Technology | Medical Futures Lab

Feb 23 2014

Hashtag Craziness

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57dzaMaouXA

Using a hashtag in a tweet or in a post on Facebook can be a very valuable way to draw attention to a keyword or phrase of your choosing. However, it is very easy to annoy people and lose the meaning of your post through hashtag abuse. The most clear and hilarious example of hashtag overuse comes from a skit in Jimmy Fallon’s Late Night Show. Throughout the skit hashtag abuse runs rampant as common words and even music lyrics are unnecessarily tagged. Apart from being really annoying after it loses its initial charm, exemplified by Questlove’s clear disapproval, the abuse of the hashtag by Jimmy and Justin scrambles their dialogue, making illogical jumps between topics. In this way, the reader loses the intended message and the meaning is misconstrued.

This skit draws very necessary attention to the rampant hashtag abuse that is omnipresent across all social media platforms. #This and #that is becoming unnecessary and ultimately diminishes the intended importance of the hashtag. According to Twitter’s website a hashtag is meant to be used before a relevant keyword or phrase to categorize it and make it show up in a Twitter search. This can be a very useful tool for a small business trying to create buzz for a new product or for a cancer survivor trying to bring attention and insight to issues from their treatment experience. It is meant to broadcast your message and inform other twitterers that you are bringing attention to this topic and that they can join you if they use the same hashtag. Unfortunately, due to widespread hashtag misconduct twitterers now tend to gloss over hashtagged keywords, disregarding them as spam. Therefore what could be a very successful marketing tool has been mostly discredited.

So how do we sift through all of this #hashtagcraziness and how do we restore its functionality? The former is much easier to solve as there are online tools such as Tagboard which search for a specific hashtag across all social media sites. Secondly, to restore people’s trust in the hashtag perhaps Twitter should impose a limit per tweet. Nonetheless hashtag abuse needs to be limited for what could be a very effective tool in reaching out to others and giving a voice to those who need to be heard is currently being mistreated so it fails to reach its potential.

Feb 18 2014

Communication, Design, Health, Technology

The Plight of the Primary-Care Physician

Type in “reasons for shortage of primary-care physicians” into Google and you will be led to almost 3 million responses. Most of these articles list the same few reasons including:

The lack of financial stability involved in going into primary-care medicine
A shortage of primary-care residency positions
The current state of primary-care, where physicians see too many patients per day while navigating through the convoluted web of medical insurance

Photo Credit: www.dreamstime.com

Now type in “how to solve the primary-care physician shortage” into Google. Again, you will be bombarded with millions of articles, many of which discuss trying to utilize the power of other health professionals some of which include nurses, physician assistants, pharmacists, dietitians, and psychologists. While this seems like a viable solution, the most obvious impediment is communication between these different health providers. Currently, the primary-care physician serves as a reference point between their patients and a sea of other healthcare providers. This only reinforces the current problem with primary-care, where physicians are reaching a cognitive overload. So what can be done to solve this problem? Or more specifically:

Can advances in technology help a primary-care physician maximize their limited time?

Photo Credit: www.hcplive.com

The limited time between a physician and patient is one of the greatest problems in managing complex health problems. One potential solution, mobile applications, allow a physician to be kept up to date on a patient’s progress. Currently, applications allow patients to track various health parameters associated with their chronic condition, and send a report of these results to their doctor. However, the information sent their doctor is often in an unorganized format and is highly variable in form due to the large volume of mobile applications available on the market. In order for this solution to be effective in maximizing the physician’s time, the information must be conveyed in a standard format, and must be available to the physician prior to the appointment.

The other communication problem that drains the time and energy of primary-care physicians is trying to coordinate care with other health providers. Many primary-care physicians still coordinate care over the phone, which can be extremely time-consuming. We need to find ways to streamline communication among different providers. This could include a redesign of electronic health records to better facilitate between physician communication, or an app which not only links a patient to their different providers, but the different providers to each other.

While these changes alone will not solve the primary-care physician shortage we will face in the coming years, they will allow a primary care physician to maximize their time with a patient during a 20-minute appointment. This will lead to better health outcomes, which is the ultimate goal of medicine.

Feb 17 2014

Culture, e-patient, Education, Health, Medicine, Technology

5 Lessons from the Quantified Self Movement

When it comes to health, we often go through the motions, blissfully unaware of ourselves. We imagine that we cannot manage our health; when we get sick, it’s not our fault. We complain that our friends gave us the virus and that our classmates are the vectors of disease. Rarely do we accept the responsibility of sickness. That would be a display of weakness, and we don’t have the time to address our health. Just give us a pill, so that we can get back to work. We have school, we have jobs.

Hopefully, that passage elicited some cringes. Its message is not foreign, and unfortunately, we tend to extrapolate our American grab-and-go philosophy to health. We believe that we are far too busy to appreciate our health, and we only begin to pay attention to health when we are already sick. Wouldn’t it make more sense to nurture health while we are healthy? Why wait until it is too late?

Photo Credit: funnyjunk.com

The Quantified Self Movement (QSM) has its roots in health and wellness improvement. The idea is to promote self-knowledge through self-tracking. As Mark Moschel eloquently states, we are “taking control of something conventional wisdom has told us is not ours to understand.” We can effectively incorporate technology into our daily lives to track what is important to us. With the inception of mobile health technologies, health measurements are becoming readily available at all times.

Today, we have devices that make the Fitbit and Nike+ seem archaic. With the Cardiio iPhone application, we can detect heart rate and respiratory motion through an iPhone camera. By using Eulerian video magnification developed by MIT, these unattached sensors have accuracies comparable to hospital-grade monitors. Apple also recently patented a new model of their iconic earphones that can detect blood oxygenation levels, heart rate, and body temperature, while you casually listen to music.

Photo Credit: cardiio.tumblr.com

Given these available technologies used by the members of the Quantified Self Movement, we learn several lessons:

1) It is possible to be engaged. If Cardiio can detect your heart rate while you are holding your phone in front of you, you are hardly deviating from your typical daily behavior.

2) Make time for your health. It’s truly fascinating that health is treated so nonchalantly, as if we have more than one life and can suddenly resurrect ourselves from preventable illnesses and death.

3) If it is possible to track health while healthy, it is certainly possible to track health while sick. Arguably, unhealthy patients have a greater incentive to track their health because they want to get better.

4) If self-tracking devices can take measurements automatically, there is no excuse of being too busy. You are going through the motions of everyday life while these recordings are happening.

5) These communities are vibrant and alive. You won’t be alone, and you can become engaged before you become a patient. We can even imagine QSM members as healthy patients practicing preventative medicine.

So join us. There are meetups around the globe, and registration is just a click away. You can even join us here in Houston. See you there!

Feb 11 2014

1 Comment

Communication, e-patient, Health, Medicine, Technology

Looking into ePatient Outlets: CrowdMed

The ePatient movement promotes individuals become active participators in their overall health and wellbeing. In light of the debate on how to define ePatients, I probed into CrowdMed to see how it approached the concept.

From the very front page of the website, CrowdMed presents its purpose as to solicit the “wisdom of the crowd” to ultimately help solve medical cases. Once registered, the user may decide to post cases, provide answers to cases, or the combination of the two.

To post cases, the user can go through a step-by-step process to provide a variety of information including symptoms, demographics, personal medical history, family medical history, lifestyle, and any other diagnostic or imaging test attachments pertinent to the case.

To make the case more appealing for the pool of users, the uploader is given the option of attaching a cash prize to the case. Once the case has reached a quota of possible diagnoses, the user is notified, and they are able to take this information to their doctors to choose the best solution. The case owner is then required to award that solution provider the monetary prize.

For those who are looking to diagnose rather than provide cases, one is able to search through the cases by keywords or basic sort. The interface also provides a chat function in which the “medical detectives” can communicate with the case presenter for a more open discussion.

From what I have gathered thus far, the ‘e’ for ePatients carries meaning from electronic to engaged to empowered and more depending on the individual user.

CrowdMed absolutely fits the electronic definition, as it allows for easy sharing of medical imaging and lab results via the Internet; however, the engaged and empowered may be more descriptive of the users already equipped with medical education.

The website certainly allows patients to share their case with the public to explore other possible diagnoses, but the case becomes much more meaningful if you already have a background working as a health care provider. Even the most medically literate patients may have difficulty interpreting such information provided.

CrowdMed may not fit into the open forum type ePatient community that I had imagined when first research; however, the site may have opened another interpretation to the ePatient movement. ePatient as not only the web savvy, but the educated.

By patients being able to share and receive feedback from other healthcare providers, the patient is able to bring in information that may assist or even education their personal physician about new possibilities. This may create more cohesion within the physician-patient interaction and thus bring in the patient as a greater stakeholder in his treatment decisions.

For subsequent posts, I would personally like to continue exploring other ePatient outlets. Next, I will specifically focus on PatientsLikeMe to not only give a comparison, but also provide further insight into the interpretations of ‘e’.

CrowdMed (www.crowdmed.com)

Disclosure: I initially got the idea for looking into the website after talking with a friend who works for the company. All the functions discussed in the post was information I obtained after browsing through the website as both an unregistered and registered user. Permission was obtained to publish this post.

Feb 07 2014

Communication, Health, Story, Technology

Team Mara

She loved bowling, softball, and fishing. She worked at a local bank. “I got this” was her motto. But 21-year old Mara Krysiak of Superior, Wisconsin, was born with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a “genetic mutation in which the heart muscle becomes abnormally thick” and battled for her life each day as she got older and was unable to participate in sports or daily activities.

She had her first heart transplant on Nov. 24, 2012. But almost a full year after her transplant, Mara’s new heart failed. That’s when her doctors turned to the SynCardia Total Artificial Heart implant. According to the company’s website, it’s intended to sustain life until a suitable donor heart is available. She became the second person to receive an artificial heart implant at Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin in Milwaukee on Nov. 11. However, a few months later, she developed a blood infection that led to complications and excessive fluid buildup in her lungs. On January 13, 2014, Mara passed away.

But what is amazing the is incredible support Mara and her family have received not just from her local community, but the 939 members of her Facebook group “Team Mara” throughout Mara’s time in treatment. Over the years, family members and friends filled the page with photos, videos, and photos of Mara living life and remaining smiling and radiant despite her condition. The group was also a platform to encourage its members to become organ donors and spread awareness about heart disease. Yet, the most touching are the messages from the significant amount of members who have never even met her.

“Thanks for educating me on being a registered donor instead of just checking it on my drivers license. Received my certificate today!!! I never met Mara, but WOW what love there is for her. She was very important to a friend of mine and that is how I became part of Team Mara.”

Scroll down the page and from her passing you will not only find messages of condolence but you will also see dozens of photos people uploaded of their certificate of organ donation registration in memory of Mara. Her life ended prematurely but her story will save many lives through the gift of organ donation from Mara’s supporters.

This is just another example of how social and collaborative media can make an impact and even inspire change in ways that traditional health media have been less effective. It also demonstrates the power of a story, in this case, a real-life story that was unfolding as time went on. Many of the people who joined this Facebook group probably have never met Mara in their lives but who were changed by following Mara’s life over the past few years. For Mara’s family, they hope this kind of publicity will inspire their followers to not just be passive, but to take action by donating to support research and becoming registered organ donors for the future of others who need a healthy heart.

How can we use inspirations like “Team Mara” to educate, impact, and encourage media consumers to take a more active role about health issues?

Medical Futures Lab

Category Archives: Technology

Hashtag Craziness

The Plight of the Primary-Care Physician

5 Lessons from the Quantified Self Movement

Looking into ePatient Outlets: CrowdMed

Team Mara

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