Posts tagged health

A couple of summers ago I was asked to prototype an Integrated Health Education / Registration-Visit Information Intake Tool for a couple of local community health clinics. My undergraduate ninjas at the time, Allen Luo & Jakkree Janchoi, helped flush out the design, with Allen finalizing and mocking it up. Basically, an incoming patient will receive a smart tablet and be able to watch health related videos. In the back, the data on videos seen can be communicated to the doctor, or the doctor can recommend videos for the patient to see. In user story terms:

• Doctor observes patient’s interests in health education
  • User Interface gathers statistics on media consumed (Figure 1)
  • Statistics on media consumed may alert the doctor to address a particular topic (Figure 2)
• Patient receives recommended health education
  • Doctors may examen medical records to recommend topics (Figure 3)
  • Artificial Intelligence may examen medical records to recommend topics (Figure 4)

It was a good idea. Unfortunately, the proposal died as that: a proposal. As usual, when dealing with public and non-profit entities the “no money” card always flies up. (Well, it was more complicated than that…) This blog post is basically documentation of the work that we did, particularly Allen’s great implementation of my chicken scratch designs.

This was pre-iPad. This would probably look different with iOS specific UI. After all, iPad would be the way to go for something like this. A question I would have these days: would the video recommended to you, or data on the videos you watched fall under HIPAA?

Figure 1: A mockup of the media selection library.

Figure 2: A mockup of a recommendation resulting from a patient’s media consumption log

Figure 3: Doctor can recommend a particular video “prescription”

Figure 4: A mockup of a recommendation resulting from a patient’s EMR

Figure 5: “Patient” watching a video :)

This is how we should communicate medical lab data: so it can be understood. This particular design for Prostate-specific Antigen was by JUNG + WENIG, and was my favorite of the three, particularly because theirs included a clearly labeled sequence for digesting the information. Designs were commissioned by Wired for their The Blood Test Gets a Makeover article.

On an ironic side note, The NNT states that 100% of PSA test subjects received no benefit from the test, and that 20% were actually harmed due to false-positives. Yikes. HGP

The Center for Research on IT and Organizations (CRITO) and the Center for Health Care Management and Policy (CHCMP), both at UC Irvine, teamed up to deliver this excellent conference that covered many aspects of new health today. It’s definitely one of the better conferences I’ve been to.

Interesting people and things mentioned:

• Dr. Eric Topol of Scripps Health tweets about wireless health monitoring, personal genomics, and how these will change medicine. He’s a great presenter too. Check him out @EricTopol.
• Research from MIT shows that your social network is capable of changing your health behaviors. Original work was published in Science.
• DNA Transistors mentioned as a World Changing Idea by Scientific American.
• The Number Needed to Treat (NNT) is a powerful tool to communicate benefit and harm that both patients and doctors can understand. The number of treatments that don’t benefit us is shocking!
• Jitterbug is a phone aimed at seniors. The company is venturing into all sorts of health services and monitoring. Originally conceived by the inventor of the mobile phone, Marty Cooper. (Check out this mostly unrelated, but awesome interview he did with CSPAN)

Questions I wanted to ask, but didn’t get an chance to:

• If preventative health will be consumer-driven, how do we create demand? Many chronic disease sufferers are apathetic or ignorant to the the harmful effects of their illness. Technology has been shown to influence behavior, but how do we expect these consumers to understand this need before they buy?
• How do medical and health device companies expect to merge systems and solutions if their products continue to use propriety and/or undocumented systems for data exchange and storage? It’s my data. Let me access it how I want and send it where I want to!

This conference, along with some other recent events, have shown me I prefer pen to paper for most of my activities! I’ll take better notes next time. HGP