Speech recognition software + EMRs
Here is an update on one of the ways natural language processing is being used and incorporated into Electronic Medical Record technology.
Dragon's dictation system has been around for a while, and this looks like the next logical step for physicians and health care workers - an integration of the technology into existing EMR systems. This suite of tools will allow for practice analytics, data mining for meaningful use statistics, and streamlined workflow throughout the EMR system.
There is so much data out there in the medical world, with more being produced every second. (Think about how often you've been to see a doctor and all of the information gathered about you each time - vital signs, medications, test results, lab work, etc. Now multiply that by the 300 million people just in the US alone, and you can begin to imagine how huge this "data situation" really is.) Being able to extract meaning from all of that data is becoming more and more important to physicians with the increasing demands on quality, accountability, and patient safety. It's fascinating to see how technologies will be developed and shaped to assist in these needs; and which ones will actually stick.
I was speaking to a coworker about this article, and we agreed that as the decade goes on, there will need to be some work done on quick typing/data entry kinds of technology, similar to Dragon/Nuance. More doctors will be using smart phones, tablet PCs and netbooks to run their practices as well as their schedules, and the younger generations about to graduate from medical school are familiar with typing quickly and on-the-go. Perhaps predictive text combined with voice recognition in an app? Will be interesting to watch how these kinds of ideas unfold.
Insurance companies experimenting in social media
I think we've hit critical mass in the forms of social media in which one person is expected to maintain a presence. The sheer variety (and volume) of sites, apps and platforms that are available, and constantly being marketed, to consumers makes me want to throw my smart phone off a highway overpass. Nearly every day I check Facebook, two Twitter feeds (personal and professional), Google +, Google Reader, Linked In, flickr, Spotify and more. Then there are the ones I have accounts for and don't check so often like Rypple, Yelp, Shelfari, LastFM, delicious, Digg and Foursquare. Almost every site now has social media integration (YouTube, news and sports sites, messageboards, etc.) You can't escape them (short of ditching your home internet connection, but even then, many workplaces are utilizing social media now too) and you can't possibly juggle them all.
[Frankly, I'd like a social media coach to come in, interview me for a few hours, and tell me which ones are best for me and how to optimally use them.]
But now, even insurance companies are getting involved in the social media game. From the descriptions of the two examples in that article, one from Humana and one from Independence Blue Cross, they are going about it in varying ways. The Humanaville world is just an additional non-integrated site to visit, though I like the idea of visiting "places" to get different kinds of information categorized by games, nutrition, education, and the like. It also doesn't say if it comes as a smart phone app, which would be useful because it could integrate with places/locations, calendars, grocery lists, etc.
The IBX site and app are integrated, allowing users to use it on Facebook or Twitter, taking into account that a lot of consumers already use these systems, and would be more likely to take on something new if it was seamlessly (or maybe even not so) woven into their existing social media lives. This quote sums up this line of thinking and design: "The beauty of it is that you really can leverage the built-in capabilities of the sites to take advantage of the capabilities of the smartphone," he explains. "It's not overly complex to do and it helps us bring in as many people as possible."
Since I already have Facebook, Twitter AND my insurance company is IBX, I plan on downloading the app and starting to play around with it to see what it's like and what it can do. I mean, what's one more thing to check every day, right!?
The role of IT systems in modernizing healthcare
Growing technologies in the medical field are really starting to make their presence known amongst doctors. It is amazing to see how the majority of physicians own an apple product such as the iPhone or iPad, along with the many others who plan on purchasing such items within the next year. The applications and social media networks on these mobile devices can assist doctors in several ways, such as prescribing medicine, accessing medical records, and even looking up health information that doesn't necessarily pertain to their practices. Great job by SpinaBifidaInfo.com for providing this fabulously informative image!
Image Source:
Social media & disaster-preparedness
Great article from the NEJM about the increasing use of social media outlets like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Flickr during and after disasters and emergencies.
Examples ranging from the revolution in Egypt, the earthquake in Haiti, and the 2009 H1N1 flu outbreak are used to describe the varying ways social media can quickly disseminate information, communicate with specific populations, provide real-time updates to users and even allow health care workers to "check in" to sites where their skills might be needed.
I think it's a great idea to start considering the value of these media, and how to integrate them into already-existing preparedness strategies and plans.
Concepts I enjoy, vol.1
This video of a Japanese robotic nurse/medical aide makes me feel extremely uncomfortable; not because of the idea of it (although if I think too much about it I'm not sure I can figure out why it should exist or how necessary its role is), but because of how it made me feel both cognitively and emotionally. If I was confronted with this in a hospital or clinic, I don't think I would feel comforted or helped. Instead, I would feel creeped out (in addition to wondering why a human wasn't employed in the position), and the reason for my being creeped out is a really fascinating concept called the Uncanny Valley.
but, i like zombies!
[I find this graph to be extremely interesting, but it doesn't represent exactly where those things lie on my personal U.V. continuum. For example, I like zombies quite a bit (I mean, philosophically) and would put them higher on the familiarity axis, and I would put "humanoid robots" much farther into the valley... indicating that everyone may have a different set of "rules" for this.]
I have a Wii Fit at home, and anyone who has used the "personal trainer" function knows that they are cartoonish black and white avatars, far less sophisticated than current technology allows. I'm not sure why they were made this way, though it's interesting to think about. Often the Wii Fit trainers have to tell you things you don't want to hear (that you're not strong, flexible, in shape, etc.) and it may be that it's easier to hear negative or bad things from less-human entities. Which makes this project of very human-like medical robots even more curious. How would you feel if one of the nurse robots had to break a piece of very bad news to you? Do you think it would be easier to take, or harder?
Do your grocery shopping from the train station
grocery shop from the luxury of your own subway car
Talk about innovative... A grocery store chain (Tesco's Home Plus) in South Korea had the brilliant idea to take photos of the products on their shelves (with the bar codes showing), make life-size versions of them, and put the photos up in subway stations around Seoul so people could shop while waiting for the train on their daily commute.
Using the bar code scanner app on their smart phone (an app I adore, by the way) a person can take pictures of the bar codes for the items they want to buy, which then puts that item in their virtual cart. After using their phone again to check out, the groceries are delivered to their home at the end of the work day.
This campaign (which I wouldn't necessarily categorize as "advertising" as much as an innovative/interactive shopping application) won the Grand Prix award at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity - a very cool prize indeed.
Invention vs. Innovation
Malcolm Gladwell wrote an interesting piece last month in The New Yorker entitled "Creation Myth: Xerox PARC, Apple and the Truth About Innovation", which discusses technology invention and innovation and how they are both similar and dissimilar. There is a follow-up intereview on NPR as well.
I'm interested in this because I'm interested in creativity, what are the various forms creativity takes, and how limited in scope our definition of "creative" can be. For many, it's synonymous with "artistic". But in the Gladwell article, he describes a process where ideas or products are re-thought, re-purposed or re-designed by individuals who didn't come up with the idea themselves. Instead of being inventors, they are innovators: people who are able to see a novel use or new market for an existing thing, which may be stagnantly collecting dust somewhere. And I think this is a very real, and very important, form of creativity.
A good inventor isn't necessarily also a good marketer or communicator, and I think this article highlights the importance of both when it comes to technology. Part of my job involves "scouting" emerging health care markets for ideas or products that could have new applications. Reading the Gladwell article has made me think about that process a little more clearly, but also broadly - creativity and innovation has a place in institutions (like health care or education), but also within organizations and communities.
Which do you think you are? The inventor or the innovator... or could you be both?
Have you ever heard of Nunavut?
Timothy Willett, MD, may look like a San Franciscan indie-rocker, but he’s really a Canadian tech geek doctor with a big heart.
Last year he did a really cool pilot study in the Nunavut Province of Canada (a piece of land so large – 2.1 million square kilometers, or 1.34 million square miles for us non-Canucks – that it would be the 15th largest country in the world if it were a sovereign nation!) which despite its size, has a population of only 30,000. Because of the terrain, climate and sparse population density, getting medical resources or personnel to critically ill patients is extremely difficult. In fact, a medical–response helicopter ride from Ottawa to the capital of Nunavut, Iqaluit, takes four hours. Which means getting someone who is either severely injured, or in acute renal failure, for example, could take eight hours. So Dr. Willett conducted a simulation training for community physicians in Iqaluit using web education modules, video-conferencing problem-based cases, and training on simulation task-trainers like Sim Man to train them in dealing with critically-ill patients, in order to improve their chances of survival in less-than-ideal health care conditions.
His pilot project resulted in increased confidence on the part of the doctors in dealing with such situations, increased knowledge in critical care treatment, and improved performance across two Simucases. These encouraging outcomes lead to another pilot involving critical care nurses in Iqaluit, and further pilots planned for interdisciplinary team-based trainings.
Hearing about this project really had me thinking about the use of emerging technology in medical training, and how it can be so much more than just med students tinkering around in a high-tech campus sim center. Dr. Willett described the high cost and complicated logistics of getting the equipment up to Nunavut, an area well-served by access to such resources, due to its remoteness. I appreciated his innovative use of task-trainers, video conferencing and web modules to stretch the boundaries of their more popular current uses. And I’m also excited by the ideas generated in regards to team-based training, and how this could help areas where physicians are scarce (due to geography, over-population, etc.) or where remote clinics are staffed by a mixture of med techs, medical students on away rotations (like areas in Africa and South America) and nurses.
You can read a little more about Dr. Willett’s project here.
A lamp that can read your mind?
There are many things I may never fully understand, such as why the Electoral College is still used in the United States, how anyone likes the taste of marzipan, and astrophysics. The LED lamp I am about to describe is also on that list.
The Mind Lamp, created by Psyleron in collaboration with the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) lab, is described as an "ambient mind-matter interaction lamp". The claim is that the lamp changes colors in real time based on quantum processes that have been shown to be influenced by the human mind. If I'm understanding this correctly, the key to the lamp's "quantum processes" is a device nestled inside it called a Random Event Generator (REG). Utilizing a process termed "electron tunneling", the REG takes electrons (with a variety of wave functions) from the environment and translates them into digital output. A microprocessor inside the lamp statistically analyzes this digital output, and based on patterns it finds, it adjusts the color of the lamp.
Let me just admit right now that even though I wrote the explanation above, I don't completely understand it. Concepts like "electron tunneling" and "quantum processes" are pretty foreign to me. However, if I were to try to translate that explanation into plainspeak, I would put it like this: The lamp senses and changes colors based on data from the environment, some of which might come from human consciousness. The question here is whether that means "I think of a color, and the lamp changes to that color" or "I have a mood, and the lamp reflects that mood with a color" or something else entirely. The researchers admit that they don't understand all the details, which is why this is a subject of ongoing research. (In fact, they were clever - they packaged this up as a consumer-friendly technology, and now they are reaping data on people's experiences via their reviews.)
Check out this video:
Mind Lamp: 60-Minute Time Lapse from Psyleron on Vimeo.
I find this lamp so intriguing, in part because I am having such a difficult time evaluating it. The skeptic in me starts listing the confounds (e.g., confirmation bias, when people only perceive effects that fit their expectations.) The logical part of me says that early research will always contain confounds, and these researchers are not hiding any of them. (The skeptic in me replies, "Yeah, like you can tell if you're being duped when it comes to electron tunneling and quantum science.") My imagination ignores them both and just thinks it's really cool, and wonders how else this technology could be used.
So there you have it. The lamps are $189.00 each, and you know what? I might just buy one someday.
Looking at dating websites is all in a day’s work.
logo pulled from Junebug's website
We've talked about search engines customizing your results according to what you seem to usually like at work (and here on the blog), so when I heard a very brief mention of a "new" dating website called Junebug this morning on NPR, I thought I should mention it.
It was a really quick story - quick enough that they didn't even list it on their website as something on the show! The story explained Junebug as a dating site that works with a similar algorithm that google and amazon use. They get you go answer some questions, just like every other dating site, but they also track the profiles you look at, extract the "most important" pieces of information from that profile, and find others with the same characteristics to suggest to you.
I'm no expert in online dating sites - not since I found my boyfriend on okcupid two years ago, anyway - but this seems more sophisticated than the usual, "fill these questions out and we'll find people who answered those questions similarly and match you" kind of thing. It's also more robust than simply asking, "Do you think opposites attract?" and then adjusting the results to find your mortal enemies online and pair you with them.
Naturally, there are disclaimers all over the about section about how it takes a while to get a good feel for who Junebug thinks you'd like, but I think that just like every other recommender system it will become very good at figuring out what you find attractive in people.
I'd tell you to to ask the lady in the story who met her husband on the website, but I couldn't find it anywhere on NPR's site. Reference fail!