Welcome to the Medical Futures Lab blog! We publicly launched the Lab yesterday at the MedicineX conference at Stanford University, with a presentation by me and my collaborator Bryan Vartabedian. One of our Rice University undergrads, Adithya Balasubramaniam, joined us and we highlighted a prototype he developed called “Project medBook.”
We were thrilled to see a great audience turnout and we got lots of excellent questions about how we see the Medical Futures Lab developing as we move forward. People asked about the role of patient involvement, using a “pull” approach as well as a “push” approach to medical education, and expanding to engage the allied health professions. All this and more is in our future, and we welcome thoughts and suggestions from the community as we move forward.
We plan to use this blog space to post our thoughts on the future of medical education in the digital era, to announce new Lab projects, and to discuss interesting developments in this field. Expect posts from the very different perspectives of our collaborators in medicine, media studies, bioinformatics, digital medical humanities, visual arts, and more. And we want to hear from you – what would you change about medical education and why? If you could re-design medicine from scratch, what would you create?
More on our upcoming symposium, “Millennial Medicine: Knowledge Design for an Age of Digital Disruption” (April 26, 2013 in Houston, TX) coming soon, and start gathering your top must-reads on medicine in the digital age – we’ll be tapping the crowd to help shape the content of our upcoming team-taught course, “Medicine in the Age of Networked Intelligence.”