[ This post is written for the WCIT2010 blog and cross-posted here ]
“A hospital is no place to be sick”, Samuel Goldwyn (from MGM) once said.
And he was right. Because ultimately nobody wants to be in the hospital. But we cannot deny the fact that everyone will be a patient sooner or later. Maybe short and only irregular if you’re lucky – or for long periods and often, if you are the not so lucky.
Healthcare is an industry. An industry that affects billions and employs millions. An industry means a business. And businesses are there to help their customers and offer products and services that they want. Well, they should.
The healthcare industry, and the medical field in general, has always been keen on technical innovation. During the last century some amazing technical innovations have seen the limelight: penicillin, the artificial kidney (invented by a Dutchie) or robotic surgery, just to name a few. And technological innovation growth seems to be exponential. Which means that we now see the developments in mobile (mhealth) and nan technology changing the face of healthcare.
But there are two even more important changes in healthcare (in my opinion).
The first is that healthcare is not about the patient – which is “bon ton” at the moment (search for patient-centered). Delivering and receiving healthcare is about a network of people involved: patients, e-patients, family, caregivers, insurer, colleagues etcetera.
The second import change is about the people that change healthcare. It is no longer only in the hands of professionals only (research, decision makers, CEOs). More and more often patients take control in creating the best healthcare experience there is. Wonderful examples of this can be seen in the stories of ePatientDave or Maarten Lens-Fitzgerald.
Therefore innovation in healthcare is innovating the whole service: service design (with agencies like IDEO or 31volts showing the way). Technology is a part of an experience created by and for people. This thinking in networks, services and sharing has recently resulted in a new name that rightfully reflects what the future of healthcare is really about: participatory medicine. The Society of Participatory Medicine (and the accompanying Journal of Participatory Medicine) provide inspiration and pratical examples of how people together, information and technology can co-create a better future for healthcare. Because in healthcare you’re not alone.
Check out this presentation that shows Maarten Lens Fitzgerald story:
Probably most ambitious people are starved for the sort of encouragement they’d get from ambitious peers, whatever their age. [...] Which means one of the best ways to help a society generally is to create events and institutions that bring ambitious people together. It’s like pulling the control rods out of a reactor: the energy they emit encourages other ambitious people, instead of being absorbed by the normal people they’re usually surrounded with.
Paul Graham makes these and other excellent points about determination and what drives people. It’s an insightful read about why some succeed and others don’t. Makes you reflect.
Disclaimer: I’ve blatantly stole the idea for this post from Jen’s excellent blog, so all kudos for digging up this gem go to her!
Every Thursday evening we come together. The #momoams team: @vangeest@panman@marcfonteijn@samwarnaars and me. I like those meetings – a lot. They’re personal, on the edge and energetic. Trends, future scenarios and the latest gadgets all are part of the conversation (and we also do some event planning in between too :-)
Last week on our mailinglist @vangeest mailed a link to an article on Edge.org from Frank Schirmacher called The Age of the Informavore.
I watched the video and I’m blown away.
Really. It’s an more than excellent talk about how technology influences people and our society. It may seem like dry stuff, but really after watching this video you might very will think different. (On of the funny things in the video, considering the topic, btw is the sound of new mail coming in every now and then at Schirrmacher’s computer :-)
I have added the video below and added paraphrases of some of my favorite parts of the interview also (I can’t take credit for any of the content, they’re all Frank Schirrmacher’s, just see them as my highlighted parts). But actually, go over to Edge.org and read the full article (including excellent links and more info)! It’s more than worth it. Thanks again to @vangeest for sharing!
There seems to be an explosion of ideas, but not enough brains to cover them
When you view attention as food for information, we are now in a food crisis. That’s when dynamics of Darwinian selection kick in. Which ideas survive? Which thinking succeeds and which doesn’t?
The human is an informavore, it’s eating information. But just as with food it has to decide what take, what not to take, whether something has good or bad calories, whether it’s healthy etcetera
We are experiencing a cognitive revolution, much of what we are thinking is stored less in the lived life and more in systems linked to knowledge: Facebook, blogs etcetera
In the 19th century it was talked about that muscles had to adapt to the machines, in the 20th century we see the same question but now with the brain. We face issuess with e.g. multi-tasking.
There will be major issues with the tools developed, especially predictive search versus free will. Issues about the way we predict and the way we ARE predicted
Three important 19th century principles return – but in a different way – regarding information and society: Darwinism (who survives in the Net), Communism (question of free), Taylorism (people see themselves not capable anymore of keeping up with the system)
The realtime nature of the information has #iran already competing with @parishilton. You also already information cascades to influence this not only by humans, but also by bots
Kafka and Shakespeare in their time translated reality into literature – we need to find people that can do this on the level of software. George Dyson e.g. has done this very well in the article Turings Cathedral about his visit to Google: “Despite the whimsical furniture and other toys, I felt I was entering a 14th-century cathedral — not in the 14th century but in the 12th century, while it was being built.”
People tend to forget heuristics, e.g. the ability to calculate as machines will do that for us.
@groenlinks (their official Twitter account) twittered about their questions and I decided (together with my general idea of the party) that was a good reason to sign up. They even retweeted my decision to sign up.
But now I’m having second thoughts.
Why? Let me explain. Most of my involvement with the party is online (I follow their Twitter account and that of some of their politicians). I focus on some of their issues (free standards, green deal, better social structures), rather than the party as a whole. But it’s still a party organisation and that’s a problem.
I signed up online, because of online issues (Buma/Stemra). And what do I get? Paper. Loads of it.
I’ve gotten flyers, brochures, party programs. The lot. And I’ve never asked for any. If would want to read those I would go online and download them. But what’s more: I’m interested in specific topics: online rights, new deal, social structures – what about those?
There’s no personalization. But the paper forms do ask me for a lot of other things: help them campaign, spread flyers etctera. I feel that with signing up I seemed to have gained the status someone-we-can-use-as-free-campaigner.
I know I signed up for your organisation. But what I’m interested is in your people, your specific issues. The issues I can sympathize with. Just like with the Buma/Stemra one.
I’m an online person. I don’t like paper. Others might. I don’t. So, where is your Twitter? Facebook? Online forms? Google Docs? Live stream?
Political parties need VRM – Vendor Relationship Management. It’s not about them pushing all their party issues on to me. It’s knowing who I am and linking their issues to my person. That’s personalization – that’s the new campaigning.
I’m ditching all the papers and I’ll wait for a response that fits my way of working (I’m @mdbraber).
With the introduction of Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) many cool features were introduced and at least one not so cool feature: whenever you press the Play/Pause button your keyboard when you have e.g. Spotify running, it opens up iTunes. Anyway, nothing we cannot solve with a little hacking, right?
First start by downloading this script and save it somewhere on your computer. (DISCLAIMER: This script was taking from this thread on Apple Discussions). The contents of the script are listed below. When the script is launched it checks if another program that uses the multimedia keys is running. If there is it ignores the request to start iTunes, otherwise it simply proceeds with starting iTunes. You can change the apps setting to list more apps that you want to prevent iTunes from launching.
#!/usr/bin/env pythonimportsys, os, subprocess
launch = True
blocker = ""
apps = ["Ecoute", "Spotify", "Songbird", "Mplayer OSX Extended", "Mplayer"]
ps = subprocess.Popen("/bin/ps -x", shell=True, stdout=subprocess.PIPE)for line in ps.stdout.read().split("\n"):
for app in apps:
if app in line:
launch = False
blocker = app
ps.stdout.close()if launch :
os.spawnvp(os.P_WAIT, '/Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/MacOS/iTunesX', sys.argv)else :
print"Not launching iTunes while %s is running."% blocker
Next issue the following commands in a Terminal (of course replace <downloaded-script-location> with the directory where you downloaded the script to (e.g. /Users/myname/Downloads).
Today I attended a presentation at the Dutch Design Week by Marcel Zwiers from 31volts about Service Design. It’s a subject I’ve become more and more interested in over the last few months. If we take so much time designing products, what about services? And what value could it add? Especially for healthcare I suspect there might be significant gains in exploring the methods used. I will do a post on that later, first I’ll list my key take-aways about service design in general. [click to continue…]
Yesterday I attended Reshape 2009, a Dutch Health 2.0 conference organized by @zorg20 and others – it was put together very well (kudos to the team!). There was a good vibe and for me personal it was good to meet with national and international good friends. Some of my thoughts on the day and what’s happening to Health 2.0 (in The Netherlands and abroad). [click to continue…]
San Francisco. Feels a bit like being home (Amsterdam that is). You can just walk through the streets here and not have to take a cab for every place you want to go to. That’s nice! And in some ways it’s even better than Amsterdam: they have a a proper Apple Store :-) [click to continue…]
Finally – it’s been a struggle but I’ve made it! My thesis presentation and the rest of my colloquium went very well. The presentation was fun to give and it was a blast to be able to finally present to all those of you who have shown their continuing interest in my research (and the process leading up to it). And the best part: I’ve graduated with 8 (as has Joost!)
Thanks again to all of you who have attended my colloquium (in person or online in any form). I’m really stunned by all your nice reaction and congratulations!
Lots of you asked and finally they’re here: the document and presentation of my thesis. Today at 10.30am I will be presenting and if all goes well you can follow the live-stream here (from 10.30am GMT+1). For now you can download the final document or read it on Scribd. The presentation is available on Slideshare (although I can’t guarantee that I won’t make any additional changes this morning before presenting :-)
When the presentation is done I’ll update you with the grade and devote a proper posting to the topic afterwards to summarize the findings. After lots and of sleep and party first I guess… (not in that particular order :-)
Running a hospital is a balancing act. How can the hospital provide true value for patients/customers while at the same time handle all pressures of limited finances and ever-increasing demands? Business model theory can help hospitals build comprehensive value-based strategy.
This is where healthcare is going, the gold standard of semantic interoperabilty. Consumers WILL be able to access healthcare goods and services online and offline at will. This means consumers will have many choices to make in healthcare – how? where? when to access? which sources are credible? which providers protect my privacy? which hospitals [...]
I’ll do the shameless plug thing again and tell you that we’re presenting the Nexthealth model and research in CR2 at 1.30pm today. We’ve already put our presentation and paper online for you to view. Love to hear your comments (either on this site or after/during the presentation)
It’s day 2 of the conference and I must say it’s growing on me this conference-going thing :-) Love talking to so many inspirational and innovative people!
There are 180 people attending from 19 countries :-) Got an email from Rashmi Sinha (Slideshare CEO) asking for everyone presenting at Medicine 2.0 to put up their [...]
Coming to you live from Medicine 2.0 at the MaRS centre in Toronto. Follow the discussion on Twitter. See the first photos on Flickr and wait for the first blogposts to appear – more to come soon :-)
UPDATE: I’ll try to add links to everyone liveblogging or reporting from the event. Let me know in [...]
Tomorrow I’ll be flying out to Toronto for Medicine 2.0! I’m quite thrilled being able to go there and present the Nexthealth paper Jen McCabe Gorman and I wrote (originally for SWWS ‘08). You can check the conference proceedings for the paper. Also we’ll be presenting the Nexthealth model which Jen has been particulary busy [...]
Innovate Healthcare Business Models! Health 2.0, Innovation, Service Design, mHealth, Speaker, Entrepreneur, Event organizer, MoMoAms, Social Sunday, WiFi-geek
