 Developer Challenge – Developed by the Health 2.0 Conference folks, this includes online challenges and live competitions including a Code-a-Thon which most recently occurred in February A Code-a-Thon is a day long competition to build an application. Winners included a meta-analysis engine, Healthy people 2020 tracker, and an epidemic finder.
- Veterans Affairs Innovation Initiative (VAi2) – This includes everything from equipment sterilization, blue button technology, prosthetics and rehabilitation. It encourages submissions from its own employees, as well as healthcare industry leaders.
A new player in this arena is Innocentive, an online business built around challenge-driven innovation. While not specifically focused on healthcare, it does have a Global Health Pavilion, featuring challenges from cell biology to caregiver communities. These challegnes promote the idea of an Open Innovation Marketplace, which is the topic of its new book.
For each of these healthcare challenge websites, the basic concept is open innovation. By utilizing competition for a financial reward, the government, an NGO, a private sector company and healthcare providers can generate low cost solutions. But the inventor/innovator needs to keep in mind their intellectual property rights if these are not spelled out clearly up front.
Nonetheless , the potential for healthcare innovation and problem solving are yet to be measured. Perhaps someone will some develop a site or app which aggregates these challenges and their successful solutions. Aggregation of healthcare innovation challenges would help inventors find opportunities which are sprouting up from government, conferences and corporations.
This post was originally published on Hospital Impact on May 18, 2011.
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Book Review: Data Source Handbook
April 19, 2011
This new book from O’Reilly Media, written by a former Apple engineer, Pete Warden, is a catalog of code for connecting to publicly available APIs for all kinds of sites. It shows data sources by websites (whois, delicious), people by email (Amazon, FriendFeed), people by name (white pages, LinkedIn), search terms (Bing, Google), location (Google geocoding, US census), companies, IP addresses, books, films, music, products.
The brief reviews and code for each source includes those which use REST/JSON, YQL and other languages.
Overall the book is a very practical guide for programmers wanting to integrate public data into their websites or creating mashups. However, the book lacks any data sources related to health although many existing on the web from PubMed to ClinicalTrials.gov.
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TEDxMaastricht – Hope in technology and participatory medicine
April 7, 2011
April 4 in Maastricht, Netherlands, was an event full of optimism but not simply about how technology can transform healthcare. Lucien Engelen envisioned this conference as about health, not healthcare and full participation by the patient as an equal partner. To what extent was this accomplished?
The answer is in much of what was said:
- health as homeostasis rather than disease and cure
- you can’t outsource your health
- inforgs -by Luciano Floridi
- society has seen the separation passion and profitability
- in education ere are too many questions for faculty to answer, students must be full participants
- use of a flight simulator as a safety team building tool
- add travel history to your personal health record
- singularity – artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, implantables, genomics, robotics, regenerative medicine
- the shock of the possible – unexpected connections
- doing the impossible – climbing a mountain six times, curing cancer in 10 years
- everyone with a chronic disease is part of a community, they just need to be invited and join
- integrate Google Body with personal health records
- Recognizing healthcare failures and learning from them
- reducing fear of disease, hospital, blindness, etc. As a major goal of a medical practice
Although these quotes may not be exact or make up a coherent whole, the point is that creative optimism gouged by new, openly available technology like social media, can be transformational now.
This was no less true than the patient stories heard throughout the day of facing disease but triumphing over it through community (often online) and hope.
As I process this event, watch for more posts on these themes.
TEDx Maastricht – The Future of Health
April 1, 2011
In anticipation of the International event on April 4, I wanted to share some links. Although many conferences which claim to be futurist meccas for healthcare, this one is bringing together a group of people including a very strong patient perspective which all are thinking innovation. Also, it is completely full and is being simulcasted to several countries.
- Website, speakers
- Some of the attendees via a tool which exploits LinkedIn
- mashup on VPRO
- Simulcast schedule – I am being interviewed at 11:15 local time
Follow tweets at #tedxmaastricht
Share this:Hearing Atul Gawande speak about Checklists and Health Policy
March 22, 2011
Atul Gawande
Just returned from live tweeting of Atul Gawande at Cleveland Clinic Ideas and full of quotes and ideas. For instance, the evidence is building for use of checklists showing significant reduction in mortality and complications so that he states that if there was a drug that showed this kind of effect it would be adopted immediately, even faster than Viagra. Gawande also discussed two of his well known New Yorker articles:
- The Cost Conundrum - What a Texas town can teach us about health care
- The Hot Spotters: Can we lower medical costs by giving the neediest patients better care?
In the end, he challenged the audience and the country to find one hospital which could reduce costs while not causing harm to set a model. He predicted that in the coming hospital wars, the ones which reduced cost while maintaining quality would win and others would lose (close).
Within the provocative statements was the voice of compassion and rediscovering the soul of medicine in the complex, competitive healthcare environment of today.
Check out the twitter feed from the meeting. And his book: The Checklist Manifesto and his checklists.
Final thought – why are hospitals not advertising that they endorse and complete adopt checklists? And why would anyone not have surgery in a hospital that does not use checklists? Why take the risk when the evidence is there?
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Report from AMIA – All Diseases will become Orphan
March 12, 2011
The first speaker I heard at the American Medical Informatics Joint Summit was Kenneth Buetow from the National Cancer Institute. In his typical provocative manner, he challenged the audience on the transition day from the Translational Bioinformatics to the Clinical Research Informatics Summits. He began with promoting the P4 Medicine as the new model for healthcare: personalized, predictive, preemptive, participatory. Although throughout the conference little was articulated on the participatory aspects with one exception. More on that later.
Buetow talked about defining cancer on the molecular level and the challenge of the exponential number of patients required to do genetic screening for a single disease. He referred to Pharma 3.0 from the Ernst and Young report on Progressions 2011 where patient engagement through social media as necessary in this new age of medicine. It is here that he stated, “All diseases will become orphans” meaning that as we understand more about genomics and are able to combine these findings with clinical data, we will understand each disease process on a truly personalized level and hopefully treat it as such.
As part of Pharma 3.0 and a new model for medicine, he did note some encouraging trends in volunteers for clinical trials, true patient activism in a full participatory sense. Specifically, he reported some recent statistics from Army of Women, a joint project of Avon and Susan Love to recruit an army of those willing to volunteer for research studies. Rapid recruitment occurred consistently for studies through this resource while traditional clinical trials continue to suffer from lack of full enrollment. He also referred to adaptive clinical trials as part of this new model. Finally, he discussed the Translatable Informatics Ecosystem as a way of describing how informatics will be key in this new paradigm using Services-Aware Interoperability Framework (SAIF) as one technology to reach that goal.
Many of the presentations at this year’s conference were focussed on data warehouses of clinical and genomic data and ontology development and application include many efforts in the semantic space.
Several speakers referred to Evidence Based Medicine, Personalized Medicine and the Learning Healthcare System implying if not explicitly stating that there is a convergence of the future of medicine and that medical informatics and clinical research informatics are at the center of this convergence. Bill Hersch, noting the explosion of data both in journals and through EHRs and others sources, citing Stead on the need for “Systems of Brains” to manage the amount of information now available
All agreed that Medical Informatics is at a crossroads and has the opportunity to take leadership in the future of medicine, managing the data explosion and making it managable in the personalized medicine era we are entering.
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