This is the category for all the stuff we read around the web. It’s for posts that don’t come from a specific trip, but rather from our general perusing of ye olde internet.
Looking at the medical records of more than 155,000 patients at nine physician practices and four community health centers in the hospital’s primary care network, they found that patients who not only named their own doctors but whose doctors also identified them as “my patient” were more likely to get screenings for cancer, diabetes, and coronary artery disease compared to patients not linked to a personal physician. These patients saw different doctors in a practice or health center.
Although the patient-physician connection was more common among people who are white, speak English, and have health insurance, the bond with a personal physician was a bigger factor than race or ethnicity in whether a patient got guideline-recommended preventive care. Being insured was also not as important as being connected, according to the study, which was completed before Massachusetts passed its healthcare law mandating near-universal coverage.
Found this video, which is a good explanation of how MRI works, notable also because its explained by
“Wizard of Schenectady” Howard Hart, who used to work for General Electric on MRI design, and the video is produced by the awesome Edison Museum in Schenectady
It is on the sociological level, though, that we’re missing the boat most completely by sticking doggedly with a workplace-based system that no longer makes sense. America has always been a mobile society with a labor market that grows more fluid over time. Once, the norm was to work for a single employer for one’s entire career. Today, people change jobs an average of 11 times before they reach 40. Fear of losing health coverage keeps people in jobs they would otherwise leave, creating a drag on economic efficiency.
I hadn’t thought about how the trend of people being more transient in their jobs effects our healthcare policy, but it makes sense it should.
While we were out at Waukasha we spoke to David Lee again. One of the things he said that was very interesting is that one of the best predictors of a person’s health is the question “how are you feeling today?”
Track Your Happiness.org is a new scientific research project that aims to use modern technology to help answer this age-old question. Using this site in conjunction with your iPhone, you can systematically track your happiness and find out what factors – for you personally – are associated with greater happiness. Your responses, along with those from other users of trackyourhappiness.org, will also help us learn more about the causes and correlates of happiness.
This is super interesting to me and starts towards making health a better game, which we’ve been talking lots about.
As part of this project and my new interest in healthcare, I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about how I believe health is essentially a marketing problem: An attempt to change consumer behavior through communication. With that in mind I was intrigued by this New Scientist editorial that suggests climate change has a positioning problem. Specifically the editorial suggests that science’s hard line that it’s not about belief, but rather fact, misses the point of how culture actually works:
People’s attitudes towards climate change, even Pope’s, are belief systems constructed through social interactions within peer groups. People then select the storylines that accord best with their personal world view. In Pope’s case and in my own this is a world view that respects scientists and empirical evidence.
Supporting the argument are a few examples (certainly not scientific) of people involved with reform around climate change ignoring the dangers of their own behaviors (something that seems common with doctors as well).
So a few weeks ago we asked folks at GE what they were reading. They gave us lots of great books and we’ve now compiled them into a little Amazon reading list to make it easy for you to buy anything on the list. We’d like to keep expanding this, so feel free to add your books in the comments.
One of the most common congenital abnormalities of the heart is a hole between the two upper chambers, between the right atrium and the left atrium. Since the pressure in the left side of the heart is higher than in the right, blood will flow from the left atrium through the hole into the right atrium. This aberrant blood flow is called a shunt and can overload the right side of the heart, leading to heart failure and other complications. Lock told me that doctors send children for surgery to close these holes if there is a two-to-one shunt, meaning that twice as much blood flows through the right side of the heart than the left.
“Do you know where that two-to-one number came from?” [Dr. James] Lock [, chief of cardiology at Boston's Children's Hospital,] asked. I imagined ti was from careful clinical studies of children with the hold. “You would think so. But you’d be wrong. At a medical meeting in the 1960s, a pediatrician presented the question ‘When should the hold be closed?’ to a group of cardiologists. There was a heated debate about how much shunting required a surgical fix. So the meeting organizers, out of desperation, took a vote. Some voted for a lower number, some for a higher number. The median ended up being two-to-one. This was published in the American Journal of Cardiology. So now all textbooks have as the truth that you should close a hole when the shunt is two-to-one.
In reality, Children with a two-to-one shunt can live a healthy life without ever requiring treatment. Heart surgery, as one can imagine, is always a dangerous proposition that carries risks for the patients.
When we visited the Global Research Center one of the coolest stops was the Trailer of the Future to see all the Veriwise stuff. Basically GE is helping to track much of the cargo that gets shipped around the country in 18-wheelers.
With all that data coming in the first thing we all thought of was visualizations: What kind of awesome patterns and trends could we show by mapping the data?
Hrm …. A very interesting question from The Guardian. As they point out, men are generally less healthy than women, yet they see their doctors less often.
A few hypotheses are included (”They see it as a question of maintenance, whereas men see it as a question of repair. Men treat their bodies a bit like a car: once it’s burnt out they’ll fix it, but until then they power on.”) but it’s a great question. Any thoughts?
Hi! This is a blog about a project we are doing for GE. We are from The Barbarian Group, an online marketing company, and GE hired us to help them with their internet behavior, so this is our marketing journal where we will show you what we find and talk about what we might do next.
