This week’s photograph is actually a series, taken at Washington, DC’s Tech Cocktail 6, a gathering of the technology/startup community, in the Adams Morgan Neighborhood. From the top,Anita Samarth from DC’s Clinovations smiling, with AOL guy in the background, Cake, a panoramic view of the Adams Morgan neighborhood at night, and frozen yogurt from Caliyogurt.
The Real Truth about Apple and Google and Arrington – A fascinating look at the upheaval of the telephone/carrier industry brought about in a roundabout way by Apple and Google. What are the similarities in other industries, from trains, to planes, to music, and ultimately health care?
Death by Information Overload – HBR.org – “Wow! Michalski, an independent consultant who advises companies on the use of social media, isn’t drowning in a cascade of information. He’s not even trying to ride it out in a barrel. He’s surfing Niagara Falls. So what’s his secret? “You have to be Zen-like,” he patiently explained to me. “You have to let go of the need to know everything completely.”
I think this is an important philosophy to embrace – “I don’t need to know everything completely” – social media is a lower fidelity communication than, say, e-mail.
The other interesting point this article raises is in the area of return on investment – avoidance of e-mail can be as significant as avoiding travel to converse with people….
E-Health Europe :: Swedish hospitals lead on social media – So far, the research has shown that Swedish hospitals leads the use of social media tools, with 11% of Swedish hospitals studied using RSS feeds and 4% using blogs. Spanish and Danish hospitals closely follow with more than 8% using RSS feeds. The study also shows that Dutch and English hospitals use the widest variety of social networking methods including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and particularly blogs (8.13%)
Why Generation X Has the Leaders We Need Now – Tammy Erickson – HarvardBusiness.org – “You will have the opportunity to change the corporate template, and create organizations that are more conducive to your values. As leaders, you will be able to reshape the organizations you lead to make them better places for future generations and yourselves, make them more humane, and break the cultural norms of corporate life — long hours, a focus on full-time work, heterogeneous perspectives, and language of combat. You will bring your desire to create better alternatives, including how to balance work with commitments beyond the corporation and finding meaning in work. Most importantly, your preference for “alternative” and your inclination to innovate will allow you to look for a different way forward.”
Life as a Healthcare CIO: The FY10 HMS IT Operating Plan – Thanks again to John Halamka, MD, for sharing the Harvard Medical School Information Technology Operating Plan, in the interest of serving as a benchmark to others, and being transparent within his own organization.
The question in the title of this post is a reasonable one to ask in Washington, DC, when entering a meeting after walking downtown, even in the morning, and a very reasonable one to ask when entering one’s first meeting using TelePresence, with its Blu-Ray (1024p) resolution and life size reproduction of a continuous video image.
This isn’t videoconferencing: Besides being a great patient advocate, Danny Sands, MD, is also a great innovator in the area of health information technology. His work contributed to the first philosophical platform around patient-physician e-mail, and now, he may do the same in the era of telehealth, so of course it was worth a visit!
This was my first time visiting a TelePresence room (it was Danny’s 100+, he told me); I admit (and admitted to Danny) that it’s disarming. As he pointed out, the room is constructed in such a way to reinforce the perception that another person is sitting across the table from you. I felt like I wanted to reach over and take a look at his mobile device and laptop – everything matches, down to the table surface, the chairs, and the paint colors.
Beyond TelePresence, there’s HealthPresence, which combines the video quality and continuity of TelePresence with clinical devices (electronic health records and biometric monitoring) in a clinical environment. A pilot of HealthPresence has been done in Scotland; you can see a YouTube video of that experience here.
After a nice introduction to the technology (and for doing this over 100 times, I have to say, Danny’s a great and patient teacher), we talked about ideas for using technology like this in health care.
This ranges from everything to providing care over distances where physicians or specialists aren’t present, to expanding the footprint of specialty of care regardless of distance. The promise of including family members in consultations seems interesting as well.
I was especially intrigued by the possibility that Danny suggested of there being special training to deliver health care using this format. The corollary to that is a curriculum in undergraduate and graduate medical education in providing care using different modalities (including e-mail as well as video) might result in a new specialty, or at the very least, new emphasis on patient-centered care in the medical education system.
By the end of an hour, I definitely felt more comfortable with the conversation. It was fun to bring a little Washington, DC to Boston via this technology, and vice versa.
Part of connecting with innovators like Danny is connecting with their enthusiasm for the future; to that end I took a few videos of my own – this is of Danny illustrating the 3-dimensional audio capabilities of the system. I’m going to edit the other and post it in a few days. See what you think.
Getting Doctors Talking Key To Health Care Fix : NPR – Dr. ANN O’MALLEY (Center for Studying Health System Change): Coordinated care refers to the integration of health care across all of a patient’s needs, conditions, the different clinicians that person sees and the different settings where the patient receives care. SILBERNER: Seventy-six-year-old Ben Bart(ph) knows what coordinated care means. He’s a retired electronics engineer. He likes systems and he likes Kaiser Permanente, where all the doctors and nurses work together and share a computer system. Bart has diabetes, which can cause eye problems, so his primary care doctor sent him to a Kaiser ophthalmologist.
"When I picked up my paper, the images were joyful, depicting happy same-sex couples who were finally able to apply for marriage licenses in our nation’s capital. I often tell my students that, in my humble opinion, one purpose of government is to help people be happy. The DC government did a good job on Wednesday." […]
