I wanted reporting capabilities beyond what wedshare.com had to offer, and decided to move data between my wedshare and salesforce.com accounts. I’d be happy to share the code with anyone else looking to do the same.
Med student illustrates the horror of today’s EMRs
In a recent email conversation with a friend in med school I was once again reminded of the enormous unrealized potential of hospital IT systems (primarily EMRs). Plenty of other authors and bloggers have described the politics, regulation, and lack of incentives on behalf of the major EMR companies that I believe have led to the current situation. Rather than explain why this gap exists, I’ll just let this anecdote and perspective speak for itself. This is the kind of stuff that energizes the innovator/entrepreneur in me.
Right now all the EMR’s are pretty terrible. It is a constant battle to try and either get your patient’s on the right meds or keep them off the wrong meds. Between all the residents, specialists, and different doctors that interact with a patient on a given day, one is bound to put them on a med that is contraindicated. It happens every day. Just tonight, I happened to be right next to the nurse as she took a call from the resident on call for a patient that was in liver failure and was requesting pain medication. The resident told her to put him on Vicodin which has tylenol in it and is toxic for the liver. I just happened to be standing there and told her not to do that. But this stuff happens all the time, and I just happened to be around the patient. The night before he was put on another liver toxic med by another doctor.
The whole system relies on people being right rather than a system of fail safes or an effective patient management system. The EMR systems are just storage systems, they don’t have any smart features to them, which is such a shame, because we have all of this great information, but somehow medicine hasn’t found a way to organize it effectively. Unfortunately, diagnoses get missed all the time, when the blood work screams the answer, but it is just missed by us. Someone has to be working on this, right? I certainly don’t have a solution for this, but I continue to find it an interesting question.
Anticipating the arrival of the book, Biodesign: The Process of Innovating Medical Technologies
Learn all about a process for innovating medical technologies that was formerly limited to fellows and students in Stanford's Biodesign Program.
I’m excited to be receiving a copy of the Biodesign book this Wednesday. When I learned this process in the driver’s seat as a fellow in the program, the only written material to reference was a collection of detailed notes written by a previous year’s fellow. Our primary guides in learning this process for innovating medical technologies were the co-founders of the program, Josh Makower and Paul Yock. I feel fortunate to have had the opportunity to learn directly from these two physician-innovators. I also recognize that this teaching model is limited in its scalability. Now that the process is explained in writing and available on Amazon’s bookshelf, anyone can glean the valuable lessons and advice for less than the price of taking any single author out to dinner!
Since Stanford’s Biodesign Program continues to evolve year-after-year, I’m also looking forward to the new lessons, case studies, and process guidelines that have developed since I completed the fellowship 5 years ago.
Here’s a brief description of the book from a recent release announcement:
Biodesign: The Process of Innovating Medical Technologies, is now available in the U.S. This is a comprehensive and hands-on guide to medical device innovation – over 700 pages – that provides practical information on important topics such as needs finding and characterization; ideation and brainstorming; IP, regulatory and reimbursement strategies; global opportunities; and funding and marketing approaches. The book also includes quotes, case studies, and vignettes from hundreds of innovators and companies from the Bay Area and beyond.
Women: did you know that breast cancer isn’t your greatest enemy?
Click to visit Abbott's foryourheart.com website.
Do you know the #1 cause of death of women? Turns out that it’s not breast cancer—that’s just the disease that receives the most publicity. I, too, was surprised when I first heard that the #1 killer is heart failure. I first heard this at a heart failure conference last year; it wasn’t until today that I saw the first sign of public awareness. On my drive up US-101 towards San Francisco today, I was delighted to see a billboard making this point loud and clear, and directing drivers to the site foryourheart.com. This Abbott-sponsored site lays out the facts in one page and provides readers with Personal Stories, Symptoms, Risk Factors, and other Resources. Check it out.
Powerful insights on how healthcare can become affordable
I just finished watching Clayton Christensen’s lecture, The Innovator’s Prescription: A Disruptive Solution to the Healthcare Crisis. Even though I don’t have the time to write all my takeaways and where I’ve seen evidence of his model in my own personal and professional experience with the healthcare system, I felt compelled to share this nonetheless.
A few key lessons:
- A successful business model offers a value proposition that helps people do something they are already trying to do
- Regulation is initially put in place to encourage innovation; as it evolves, it does the opposite by defending current industries
- Existing business models will morph an innovative ideas; to deliver innovation to the market, a new business model must also be created
- What is the best entity to manage healthcare? Employers. (Forward to 1:18 to find out why.)
Looking forward to reading the book!
I’m ready to ride the Wave (the Google Wave, that is)
This morning I watched the adult (geek?) version of Saturday morning cartoons: a presentation by Google introducing it’s new communication/collaboration technology called Google Wave. To sum up my opinion of this uber-hyped technology: Bring it on!
During my time wearing the project manager hat over the past several years, I’ve repeatedly experienced the stress associated with managing team communications that Google Wave is designed to relieve. As someone obsessed with keeping a team aligned, sharing team contributions so other team members can build upon them, and preventing redundant effort and communication, I’ve tried moving email chains to a discussion board; drafting documents on Wikis; and having team members post their notes to a blog. The challenge I’ve faced is that these tools are disjointed, lack real-time collaboration, and are far removed from the work flow for many team members (at the time, I was also limited to enterprise-hosted Microsoft SharePoint). Email is so easy to use and pervasive that it even becomes the standard for document collaboration, with rev-after-rev of attached documents and spreadsheets flying between team members. Google Wave is the first product I’ve seen that could clearly overcome these ease-of-use issues and truly become the central point of team communication and collaboration.
Looking forward to the day when Google Wave crosses the tipping point so I can lead teams more efficiently!
If I knew I could not fail, I would…
This morning I had the privilege of meeting with Alex Carmichael to understand her vision for the company she co-founded, CureTogether. In addition to the advice she provided on where my combination of my skills and vision may be most valued, I also appreciated the thought-provoking tagline on her business card: What would you do if you knew you could not fail? Two answers occurred to me on my train ride home. This is not the first time these BHAGs have occurred to me. Now that I’m putting them in writing, I can bet that it won’t be the last, either.
…align human effort globally towards extending the experience of being human indefinitely.
Having been raised in a Seventh-Day Adventist home, my world view in elementary school was that Jesus would be returning to Earth again very soon to take believers with him to Heaven. Even though I knew that believers who had died prior to his return would be resurrected, I really hoped that he would come before I died so I could be spared from the experience of death. Decades later, two things remain the same: my interest in living indefinitely and my belief that it’s possible. If I were to name the most relevant aspect of my world view that has changed since then, it is this: we are empowered and capable of overcoming the forces that bring each human life to an end.
Easy? No.
Possible? Yes.
Will it happen within my lifetime? I’m looking forward to finding out.
How will it happen? We won’t know until we get there. However, the description that I relate to the most is that told by Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman in their book, Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever .
I thought you were job hunting, not dreaming of the impossible. In my mind, they aren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, if I look back at many of the key job-related decisions I’ve made, this dream has had a significant influence; I simply described it as wanting to apply my expertise in a way that helped people. The mission statement of my previous employer, Medtronic, is even in line with this dream:
To contribute to human welfare by application of biomedical engineering in the research, design, manufacture, and sale of instruments or appliances that alleviate pain, restore health, and extend life.
Great, so you have a vision, purpose, mission statement, blah-duh-blah. What specifically are you going to do? I’ll answer that with this observation. When Earl Bakken wrote that mission statement, it was his tinkering with a hot new technology called the transistor that enabled him to extend life with the first battery-powered pacemaker. What’s the hot new technology that sweeping the world today? For one, Twitter. For another, Facebook. Where do I think that these types of technologies are being tinkered with that will ultimately improve health and extend life? If there’s anything to learn from Earl, I’ll bet it’s in someone’s garage.
You said there were two things you’d do if you knew you couldn’t fail.
Storytime has ended for today. Stay tuned!
(How would you answer this question?)
Jeremy A Johnson: a Self-Knowing Reinventing Health Nut (by 43things)
43things
Discovering my life’s themes: it’s all about Alignment
I feel like I’ve uncovered the deepest vein of gold so far during this long weekend of instrospection and self-discovery and wanted to write about it while the discovery is fresh.
As background, I’ve spent the majority of the last few days studying and applying concepts in The Job-Hunter’s Survival Guide, You Majored in What?, and Guerrilla Marketing for Job Hunters 2.0. My motivation is to find meaningful connections between my vast array of academic, industry, and personal life experiences that will help me understand where to focus my career for maximum personal satisfaction and benefit to society (followed by learning to communicate this to potential employers effectively). Before beginning this exercise, my unifying theme was something like, “I like applying new technology to help improve human life.” Wreaking of vagueness, this statement needed an upgrade in order to differentiate myself.
What I discovered just minutes ago is that the underlying theme driving what I love to do and what I do well is creating alignment. Why did I work like mad teaching myself Microsoft Access and creating a database that replaced the post-it-on-whiteboard process of collecting and sorting unmet clinical needs? Why did I introduce Brightidea at my last job for soliciting and evaluating new business opportunities and innovations from our employees? Why did I insist that my team record all their research results in Microsoft SharePoint—and then take the lead on creating the structure and process used that helped the team reach it’s conclusions and recommendations? I observed that I’ve been using tools like this for my teams to work with for nearly a decade. Only today was I able to distill the underlying motivation into a few words: I have an underlying passion for creating alignment in the world around me, and use my knowledge and skills to achieve this alignment.
My brain is actively making connections to so many other past accomplishments, activities, and experiences. I’m going to predict that you, the reader, may not get the connections made above, even if you know me well. That’s OK for now. I’ll provide more examples as time allows (or as you ask for in the comments!).
The race for Web 2.0 mind mapping—no winner, yet
Those of you that have worked with me know I’m a die hard mind mapper—a mind map evangelist you might say. For the past 6 years I’ve exclusively used MindJet MindManager in Windows XP. Having moved to a Mac and because of my attempt at frugality, I no longer have MindManager at my fingertips. Yesterday I went shopping for mind mapping tools and was pleased to see some good competition in this space. After quick reviews of the top delicious bookmarks tagged with mind mapping tools, I narrowed it down to MindMeister and Mindomo.
MindMeister and Mindomo attracted me because:
- SaaS model: no software to install, available anywhere at anytime, platform independent, easy collaboration, continual improvement
- Low-cost entry: Free basic service and additional features for a small monthly fee
- MindManager friendly: maps can be imported and exported to/from MindManager
Each of these three tools has some work to do to get to the finish line, in my opinion. Here are the key features I think each needs to add:
- MindManager
- Offer a free SaaS version: there are always people that will only start using a free version, especially given the other free choices available. Get MindManager Web into their workflow and they will likely upgrade to the $120/yr version after realizing it’s superior to the others.
- MindMeister
- Allow orphan topics: sure, mind-mapping is all about relationships. When populating a map for the first time sometimes it makes sense to do a mind dump that doesn’t require everything to be immediately related to the main topic. It also helps for creating a separate topic for a legend, for example. The lack of this feature alone turned me away.
- Mindomo
- Auto-save: every change made to the map must be saved on the server immediately. With services like Google Docs, it’s what customers expect today. This also prevents inadvertent loss of data if the browser crashes, which happened to me twice while using it yesterday.
These are just the top features I personally think each vendor needs to work on; this is not expected to be a comprehensive evaluation of mind mapping tools.
What’s your favorite mind mapping software? Does it offer the features I describe above? Please share your thoughts in the comments.
