Posts Tagged ‘data’

Unfounded Truths

Monday, June 22nd, 2009

Reading this short article about the value of health data to combat unfounded best practices reminded me of another story from How Doctors Think:

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.

Posted by Noah in The Internet
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Self Surveillance

Monday, June 8th, 2009

Just ran across an interesting essay(ish) about Self Surveillance, the act of keeping track of yourself using the tools around you. This is something that popped into my head after visiting the hospital of the future folks at the Global Research Center. One of the things they’re working on is home monitoring equipment and I wondered how you could make this feel more normal for folks that need it by getting people to voluntarily use it to monitor (and optimize) their own behavior.

As this article points out, collecting data around health is pretty natural:

Self-surveillance naturally lends itself to tracking physical health and biometrics. If we think of our bodies as fine-tuned machines, then it is perhaps best we pay close attention to how we take care of them with a healthy lifestyle. Numerous studies have shown that the food we eat and the amount of time we exercise plays a major role in how we feel, and preliminary research suggests that self-monitoring increases awareness, which leads to better decisions.

Posted by Noah in The Internet
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Opening Up Some Data

Thursday, May 21st, 2009

I was thinking some more today about something I mentioned the other day in the visualizing health post. Specifically, “it might be fun to try and get our hands on this data” that makes up the GE health visualizer.

One of the things we’ve been chatting with GE about a lot is about letting things live free on the web. This is why this blog is structured the way it is and lots of the ideas that have come out of it are about just that. A great example of that sort of behavior is an API.

In laymen’s terms an API basically allows a computer program to ask another computer program for some information which it relays back in a format that was agreed upon beforehand. The term gets thrown around a lot in terms of mashups and one of the better known APIs (though I doubt most people realize it) is the one that goes along with Google Maps. Basically what Google did when they launched their maps application is make it super easy for developers to build stuff on top. Pretty much immediately after launch lots of new Google Maps mashups popped up that tapped the technology.

In this case the business results are immediately obvious: First, Google let everyone else promote their new maps service for them and second, it outsourced it’s R&D. Rather than deciding what features to build immediately it sat back and watched what the internet made on top and then built those features in to later versions. The most obvious example of this is My Maps. Basically it allows a non-programmer to do the first thing everyone did when they saw what Google Maps could handle: Build a map with your favorite spots. So, rather than building it in initially they waited and watched.

Okay, so back to GE and healthcare generally. There is an insane amount of data out there in the healthosphere. Much of it is personal and confidential, but lots of it is likely scrubbed and eager to be dug into (kind of like the stuff that goes into the Health Visualizer). We’re working on trying to figure out a way to organize and release some of that for the world (and us) to experiment with.

Posted by Noah in The Internet
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Psychology of Saving

Wednesday, April 29th, 2009

So I may be a little obsessed with behavioral economics, but this article about how Obama is using it had some gems for both energy and health.

Which message would persuade homeowners to save electricity: a call to their environmental conscience, or an appeal to their wallet? Cialdini tested those approaches in a San Diego experiment, and the answer was neither. What worked was an appeal to conformity. Residents used less power when they were told their neighbors were using less power. We’re a herdlike species, more likely to be obese if our peers are.

Interesting to think about, especially as part of smart-grid applications. Maybe just showing savings isn’t enough.

And this quote about health data, while not exactly about behavioral economics is worth sharing/thinking about:

More information can make us healthier too, which is why the stimulus poured $1.1 billion into “comparative effectiveness” research. Orszag has reams of charts showing that medical tactics and costs vary wildly across the country, with little regard for what works. He’d like to document best practices — from emergency-room to-do lists that dramatically reduce infections to protocols for when pricey tests and surgeries really help — and then have all medical providers adopt them. This approach has helped American anesthesiologists reduce deaths as well as costs.

How can GE help to make more of this data public, available and easily sharable between both medical organizations and individuals?

Posted by Noah in The Internet
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