Category Archives: Health

May 13 2013
Art, Communication, Design, Education, Health, Humanities, Story

New Perspectives on Health Innovation

Guest post by Brian Quinn, Team Director of Pioneer Portfolio at RWJF

Brian Quinn / RWJF

Thank you to Kirsten Ostherr and Bryan Vartabedian for inviting me to be a part of Millennial Medicine last month. As the team director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Pioneer Portfolio, my responsibility is to seek out new ideas that have the potential to transform health and health care. To do so, it’s become increasingly obvious to my team that we need to get out of our comfort zone of the usual conference circuit and look for opportunities to engage with folks we don’t know very well. Millennial Medicine was precisely that kind of opportunity. (If you have suggestions for other events I should attend, I’d love to hear them.)

The thing that really stood out for me about Millennial Medicine was the collaboration it fostered, whether it was across institutions or across disciplines.

One of our core beliefs on the Pioneer team is that there is a tremendous potential for health and health care to be transformed by thinking that transcends traditional siloes and comes to us from other industries and disciplines. More often than not that translates to speaking to or hearing from those who are working in technology. I get it; it makes sense. Because of the times we live in, technological advances are often vehicles for innovation. But technology itself doesn’t equate to innovation.

Millennial Medicine was the first time that I was engaging in a dialogue about health and health care innovation with people working in the humanities.

One of the presentations that resonated for me was from Alexa Miller from Arts Practica. Alexa is an arts education specialist working with physicians in Boston to improve the quality of health care by, in part, better enabling these physicians to engage with their patients through closer observation and deeper understanding of their health issues. And Jay Baruch at Brown University is also — through a humanities lens — educating doctors to see patients differently, to better hear what’s going on in their lives and, as a result, perhaps provide them with better clinical care. OpenNotes — an RWJF grant recipient — opens up a dialogue between physicians and their patients by improving communication from the physician to the patient. What Jay and Alexa talked about flips that and allows that patient perspective to flow back in the opposite direction.

Having attended Millennial Medicine, it’s clear to me that I’d love to hear from more people working in the humanities who could share their insight about issues that folks working in the health sector don’t think about very much.

If we’re truly going to disrupt health and health care, we need to consider these different interdisciplinary perspectives and bring others into the picture.

***Editor’s note: Many thanks to Brian from all of us at the Medical Futures Lab – we loved having you at Millennial Medicine and we look forward to continuing the disruptive conversation!

May 03 2013
1 Comment
Communication, e-patient, Education, Health, Humanity, Story

A Dialogue between a Scientist and a Humanist

DNA_sequencingOne of my favorite exchanges at Millennial Medicine was the dialogue between Eric Topol and Tom Cole about Topol’s “4 S’s”: scanning, sequencing, sensors, and social media. Topol argued that these four fields have become sufficiently mature that we can now digitize human beings, and he outlined the positive results of this revolution for patient care. (Our student Amol Utrankar provided a great summary of this and other presentations, for those who missed them. And we’ll be posting videos of all of the talks by the end of next week – watch this space for more details.) But Tom Cole, Director of the UT McGovern Center for Humanities and Ethics, thought Topol had missed a few S’s: Story, Spirituality, and Suffering – all crucial dimensions of the patient experience that came up at different times in the course of the symposium. This led to a wonderful dialogue in which Eric Topol expanded on his argument to say that, indeed, one of the effects of the digital revolution may be that it frees up doctors to focus on the more human aspects of providing health care: human to human contact.

The take-home lesson: digital medicine can foster improved doctor-patient communication, both through online tools and by making space for direct personal engagement. As usual, it’s not an either-or.

The even bigger take-home message: digital medical humanities can help create better health care for the e-patients of the 21st century. Scientists and humanists: let’s keep the conversation going!

Apr 17 2013
Culture, Electronic Medical Record, Health, History, Medicine

EMRs and the Problems of Diagnosis

512px-Electronic_medical_recordGuest post by Olivia Banner.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to draw the attention of physicians and medical students to debates over the diagnoses that they often accept as self-evident, particularly because these diagnoses are intricately interwoven into electronic medical records.

As we try to develop better EMRs, can we integrate into them an understanding that diagnoses reflect the cultural and social meanings about human characteristics that circulate in their historical times?

These questions became particularly relevant when I read a reaction to the recent CDC release about ADHD, which is now diagnosed in 11% of U.S. children. In a New York Times Op-Ed piece (“Diagnosis: Human”), Ted Gup, a fellow of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, described a set of personal experiences that made him critical of the current rush to affix psychiatric diagnoses to characteristics that are perhaps simply part of what it is to be human. When his son displayed qualities that other eras might have labeled “rambunctious,” our era stepped in with a diagnosis of ADHD, for which his son received, in lieu of talk therapy, the standard treatment: amphetamines.

At the age of 21, his son was found dead of a lethal mix of medication and alcohol. Gup views the death as a logical outcome of his son’s experience, where medication was not only the accepted tactic to address those qualities society labeled as a “disease,” but was also used as part of a culture of success, where, particularly among college students, amphetamine use is rampant. As further evidence of why the ballooning of diagnoses is a problem, Gup offers up the example of his own grief, an all-too-human and understandable response to losing his son – and which, according to the latest edition of the DSM, is diagnosable under the category of depression, and therefore treatable with medication.

Gup’s impassioned critique led me to consider how diagnoses are integrated into EMRs.

As we attempt to develop EMRs that can be “meaningfully used,” is there any way they might reflect broader cultural debates over the meaning of particular diagnoses?

In my next post, I’ll return to these questions in light of ongoing attempts to develop computer programs that could automate diagnosis, both for medical and psychiatric conditions. Let me know what you think.

Apr 11 2013
Design, Education, Health, Medicine, Technology

Two weeks to “Millennial Medicine”! #MMed13

Blood_Drying_Unit-_Processing_Blood_in_the_Laboratory,_Cambridge,_England,_UK,_1943_D16766The Medical Futures Lab has been humming with activity in the last weeks leading up to our inaugural symposium. Response to the program has been tremendous. In addition to our incredible lineup of speakers, we have participants coming from all over the United States and beyond, and all of the major players in the Texas Medical Center will be in the house. In the afternoon we will hear from physicians, creative writers, artists, hacktivists, and open-source educators as we reimagine medical education for the doctor of the future. (See the previous blog post for details on the morning panel.) Some titles to pique your interest:

“Story-centric: Curiosity, A Glass of Water, and Other Creative Tools for Future Doctors” (Jay Baruch)

“The Art Practicum: Clinical Skills for the Digital Age” (Alexa Miller)

“Hacking Medical Education” (Fred Trotter)

“Open Source Medicine” (Rich Baraniuk)

“Public Medical Communication: A New Core Competency for 21st Century Health Professionals” (Louise Aronson)

We’ll wrap up the day with a reception in the lovely courtyard of the BioScience Research Collaborative. We hope to see you there!

Register here.

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Apr 05 2013
Design, Education, Health, Medicine, Technology

Countdown to “Millennial Medicine: Knowledge Design for an Age of Digital Disruption” #MMed13

Millennium_Falcon_in_LEGO (1)Only three weeks left before the inaugural symposium of the Medical Futures Lab on April 26 in Houston.

The design of “Millennial Medicine” has the Lab’s multidisciplinary-critical-thinking-through-creative-design handprints all over it. We’re bringing together thought leaders from inside and outside of medical education to reimagine the future of medicine and the tools we need to get there. Our speakers are covering a thrilling array of topics, including:

“Digitizing Human Beings” (Eric Topol)

“Can Medical Education Become a Learning Ecosystem?” (Marc Triola)

“The Future of Continuing Medical Education: Can We Keep Up with Exponential Growth in Medical Knowledge?” (Yuri Millo)

“Ten Lessons About Technoculture Innovation for Medicine” (Anne Balsamo)

And that’s all before lunch. Schedule here, and watch this space for the equally fabulous after-lunch lineup.

By drawing input from different disciplines we will leverage our collective capabilities to identify core problems, create critical dialog, fashion innovative solutions, and cultivate new patterns of thinking while fostering a uniquely creative medical culture.  This innovative symposium will bring the voices of the next generation of medical leaders into the dialog about medicine’s future by asking, “how should medicine look in 2050?” Join the conversation!

Register here.

 

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