Giddyup! Horses teaching future doctors
by Jillian Ketterer
I wish I remembered how I stumbled upon this clip, but like so many things, it has evaporated into the ether/webulous/what-have-you.
In any event, this fun clip from NBC shows students at Stanford Medical School learning about communication and interpersonal skills from horses. Unfortunately the clip is old (2007) but it is still an interesting concept. Looks like Stanford is still offering the class, and students are still enjoying it as evidenced by this blog.
The clip is posted courtesy of Horsensei, which offers a range of programs for equine-assisted learning (for your job, your medical school, your birthday, etc.)
More on the mHealth Networking Conference
by Jillian Ketterer
In follow-up to last week's post about the mHealth Networking Conference, I thought I'd share some of the summaries that have popped up around the web. Here they are, in no particular order:
Federal Telemedicine News: Status of Mobile Health
MobileHealthWatch.com: Mobile apps highlight possibilities, hurdles
SPEC: Smart Health Apps, Medical Devices and the Future of Mobile Health Debated
FierceMobileHealthcare: Mobile health technology leads the revolution
MobiHealth News: Does mHealth need a doctor's prescription? (probably!)
About Face! The MIT Media Lab assesses microexpressions
by Jillian Ketterer
When I was catching up on posts from one of my favorite blogs, Brain Pickings, I stumbled upon this post about a software application developed by the Affective Computing Group at the MIT Media Lab. The application, called FaceSense, detects and analyzes facial gestures in real-time, and then uses that information to make inferences about the person's mood and emotional state. As Brain Pickings points out:
An accurate disposition detection model for video can be used in anything from analyzing politicians’ televised appearances to testing news anchors for bias.
The possibilities - both wonderful and nefarious - are endless. Check out the video to find out more!
Patient involvement – Another public service announcement
by Kathleen Rose
Apparently this video has been out for some time, but someone asked me today if I'd seen the AHRQ commercial about asking your doctor questions. The video really needs no explanation; it's a great message. Share it with every patient you know!
Perfecting patient care
by Kathleen Rose
Since my last post referred to people who make healthcare better, a post on "Perfecting Patient Care" seemed appropriate. I recently made a short field trip across the great state of PA to Pittsburgh, where I learned you cannot hail a cab easily, but you can find the dedicated staff at the Jewish Healthcare Foundation (JHF) and Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative (PRHI) doing their best to address patient safety and quality improvement, often in one patient care setting at a time.
In her dual role as president of JHS and co-founder of PRHI, our highly energetic colleague Karen Wolk Feinstein and a fine cast of PRHI staff eagerly introduced us to "Perfecting Patient Care (PPC)," which is based on the "lean" concept, using Toyota-based methods. PPC is an interdisciplinary fellowship program targeted at graduate students that runs for eight weeks during the summer. Twenty to 25 students from several local universities learn a different tool or philosophy each week. Paired with a local mentor, they meet weekly at a different healthcare institution and set to work on a problem, identified by the institution. By employing learned observation methods, students are able to identify issues and design an action/improvement plan. It's an overall win-win situation, the fellows learn a valuable team-based problem-solving methodology, and the institution is provided with valuable information and insight into their issue without having to sacrifice staff time.
Can't participate in the fellowship program? There's always PPC University, a 4-day program to train champions and healthcare professionals in practice. Open PPC runs five times a year in Pittsburgh; participants arrive with a goal in mind, e.g., reducing patient falls, eliminating infections, etc., and leave with the design and implementation tools needed to identify the issues, address the problems and attain their goals. Customized PPC focuses the 4-day program on the needs of an individual institution or care setting and is delivered on-site.
"PRHI offers healthcare leaders the necessary tools, expertise, education, models and networks to perfect patient care and safety in their organizations. Using the Toyota Production System as a model, PRHI developed a quality improvement method for clinical settings known as Perfecting Patient Caresm."
There's also something brewing called Tomorrow's Healthcare, but if I tell you about it, I'd have to kill you. Before taking my leave, I was eager to sign up for University, as I'm sure there is something I can work on fixing around here!
To learn more about PPC and other projects and PRHI programs, check out their website or stop in and say hey to Karen, Laura, Linda, Steve, Keith, Barb, Gerry, Colleen, Brian, et al...
Will the public “buy” Blippy?
by Jillian Ketterer
Today I stumbled upon a really strong example of how certain subsets of consumers are willing to sacrifice privacy in exchange for what I'll call "social convenience". Blippy, which is just in beta and was recently highlighted in a New York Times article, is an online social network that lets you share your recent credit card purchases with your friends. I haven't actually used the service, but from the description, it seems to do this automatically in a "Twitter-like" microblogging fashion - a type of passive, social information-sharing. There are, of course, ways to restrict what is shared with whom, but in general I think this is a step in the direction of transparency. The question is: will people find benefit in sharing where they are and what they are buying (and for how much) with their friends?
My guess is yes, but I am very curious about what the early adopters will look like, since users of this service will need to have, for example, (a) access to the internet, (b) a credit card, (c) available funds on their credit card, (d) an interest in shopping and purchase-related information, and (e) friends who possess characteristics "a" through "e". I look forward to seeing how this one pans out!
Hey, Miss Manners, welcome to 2009.
by Amber Montanano
I heard a segment on NPR the other day about mobile device technology etiquette. (As a side note, I notice that most of my posts are inspired by things I hear on NPR. What would I do without you, public radio?) It basically laid out some ground rules for when and how it's appropriate to use mobile devices when you're dating someone. In this new and strange age of technology, I suppose rules about this kind of thing were bound to happen. For me, this is a really interesting area to get into.
I know I’m preaching to the choir.
by Amber Montanano
e-Patients are getting more and more press lately. This morning I heard some people on the radio talking about how folks are using the internet for support and information. They even dropped the Patients Like Me name. What surprises me more than anything is that it's taking so long to get the medical community to pay attention to the social media explosion.
A Public Service Post
by Amber Montanano
Know your enemy!
It seems like there have been several viruses flying around the Center over the past few weeks. I think all six of us have been out for one illness or another. Suspicions of H1N1 swirl, but thankfully, no one has been seriously compromised.
Maybe I shouldn't be saying things like that until the flu season is officially over. Jeez, do I know how to tempt the fates or what?
Anyway, I was cruising around on npr's site today and came across a pretty useful video/article and thought that I'd share it with not only my non-MD colleagues, but anyone who happens across this here blog and is as curious about what viruses do in your body as I was.
I must now return to my muscle aches and lethargy.
Remember the Milk, and other things
by Jillian Ketterer
I spent the last I-don't-know-how-many years of my life in a seemingly constant rainfall of post-it notes and napkins, each with some number of my own reminders scrawled on them. If I had no paper, well, my own left hand would do for taking down a reminder (which could be anything from, "Buy milk" to "Find that post-it you lost, or try to remember what was on it.") [Aside: I'm going to skip making a joke about the left hand knowing what the right hand is up to, because that would just be bad.]
Anyway, I tried all sorts of non-paper-and-pencil task-organization systems, but they were all platform-dependent and just really didn't suit my needs: multiple inputs, multiple outputs, always in my face, easy, convenient, simple, sharable.
Enter Remember the Milk. This is basically To-Do in the age of Web 2.0.
Then take that, and put it on your Active Desktop (if you're a Windows user) with this nifty tip from Third Error.
Then, go throw away all those stupid lists. Or set them on fire. It's really up to you. You can get your task list texted to you each morning via Twitter, check it out on your Desktop and update it via email/Twitter/text/etc.
For someone with a brain chock full of both useful and useless information, this is Big, and not in the Tom Hanks sort of way.
Scouting Themes
Research
- Content analysis of patient complaints
- Changing physicians' competence and performance: Finding the balance between the individual and the organization
- Individual Differences and the Development of Perceived Control
Bookmarks
- Tech Start-ups Cope With Data Flood - WSJ.com
- Pre-Grade Your Paper!
- Doctor Leads Quest for Safer Ways to Care for Patients - NYT Interview with Dr. Peter J. Pronovost
- Popular Science puts its archives online for free - awesome!
- amednews: National Practitioner Data Bank expanded beyond physicians to other healthcare professionals