Jen's Posterous

Health Management Rx

Healthcare - Forget Going Viral, Go Geodesic

Quote from weekend reading - disruptive health innovator-types, read. Rinse. Repeat.

"703.08 While the building business (cross out - insert HC) uses safety factors of four, five, or six-to one, aircraft-building employs only two-to-one or even less because it knows what it is doing (Buckminster you rascal you). The greater the ignorance in the art, the greater the safety factor that must be applied. And the greater the safety factor, the greater the redundancy and the less the freedom of load distribution."

"We have a mathematical phenomenon known as a geodesic. A geodesic
is the most economical relationship between any two events. It is a special case of
geodesics which finds that a seemingly straight line is the shortest distance
between two points in a plane."

Steps for hospitals:
1. Map out every. Single. Care. Process. Start with med admin. Nodes are people, lines between are steps. More than 1:1? Not a straight line? Fail. Redesign.

2. Yes, this probably means you should get an Info Architect, Service Design, IDEO type to come in and show you how to perform the process-mapping equivalent of drawing on the street with sidewalk chalk.

File this little nugget away like an acorn: Pay attention to tensegrity and geodesics.

These kinds of concepts will reappear as the web evolves us towards ubiquitous health, or the Nexthealth version - complete semantic interoperability of healthcare ("consumers will be able to access healthcare goods and services, online and offline, at will").

Tensegrity should be part of healthcare's 'straight line approach' to connect with advancements in semantic web/cloud computing, which thus cyclically informs service interaction design in brick and mortar healthcare.

That said, feel free to start with lucrative real-world care process redesign (house it in your CQI arm), especially if anyone on your executive team thinks the 'semantic web' is some pop-multiculture-ish sequel to Charlotte's Web. 

Why is this important? Semantic web/cloud computing will make 'tensegrity' in healthcare delivery possible.

You don't have to suffer through any more of my mixed metaphors - I'm not really saying anything new here - just restating theories like Doc Searls' Big Zero and Kevin Kelly's One Machine.

Google those guys, who have learned to write up tech theories about which they are passionate in a not-quite-so-schizophrenic fashion. I'm still a bit like a freshman liberal arts student sitting in on her first lunchtime debate, blurting things out in random order and occasionally spraying some poor tablemates with partially-masticated food in the process.

Here's how geodesic design will apply to health...We'll become, cyborg-anthropology like (a la @ambercase), floating islands temporarily and technologically docked to SaaS+web-based platforms. We're in the early Pre-Cambrian/Archaean age with telemedicine and health apps for the iPhone. But we're all still drifting aimlessly because someone has to construct the magnetic core.

 

Happy Rare Disease Day

via fda.gov

"Developing Orphan Products: FDA and Rare Disease Day."

http://www.fda.gov/consumer/updates/oda020808.html

http://rarediseases.info.nih.gov/rarediseaseday.aspx

Happy Rare Disease Day...if you're one of 25M Americans who haz one, the government haz incentives for pharma to build you a pill.

We define a rare disease as having such a low prevalence that your family doc would only expect to see about 1 case/year.

The NIH Office of Rare Diseases quantifies a rare disease as having a prevalence of less than 200k affected patients (in the US), or 5 people for every 10k in a community.

Thank another form of Reaganomics for pumping support via the Orphan Disease Act, signed into law in 26 years ago.

Rare Disease resources:
http://rarediseases.info.nih.gov/

Why rare diseases will increasingly be a focus of medical research:

1. incentives - yay ODA!
2. genomics and personalized medicine (80% are genetic in origin)
3. they hit kids (75%)
4. 1+2+3 = a PR home run for Big Pharma, who could sorely use one

Get your Rare Disease Day poster here:
http://rarediseases.info.nih.gov/files/RDD_POSTER_FINAL.pdf

Drosophila's Walk of Shame - the Consequences of Mating

Check out this website I found at ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Source: Immunogenic males: a genome-wide analysis of repro...[J Evol Biol. 2009] - PubMed Result.

"In Drosophila melanogaster, mating radically transforms female physiology and behaviour."

What kind of delta are we talking here?

* "increase in the oviposition rate"
* " reduction in female receptivity"
* "activation of the immune system"

"The fitness consequences of mating are similarly dramatic - females must mate once in order to produce fertile eggs, but additional matings have a clear negative effect."

Before you write off this post ladies, consider that we share almost 60% of our genome with those lil' critters who appear if your bananas hang around too long.

"We propose that both sexually antagonistic and natural selection have been important in the evolution of the innate immunity genes, thereby contributing to the sexual dimorphism and rapid evolution at these loci."

The Web 2.0 Fabulous Way of Keeping Up with Family

via facebook.com

I thought Twitter, Flickr, Blogger, and LinkedIn were enough sites and services to make me fully web2.0-fabulous.

Apparently not.

So I'm now on Facebook (sigh - thanks @oldbailey, Char), even though the UI make me think of Excel, and Outlook, and early Hotmail (which was for college n00bs in 1998, just like Ebay before listings had PHOTOS), and thus throw up in my mouth a little.

And then I find this pic of family hiking on Char's Facebook. You don't realize what you miss doing crazy startup stuff until you can see it posted all over every social network in the world.

This pic = cousin Char, cousin Soph, sis Kate+niece Baby Ellen in utero, cousin Julie. I'm the only gal of the fab 5 missing.

But without this photo, and others on their Facebook pages, I'd have missed nearly 7 months of their collective lives.

Do they get the same benefit reading my blog? Nope. As sis said:

"Jen, I read your blog a few times a week. Half the time I have no d&*^ idea what you're talking about, but it's neat to hear what you're working on, even if I don't understand it."

Supportive family + Web 2.0 = not abandoning the startup life.

Kate, this Posterous is for you...:)