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 why is an aerospace engineer from GE Global Research visiting GE Healthcare in Milwaukee? I wish I could say it’s because I am finally realizing my dream of making the world’s first supersonic pulse detonation MRI machine, but the truth is that I took a wrong turn out of my driveway in upstate New York, and before I knew it – I was in Milwaukee. Well – okay, that’s not really true.
Seriously, I was lucky enough to arrange an escape from my regular day job at the Research Center in order to spend some quality time with the Barbarian Group. I figure I have lots to learn in life – so, well here I am.
First off, Ben, Noah and Michelle are just really amazingly nice people, and our host, Sam, has done an incredible job organizing our visit. Today was incredible – we spent the day learning about all kinds of GE Healthcare products and new initiatives. I had never actually seen an MRI machine (let alone understood how it worked) – so this is all new to me. Did you know that modern MRI machines use superconducting magnets that are cooled down to 4 K (-452 F) with liquid helium? Uhh… that’s really cold. Don’t worry, it’s all completely safe – the supermagnet just helps get very high resolution image scans.
For me, it’s interesting because it’s very different from the 5000 K temperatures I used to study in grad school when looking at orbital reentry aerothermodynamics (like when the Shuttle returns to Earth). I guess it’s a different world over here… hey it’s only brain surgery, it’s not like it’s rocket science (sorry - terrible joke – couldn’t resist).
Benjamin and I are out in Wisconsin visiting the folks at GE Healthcare for the next few day, so things should pick up around here.
We have another chat with David Lee as well as about 20 other stops over the next three days and we’ll do our best to get stuff posted in the evenings.
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.
Another entry inspired by How Doctors Think for your (in case you missed the last it was about confirmation bias). This time it’s about the differences between primary care physicians and specialists and the way they’re viewed by society.
One should not confuse highly technical, even complicated, medical knowledge — special practical knowledge about an unusual disease, treatment (complex chemotherapy, for example), condition or technology — with the complex, many-sized worldy-wise knowledge we expect of the best physicians.
The narrowest subspecialist, the reasoning goes, should also be able to provide this range of medical services. This naive idea arises, as do so many other wrong beliefs about primary care, because of the concept that doctors take care of diseases. Diseases, the idea goes on, form a hierarchy from simple to difficult. Specialists take care of difficult diseases, so, of course, they will naturally do a good job on simple diseases. Wrong. Doctors take care of people, some of whom have diseases and all of whom have some problem. People used to doing complicated things usually do complicated things in simple situations–for example, ordering tests or x-rays when waiting a few days might suffice–thus overtreating people with simple illnesses and overlooking the clues about other problems that might have brought the patient to the doctor.
Never really thought of it that way but it makes a whole lot of sense.
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?
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.
