Category Archives: Communication

Feb 28 2014
Communication, Design, e-patient, Electronic Medical Record, Health, Prototyping, Technology

Ping. Have It Your Way.

Ping.  That must be my daily reminder.  How am I feeling now in terms of arousal and valence?  Well, I just had my weekly meeting with my research advisor.  He was really getting into the nitty-gritty and suggested that I should have been farther along with my project.  I don’t even like this project.  I wish I could just get it over with… Anyway, probably low valence.  It was a pretty negative experience.  Also high arousal… He really stresses me out, and I could feel my blood pressure rising.

Photo Credit: mzstatic.com

One of the greatest benefits of mood tracking is increased self-awareness.  Mood tracking apps like Moodscope and Mobile Therapy remind users to take a step back and to reevaluate their life choices.  They can reflect on what is bringing them happiness and what is bringing them down.  By connecting their moods with other factors happening in their lives, users can develop a greater understanding of themselves with respect to their environment.

The beauty of mood trackers is that they also provide spatial and temporal information.  Users can link their moods to their immediate spatial surroundings and to the time of recording.  By randomly sending pings throughout the week, these apps can help users determine where and when they tend to feel upset or happy.

Additionally, mood trackers do not only take in information, they can also offer advice.  Mobile Therapy offers therapeutic exercises, including breathing visualization and muscle relaxation.  It also offers strategies to quit smoking, treat anxiety, and detect relapses in psychotic disorders.  Ideally, these mood tracking apps could personalize therapeutic exercises to a user’s specific input.  You could “have it your way” by inputting end goals, such as cultivating happiness or controlling the relaxation response.

Photo Credit: play.google.com

With most mood trackers, it is also possible to add information through texting—users can share paragraphs of information if they feel inclined to do so.  Therapists and physicians could use these self-reflections to see how their patients are doing over time.  Appointments with health professionals are short, and they are not necessarily indicative of how the patient normally acts.  Some patients may experience white coat syndrome, so there is an additional benefit of having records of patients outside of the doctor’s office.

In the future, perhaps these apps could notify the patient’s physician directly.  Jon Cousins describes the benefits of connecting his data to those close to him: “We leave traces of ourselves with our numbers, like insects putting down a trail of pheromones, and in times of crisis, these signals can lead us to others who share our concerns and care enough to help.”

If physicians have access to their patients’ personal information, they can individualize their treatments.  While there would be a lot of information to handle, this issue could be alleviated with efficient organization and clean programming.  It is possible to automatically assemble the relevant information in a visually aesthetic way, and these apps track not only the physical health of users, but also their mental and psychosocial health.

Feb 27 2014
Communication, Culture, Story

Live tweeting and Surgery

http://www.sbnation.com/lookit/2013/10/24/5024682/video-hospital-live-tweets-acl-surgery

In October of 2013, Memorial Hermann Hospital continued to remain at the front of the lines of technology, not by using some sort of new tool or technique, but by live tweeting the knee surgery of an unnamed teen female athlete who injured her ACL playing intramural football. The livetweet session was fairly vague as to her identity, but that girl was actually a Rice student, injured in a powderpuff game!

Using every social media outlet that they could, the doctors on the case showed off their work — across Twitter using #MHknee with both descriptions and photos, and on Vine and YouTube as well. Now there is, at the link at the top, a 6 second video summary of a standard ACL surgery done by the head physician for the Houston Rockets and the Houston Texans. (Warning- it’s fairly graphic!)

This is not the first time that Memorial Hermann has graced the internet with graphic representations of surgery over social media. In May of 2012, surgeons there documented a 21 year old female’s brain surgery, telling twitter all about the angioma in her right temporal lobe, including showing MRIs of her brain, and describing it’s removal. Concurrent posts to YouTube documented her journey of the day, including explanations of the procedures and tools used, and even video of the drilling into and removing a portion of the skull. Photos even went up on the site more known for wedding dresses and craft instructions, Pinterest.

Memorial Hermann was the first hospital to attempt such a presentation of the real time sequence of events with a live tweeting (text only, in that case) of open heart surgery a few months before the brain surgery, and they continue to lead the way in keeping the public in the know about such drastic surgeries.

Other medical institutions have followed the way, and just 6 days ago surgeons at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre livetweet a bypass, becoming the first in Canada to do so.

“This is an engaging way of keeping the public informed,” surgeon Dr. Gideon Cohen was quoted as saying in a post surgery interview with CBC News. But the same article quoted the blog of Summer McGee, “a professor of public health ethics and policy at the University of New Haven in West Haven,” Connecticut. McGee poses the question of what might occur if a live tweeted surgery like this might come to an unfortunate end– and what ethical issues might come to light in such an event.

In the era of social media, it is certainly something to think about. While more and more people might have access to and be interested in an event like this, and it can be a great PR boost for a hospital amidst a dozen other hospitals like Hermann, it certainly has the potential to go wrong. McGee recommends that “Limiting the PR elements and focusing on the educational elements of this practice is likely to help ensure the practice doesn’t get out of hand and harm patients or their relationships with physicians and health systems.” While livetweeting may be fascinating for the audience, the patients must always come first.

Feb 24 2014
Communication

A Recipe for Public Thinking in Academia

Nicholas Kristof’s latest column on academia’s detachment from public issues raises many excellent questions for intellectual leadership in a digital era. Should academics be more visible in public debate? Should their work more directly address current policy matters? Should academic culture be faulted for fostering insular thinking?

The one question Mr. Kristof didn’t address is the one most worth asking: What can we do about it? How can we better connect academics to social issues, public conversations, and societal interests? As we discuss matters of health design, e-patients, and digital presence in “Medical Media Arts Lab,” can we look beyond the individual to understand the systemic inhibitors of public engagement in academia?

Kristof’s piece suggests the solution is for individual academics to simply become more involved:

Professors today have a growing number of tools available to educate the public, from online courses to blogs to social media. Yet academics have been slow to cast pearls through Twitter and Facebook.

While individual willingness to participate in the public forum is important, these issues run deeper than that. We need more than intent and a platform. What we need is a broad rethinking of the way we educate, evaluate, and engage in academia.

Education. During her training, an academic will learn how to ask a research question and develop a method to test it. What she won’t learn is how to communicate it. And I don’t mean the sort of weighted jargon of p-values and regression coefficients, but the type of dialogue that can spark a bus stop conversation or tell a story at a high school career fair. If we want academics to be publicly engaged, let’s start by teaching them how it’s done.

Evaluation. In today’s publish or perish climate, engagement that can’t be measured in citations or impact factors is an afterthought. What earns tenure is a publication in Science or a major NSF grant, not a Twitter feed or a NYTimes column. To cultivate holistic academics, we need holistic measures of value and impact. Would we need Kristof’s article in a world where public impact was a factor in grant awards or tenure decisions?

Engagement. Perhaps the strongest, and toughest, catalyst for public thinking is a cultural shift where academia embraces its role as a service to the public. Public scholarship isn’t simply ignored in today’s academia, but often actively discouraged. To advocate and engage is to sacrifice credibility and accountability, the currencies upon which research careers are built. Rather, academia should embrace the accountability and responsibility that comes with public research dollars. It should recognize the pedestal for impact and change that their expertise confers, and leverage it for public good. This culture shift won’t be simple, but it’s absolutely critical.

Academics must recognize the importance and imminence of a shift towards public engagement. Those who don’t will soon meet the most compelling impetus of social change: obsolescence. In the age of crowdfunded citizen science ventures, patient-driven medical research, and growing popular antagonism towards science, those who don’t embrace the public sphere will find themselves consumed by it.

This post is a modified version of the original, which appears here.

Feb 23 2014
Communication, Culture, Technology

Hashtag Craziness

hashtag_fallon_large_verge_medium_landscape

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57dzaMaouXA

Using a hashtag in a tweet or in a post on Facebook can be a very valuable way to draw attention to a keyword or phrase of your choosing. However, it is very easy to annoy people and lose the meaning of your post through hashtag abuse. The most clear and hilarious example of hashtag overuse comes from a skit in Jimmy Fallon’s Late Night Show. Throughout the skit hashtag abuse runs rampant as common words and even music lyrics are unnecessarily tagged. Apart from being really annoying after it loses its initial charm, exemplified by Questlove’s clear disapproval, the abuse of the hashtag by Jimmy and Justin scrambles their dialogue, making illogical jumps between topics. In this way, the reader loses the intended message and the meaning is misconstrued.

 

This skit draws very necessary attention to the rampant hashtag abuse that is omnipresent across all social media platforms. #This and #that is becoming unnecessary and ultimately diminishes the intended importance of the hashtag. According to Twitter’s website a hashtag is meant to be used before a relevant keyword or phrase to categorize it and make it show up in a Twitter search. This can be a very useful tool for a small business trying to create buzz for a new product or for a cancer survivor trying to bring attention and insight to issues from their treatment experience. It is meant to broadcast your message and inform other twitterers that you are bringing attention to this topic and that they can join you if they use the same hashtag. Unfortunately, due to widespread hashtag misconduct twitterers now tend to gloss over hashtagged keywords, disregarding them as spam. Therefore what could be a very successful marketing tool has been mostly discredited.

 

So how do we sift through all of this #hashtagcraziness and how do we restore its functionality? The former is much easier to solve as there are online tools such as Tagboard which search for a specific hashtag across all social media sites. Secondly, to restore people’s trust in the hashtag perhaps Twitter should impose a limit per tweet. Nonetheless hashtag abuse needs to be limited for what could be a very effective tool in reaching out to others and giving a voice to those who need to be heard is currently being mistreated so it fails to reach its potential.hashtag-abuse

Feb 18 2014
Communication, Design, Health, Technology

The Plight of the Primary-Care Physician

Type in “reasons for shortage of primary-care physicians” into Google and you will be led to almost 3 million responses. Most of these articles list the same few reasons including:

  • The lack of financial stability involved in going into primary-care medicine
  • A shortage of primary-care residency positions
  • The current state of primary-care, where physicians see too many patients per day while navigating through the convoluted web of medical insurance
Photo Credit: www.dreamstime.com

Photo Credit: www.dreamstime.com

Now type in “how to solve the primary-care physician shortage” into Google.  Again, you will be bombarded with millions of articles, many of which discuss trying to utilize the power of other health professionals some of which include nurses, physician assistants, pharmacists, dietitians, and psychologists. While this seems like a viable solution, the most obvious impediment is communication between these different health providers. Currently, the primary-care physician serves as a reference point between their patients and a sea of other healthcare providers. This only reinforces the current problem with primary-care, where physicians are reaching a cognitive overload. So what can be done to solve this problem? Or more specifically:

Can advances in technology help a primary-care physician maximize their limited time? 

Photo Credit: www.hcplive.com

Photo Credit: www.hcplive.com

The limited time between a physician and patient is one of the greatest problems in managing complex health problems. One potential solution, mobile applications, allow a physician to be kept up to date on a patient’s progress. Currently, applications allow patients to track various health parameters associated with their chronic condition, and send a report of these results to their doctor. However, the information sent their doctor is often in an unorganized format and is highly variable in form due to the large volume of mobile applications available on the market. In order for this solution to be effective in maximizing the physician’s time, the information must be conveyed in a standard format, and must be available to the physician prior to the appointment.

The other communication problem that drains the time and energy of primary-care physicians is trying to coordinate care with other health providers. Many primary-care physicians still coordinate care over the phone, which can be extremely time-consuming. We need to find ways to streamline communication among different providers. This could include a redesign of electronic health records to better facilitate between physician communication, or an app which not only links a patient to their different providers, but the different providers to each other.

While these changes alone will not solve the primary-care physician shortage we will face in the coming years, they will allow a primary care physician to maximize their time with a patient during a 20-minute appointment.  This will lead to better health outcomes, which is the ultimate goal of medicine.

 

 

← Older posts
Newer posts →
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox

Join other followers: