Posts Tagged ‘Innovation’
Games for Health Europe
November 14, 2012
Lucien Engelen of the Radboud ReShape Innovation Center in the Netherlands, had an extensive interview at this innovative conference. In this interview he discusses how his center at Radboud Medical Center will have have a game consultant visit weekly to consult with physicians, patients and others to discuss games for health.
Twitter stream on the conference is at #GFH12EU
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Medical Innovation – Big Data and Patient Engagement
October 31, 2012
At the Cleveland Clinic Medical Innovation Summit, there was a discussion about big data in health care which moved to the issue of patient engagement and the need for not only transparency of data but also providing tools to manage and interpret data. Two panelists had important inputs – 23&Me and Dr. Harris, CIO of the Cleveland Clinic. What is needed includes PHRs, like MyChart, but also interpretation of results, such as offered by 23&Me. The tools must provide actionable results.
IBM Watson was also featured with a new initiative with Cleveland Clinic to “send Watson to Medical School” using medical students and others to improve paths for medical decisions. This exciting prospect is an experiment in human-computer interaction and machine learning. See this video for more details:
Finally, the top ten innovations announced at the conference including everything from handheld imaging to bariatric surgery.
Share this:New Book Scheduled for Publication – Wireless Health:Remaking of Medicine by Pervasive Technologies
October 26, 2012
This is a new textbook editted by Mehran Mehregany for the Wireless Health course at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland (the course is actually conducted in San Diego). I wrote Chapter 12, Computing and Information, which outlines changes in information technology in the past 10 years and how these are enabling pervasive computing in health care. The release date is February 2013 so stay tuned. Check out the table of contents which includes a broad range of topics from gaming and social networks to medical device design and electronic instrumentation.
Book Review: Rainforest – The Secret to Building the Next Silicon Valley
August 22, 2012
The Rainforest was recommended to me by my friend Enoch Choi who lives in Silicon Valley. The book has a fresh perspective on Silicon Valley pointing out the affect of the western pioneer spirit on California in general and the Valley in specific. A spirit of independence and willingness to take risks is proposed as a basis for the unique entrepreneurial direction of the Valley. The book uses several summaries of principles, such as, extra-rational motivations and “err, fail, persist”, what stood out to me were two themes which may sound contradictory: Rule breaking and Trust. This quote about rule breaking sums it up:
“For the Rainforest to thrive, people must accept that rule breaking and believing in grand aspirations are acceptable forms of social behavior. They enable someone to believe that what was previously been considered impossible is in fact possible.” And regarding trust: “the willingness to take the initiative to trust others” and “demonstrate the transparency of its motivations as part of its routine transactions.”
Although the rainforest analogy seems to go to far at times, the concept of enabling international collaboration is right on. The book makes a strong case for the unique environment which spawns innovation in the Valley and questions the ability of many cities and regions which would like to foster innovation and new companies to do so without that unique environment. One exception Cleveland Clinic which has not only generated multiple patents and spin offs but also is now showing other health care organizations how to commercialize their intellectual property.
If you don’t have time to read the book, check out the white paper or the Global Innovation Summit.
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Everyone is Talking about Big Data
July 20, 2012
Several new publications about Big Data in healthcare are showing up with good analysis of this emerging field.
First, an article from PharmExec called “Super-Size Me: Optimizing the Information Explosion” which came out in May. They note new sources of information including:
- Electronic Medical Records
- Social Media
- Real world evidence
- Personalized medicine
- Track and trace systems
They see significant potential value in big data:
» Uncover unmet needs
» Assess the feasibility of clinical trial designs and recruit trial subjects
» Demonstrate product value
» Conduct pharmacovigilance
» React more quickly to market changes via real-time market measurement and sophisticated KPIs
» Enhance commercial activities and enable more personalized messaging
» Deploy predictive capabilities rather than retrospective analytics
And next they note the layers of technology required:
- Collection, Aggregation, and Storage
- Analytics
- Reporting.
- “Nowcasting,” real-time data analysis, and pattern recognition will surely get better.
- The good of Big Data will outweigh the bad. User innovation could lead the way, with “do-it-yourself analytics.”
- Open access to tools and data “transparency” are necessary for people to provide information checks and balances. A re they enough?
- The Internet of Things will diffuse intelligence, but lots of technical hurdles must be overcome.
- Humans, rather than machines, will still be the most capable of extracting insight and making judgments using Big Data. Statistics can still lie.
- Respondents are concerned about the motives of governments and corporations, the entities that have the most data and the incentive to analyze it. Manipulation and surveillance are at the heart of their Big Data agendas.
Presentation at H2.0 Hospital Liquido Barcelona, June 12
June 14, 2012
Electronic Medical Records: From Clinical Decision Support to Precision Medicine
With an emphasis on lethal lag time and how EMRs can be used to bring new discoveries to medical practice more quickly.
Share this:Presenting at H2.0 Hospital Liquido Barcelona, June 11-12
June 7, 2012
The themes of this conference, lead by Jorge Juan Fernández García, are:
- H ealthcare / Medicine
- I nnovation
- T echnology
- E ntrepreneurship
A Look at Social Media in Health Care — Two Years Later – iHealthbeat post
May 21, 2012
Last week I had a follow up post on iHealthbeat on Social Media in Healthcare to one that I posted two years ago. Some of my predictions were correct but who could predict the explosion of healthcare apps. There were so many other trends I could have cited including the study of healthcare social media in European hospitals.
Coincidentally, I attended the Cleveland Clinic Patient Experience Empathy and Innovation Summit on Sunday. One track in the afternoon was devoted to social media with a good mix of speakers covering the latest trends in healthcare and beyond. Check out the Twitter stream here
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Favorite Quotes from TEDx Maastricht
April 10, 2012
Last week I was fortunate to attend TEDx Maastricht in person for the second year in a row. There were several great talks, all inspiring and some surprising. The beginning and end represented innovations in care of very different types. Beginning with a demonstration of FaceTalk, a live demo of an interdisciplinary consultation between 3 physicians on 3 continents sharing CT scans and more in real time. The final presentation of a video of interviews with young adult cancer survivors even facing death with courage. Patients were certainly invited and had an impact on the overall tone of the conference. One example was Clarissa Silva who said about her recovery from mental illness, “Courage is being afraid but doing it anyway.”
A big hit was Paul Levy who talked about healthcare and soccer (football). One choice quote is advice to a girl from the team of 11 year olds he coaches: “Think about what you are going to with the ball before it arrives.” This certainly applies to future thinking in the dynamic health care environment. Check out his book, Goal Play. Then there was Paul Grundy from IBM made the comparison of physicians as the master builders of European cathedrals, trying keeping everything in their head as knowledge explodes. This leads to his conclusion of Smarter healthcare by smarter use of data.
Much anticipated was Roni Zieger, formerly of Google Health presented on Embrace the Patient Story. He talked about his own experience with a medical problem but then discussed how patients can become experts in their own care and therefore experts with others. His collaboration with Lucien Engelen, MyHealthStory, was a beginning down his new path. Now he is planning with Gilles Frydman of ACOR a new venture called Impatient Health, because they and many patients are impatient to participate fully in not only helping others as Patient Experts but also as active participants in research.
A great surprise was the introduction to the documentary “The Waiting Room.” Afterwards I had the opportunity to view the film – it is a heart-wrenching view of the real struggles of the uninsured in the US using the emergency room for primary care. I hope with the producers that the film will have a role in the health care reform debate.
Thanks to Lucien Engelen and Corine Jansen of the Radboud Reshape and Innovation Center for making this event possible. Looking forward to The Future of Health 2013.
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Thoughts on Sentiment Analysis in Health Care
March 6, 2012
There is increasing interest in Sentiment Analysis of social media. The brief messaging systems like Twitter and Facebook allow for picking out words and phrases using algorithms to find positive or negative sentiment. There are an increasing number of tools to do sentiment analysis and market research firms willing to do it. Using a simple tool like TwitterSentiment can get quick results but are they meaningful for healthcare? For instance, looking at “Mayo Clinic”, the results are rated as negative but examining the tweets show a mix of statements and some rated negative (78%) have to do with waiting for someone in surgery or concern about illness rather than care or quality. But using their twitter handle @MayoClinic shows 90% positive. Similar results are seen with Cleveland Clinic and Hopkins Medicine. Perhaps tools with a license fee are more sophisticated and show clearer results. An market research firms may take more time to tweet algorithms to sort out positives and negatives.
But hospital reputation is not the only use of sentiment analysis in health care social media. What are sentiments about diseases and conditions? In a brief check, cancer was more positive than cancer. But some comments are mixed, “thanks love! My roommate got diagnosed with cancer” is rated positive. My conclusion, sentiment analysis in healthcare requires fine tuning – what is good news, what is bad, what is neutral? The temporary pain of treatment can be a real downer but the results a real high. I will be interested to see more written on this in the future. Some research has begun, such as, this article on cancer survivorship.
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