Design, Education, Health, Medicine, Technology

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

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.

Tagged communication, future, health, medical education, medicine

Mar 26 2013

Design, Education, Health, Medicine, Prototyping, Technology

Announcing the All-Star Cast of the Medical Media Arts Hub! (aka part two)

We’re growing our team of multidisciplinary transmedia theorists and makers, and we’re inspired by the hackathon ethos of rapid prototyping as well as the “thinkathon” ethos of engaged theoretical praxis (thanks to the brilliant Wendy Chun for bringing that great term to my attention).

A sampling of our group includes the renowned multimedia artist Allison Hunter, bioengineer and co-founder of the Caroline Collective Matthew Wettergreen, Communications expert Tracy Volz, Archimage principal and Playnormous designer of award-winning games for health Richard Buday, media agnostic principal of ttweak consultancy and Houston. It’s Worth It. visionary Dave Thompson, and more.

Half of the reason we’re so excited about this new project at the Medical Futures Lab is that we have a serious celebrity lineup on deck to help make the vision a reality. And every time we talk about this project, we find more top talent ready to roll up their sleeves and get to work! Watch this space for more information on becoming a community partner or a sponsor, and look for some pilot projects to appear this summer. And, as always, if you want to get involved, let us know!

Tagged communication, design, health, medicine, prototyping

Mar 11 2013

2 Comments

Design, Health, Medicine, Technology

Announcing the Medical Media Arts Hub! (part one)

We are thrilled to announce a newly funded project of the Medical Futures Lab: the Medical Media Arts Hub!

The Medical Media Arts Hub will be an innovative online platform and media creation space where Rice undergraduates will help medical professionals amplify their health messages through creative design.

Students with arts, media, writing, and programming skills will get to apply and refine their abilities in real-world contexts as they work with physicians, nurses, public health practitioners, and patients in the Texas Medical Center who need help visualizing information for health communication. The Medical Media Arts Hub will generate direct benefits for all participants: students get to develop their portfolio through an applied, relevant context; health professionals get some reverse mentoring by digital natives and media that helps them improve their communication with patients; patients get to actively shape their relationships with providers through a collaborative process that empowers them to attain better health.

As if that’s not amazing enough, we’re going to expand this platform to engage medical students and residents in the media creation process as well. One of our core beliefs is that everyone involved in health care could learn a huge amount and improve their practice by participating in the act of public, creative communication. It’s a form of digital literacy. As Howard Rheingold puts it in Net Smart,

“When you start engaging in knowledge or media production, you tend to develop a much more sophisticated understanding of how knowledge and media is produced more generally.”

Possible project types include:

short videos, graphic design, infographics, software applications, virtual models, photography, documentary film, animations, sketchnotes, web design, creative writing, just plain good writing, painting, sculpture, and other forms of visual media arts.

Pretty great, right? Do you want in?

If you are a health professional or e-patient with a project idea – a visualization or communication problem you want to solve – leave us a comment (tab at upper left). If you are a creative professional in or near Houston and you’d like to be a guest critic, let us know! We want to have face time be part of this process, but there will be plenty of opportunities for non-local folks to participate, too. Stay tuned for more news on this project (part two of this post) later this week.

Jan 30 2013

Education, Health, Medicine, Technology

Medical Futures Lab Makes Local Debut at Launch of Health 2.0 Houston Last Night!

Last night marked the beginning of a new era in the health and medical tech innovation sector in Houston with the launch of a Houston chapter of Health 2.0.

It was a great event – a packed room at the Houston Technology Center that keynote speaker Nate Gross compared favorably to a recent health 2.0 meetup he attended in Silicon Valley. The Medical Futures Lab shared the stage for a while as our own Doctor V gave a keynote on the Changing Face of Medicine in Houston and beyond, saying a few words about how he sees our lab fitting into the bigger picture of medicine in the digital age. He also mentioned the class he and I are currently co-teaching at Rice University, “Medicine in the Age of Networked Intelligence.” (Follow us on twitter at #RiceNetMed and on our class tumblr.)

I was thrilled to meet tons of energetic, talented, and creative people who are excited to engage with the Medical Futures Lab. We’ll be posting news about upcoming projects here, as stay tuned as we gear up for our first symposium, “Millennial Medicine: Knowledge Design for an Age of Digital Disruption” to be held at the Rice BioScience Research Collaborative on April 26, 2013 – everyone is welcome – please join us!

Dec 23 2012

Education, Medicine

Selling Medicine’s Exponential Problems

Lucky Gunasekara from Singularity University’s FutureMed 2012 talks here about medical education and references ‘linear’ and ‘exponential’ problems. He suggests that we need to train the next generation for the exponential.

I’m not sure I agree.

Clay Christiensen and Jason Hwang in Innovator’s Prescription describe medicine working in solution shops and value-adding process (VAP) businesses. The solution shops are places where unstructured (exponential) problems are tackled. Obesity might fit here. VAP businesses tackle defined (linear) processes in an efficient way. Fixing hernias might be a good example.

While medicine’s big, exponential problems make dramatic video and keynote references, the future will call for solution shops and VAP operations in medicine.

We’ve got heady problems that need solutions, for sure. But we’ll always need folks to repair hernias.

These other videos from FutureMed 2012 are worth a peek.

Medical Futures Lab