Own Your Health
Posted by Maren in Healthcare innovation, design, foresight on January 22nd, 2012
Over the years I’ve come to notice that confidence is really the root of any behavior change, especially for changes that affect your health. I also think that there are residual cultural norms here in the US which discourage self-empowerment regarding health. However, I’m happily observing that many online health resources are both democratizing decision-making and eroding those cultural norms to finally give Americans a greater sense of health ownership.
Online searches for “health ownership” will give you different interpretations of what that phrase means but to me it describes the self-confidence to participate in decisions about your health. This participation is in part the result of a more democratic relationship and greater partnership with our doctors, but it also comes from personal investment.
The more time spent researching conditions online, or tracking them via downloaded apps or embedded sensor technologies, the more invested in the experience we become. It’s the same strategy Mint uses to suck you in; the more data you invest, the more control you feel you have of your financial destiny.
What if a reliable and easy to navigate Personal Health Record (PHR) interface were available to aggregate health data – and they are coming – then those who opt to use it might feel as in control and excited about managing their health as they do now about managing their money.
Third Year of HealthCamp SFBay!
We are only a few weeks away from the third annual HealthCamp in San Francisco! This year we have 2 exciting opening speakers to discuss the foundation of everyone’s health – food!
Dr. Alan Greene has pioneered the “white out” movement to eliminate processed cereal and other foods for babies.
He argues to replace this junk food with whole grains and organic fruits and veggies. This especially resonates with me as I have a little critter at home who is just starting on solids…organic oats, barley, quinoa, black beans and all kinds of other yummies. Needless to say, I’ll be getting Dr. Green’s autograph after he speaks!
Our other speaker is Kaiser Permanente’s Dr. Preston Maring who has been actively promoting organic foods and farmers markets since 2003. Dr. Maring has written a cookbook with plenty of tasty organic recipes to choose from. We are going to try to get him to give a cooking demo and then feature some of his recipes during the lunch.
It’s going to be the tastiest HealthCamp to date! It’s on September 23, 2011 at the Kaiser Permanente Garfield Innovation Center in San Leandro. Tickets are very limited, register here!
BIL Hits the Big Time
Posted by Maren in foresight, maren stuff on March 3rd, 2011
I’m pretty thrilled that BIL has made it mainstream by getting face time in the Wall Street Journal – in fact, I think the article even ran on the front page a few days ago! I guess the notion of counter-culture or, rather, counter-elitism makes good news these days given the rash of political uprisings against dictatorships recently.
It’s unfortunate that I won’t be able to make BIL this year as it is next week in Long Beach (5th-6th) and chances are I’ll be in a delivery room pushing out my own art/science project. I am, however planning on attending the first Quantified Self Conference, May 28-29, 2011 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. I’ve been supporting Gary Wolf and the team to get things going and will probably be working registration on one of the days…who knows, maybe I’ll even present something on the Archive again.
HealthCamp Brings Important Players to the Conversation
“Our mission is to assist the President in harnessing the power and potential of technology, data and innovation to transform the nation’s economy and improve the lives of everyday Americans.” – Aneesh Chopra, U.S. CTO
As one of the organizers for HealthCamp SFBay I’m pretty proud to say that this year is going to be even better than last year’s event! Not only have we secured Sprint as a major sponsor, finessed the scheduling and will provide more robust reporting, but we have also had both Annesh Chopra, US CTO, and Todd Park, HHS CTO commit to coming and speaking at the event!
Their involvement stems from our partnership with the Health 2.0 organization and agreement to co-host the Health 2.0 Developer Challenge (strongly supported by both Aneesh and Todd). What HealthCamp hopes to provide the DevChallenge is a collaborative venue for people to come up with new ideas for challenges (see current challenges), to form teams to take on existing challenges, and to share ideas on how best to tackle some of the issues involved with solving complex health related problems that involve private health data.
Both Aneesh and Todd are currently dealing with many similar challenges as they strive to come up with technology and policy recommendations that will meet strict requirements on many fronts from personal privacy to political agendas. It will be interesting to see what they have to say, come join us on October 6 at the Kaiser Permanente Garfield Innovation Center! Register here
Design In/Is Business
Leveraging design and design teams to increase competitive advantage is getting more notice in large organizations thanks in part to events like the Design Management Institute’s (DMI) “Re-Thinking…The Future of Design” conference in San Francisco this past June. Key design leaders across a broad spectrum of industries shared conversations on stage about how they used design thinking tools to create value for, and facilitate change in, their organization.
What struck me most is that design teams increasingly seem to also serve as innovation teams for the business. John Fly, the VP of Strategic Planning at Miliken & Company talked about successful designers being able to toggle between solving both business problems and design problems and often solving business problems with design solutions. The biggest hurdle in this process usually comes from finding a common business/design language. However, understanding the business inside and out increases credibility and leads to better decisions for the business.
I was most focused on what Bob Schwartz, GM of Global Design for GE Healthcare had to say because of my personal interest in improving healthcare through design thinking. His decades in design management had obviously honed his business navigation skills and it was through a combination of analogies, storytelling techniques, and an empathy workshop that he was able to build consensus and unify his design team of 46, spread over 5 countries.
Pushing empathy as a key driver for design and business decisions led to the redesign of several GE products – particularly in the pediatric space where the design team created a MRI scanner and scanning process from the perspective of a child. A story was developed for the children to engage in before they came for the office visit and the scanner room maintained the story’s imagery throughout. This environment reduced anxiety during the procedure and ultimately improved test results. The success from this storytelling approach filtered to the sales force and acted as a powerful motivator to increase sales.
My hope is that more examples like this will bubble to the surface and motivate investment in design teams and the value of design thinking processes across the entire organization. Giving every business team the license to think creatively and more empathetically will foster solutions to support humanity and not just the bottom line.
HealthCamp SFBay 2010 is a go!
The dedicated HealthCamp team that organized last year’s amazing one day unconference on healthcare innovation is back to do it again this year! We sold out last year and so it didn’t take much convincing to get Kaiser to agree to let us host the event again at their Garfield Innovation Center in San Leandro on October 6, one day before the Health 2.0 conference in San Francisco.
We are currently working on the logistics and seeking key sponsors such as Intel and Cisco who were gold sponsors last year. We will again be focusing on the conversations and idea sharing but plan to integrate a more sophisticated way to capture and report back the learning to the community. Providing flip cameras to participants was floated as an idea along with live streaming of the the Twitter feed (#HCSFbay) like last year, but we are exploring other methods as well. It’s going to be another great event so please visit the HealthCamp website to register!
“Quantified Self” Gets Bigger/Hotter
Last night I helped out with the 13th Quantified Self Meetup at Langton Labs. I love this event! About 100 nerds gather and show off their latest self-tracking projects. I’ve presented the Archive twice now, however, most of the presentations are on quantitative data tracking rather than my qualitative stuff. Projects are all quite different yet they highlight that you don’t need to be in a lab to assess what is going on with your body.
Tracking physiological metrics over time produces visible trends that can illuminate poor health choices, facilitate better decision-making and can eventually reduce or eliminate costs associated with managing conditions that have become chronic. For example, last night my friend Matt Bell did his second talk on sleep tracking. The first talk discussed his observations after filming himself over the course of a year using infrared video, this time he hooked himself up to an EEG and tracked his levels of sleep through brain wave activity. Through this process he discovered he was a physically active sleeper, that sleeping with someone did not produce the most restful sleep BUT it did reduce sleep latency which is the time it takes to fall asleep.
Many of the behavioral tracking projects seem to have an almost quantum effect on the tracker in that by merely observing the behavior it can often change the behavior itself. For example, very few of us really know how much we eat until we track calories in. Observing the sheer numbers is often enough to influence how and what the tracker then consumes.
Self tracking has been around for quite some time in one form or another but the Quantified Self movement seems to be gaining momentum, especially as people start taking more control of their health choices. One of the founders, Gary Wolf, just penned an article in the NY Times last month describing the movement which now has a growing following in New York as well. It will be interesting to see how these personal projects creep into the mainstream over time as they inspire others to start recording behaviors.
Pharma Tries on Social Media
Despite the lack of any formal guidance from the FDA on how drugs and devices can be discussed and/or promoted through social media channels like Twitter, Facebook and the like, dozens of firms are exploring what fits them best. There are plenty of examples out there but I took a look at three approaches:
- Johnson & Johnson – It’s no secret that being social takes a good deal of time, effort and investment to do well and J&J is one of the best examples of how to fully embrace the social fabric. They have a YouTube channel clocking over 1.5M upload views, a Twitter account with over 3,300 followers, and a dedicated blog dating back to June 2007.
When you take a closer look at how they manage their content you’ll find a few key topics/issues/stories that are packaged appropriately for the channel and then cross-linked. For example, a tweet will link to a blog post that may in turn refer to a video on their YouTube channel or a product description on the corporate website.
They do a particularly good job of weaving their products and services into the commentary about conditions, causes and projects. The corporate site is well positioned to receive these visits from social channels because they leverage so many personal stories and testimonials within the content. - Bayer Diabetes on Facebook takes a different route as they try to capture interest and support of the young Type 1 diabetes population (mostly girls) through popular teen singer Nick Jonas. The page, with over 12,000 fans, links to another Bayer site promoting Nick, the Bayer blood glucose meters he uses, and information about managing diabetes (emphasizing testing with Bayer diabetes care products).
- GSK went in an almost unbranded direction by creating a series of impactful ads promoting cervical cancer awareness then posted them to a YouTube channel, which has pulled in almost 30,000 upload views since February. The channel is entirely cause-oriented and only lightly branded. However, each one of the ads provides a link to a branded microsite with a strong call to action for testing and vaccination, even though Gardasil is never specifically mentioned.
Keep in mind that success can really only be measured against goals – and all social media campaigns should have specific goals whether the orientation is corporate, product, or cause awareness.
Even though it can be difficult to gauge who has the most impactful social media presence, our friends at Dose of Digital just announced an opportunity for you to cast your vote for the best social media sites through their first annual Dosie Awards.
A Maker’s Approach to Health
Posted by Maren in design, maren stuff, medtech on March 16th, 2010
I’m noticing a bit more of a shift toward self-reliance in what is known as the “maker movement” and highlighted by events like the Maker Faire in San Mateo each year. This observation might be more of a symptom of living in the Bay Area, but I’d like to think that the increasing popularity of steampunk is also fueling the fire of a do-it-yourself culture.
I’ve always had a propensity to want to make things, partly because of my creative background and inclination but also because the process and tangible end product are so much more rewarding than just throwing down a couple bucks. I have mountains of crafts projects stashed away but an equal number in everyday use or pulled out for special occasions like this past weekend’s Steampunk Exhibition in Emeryville where I decked out in regalia that I had partially made, modded and refurbed myself.
So, why couldn’t we take a similar approach to our own health? Where we spend time carefully crafting the food we eat, or the containers we carry our lunches in (steampunk lunchbox anyone?) In our increasingly virtual world, creating tangible things is hugely gratifying, and making things that make you happy AND healthy are the most valuable way to spend your most precious commodity – time.
My Dream 3D User Interface
Posted by Maren in design, foresight, maren stuff on January 18th, 2010
One of the slides from my presentation.
Frankly, I’ve pretty much reached the point of exhaustion with tracking my life through the Archive. It’s been over a decade of meticulously shooting, collecting, prepping, organizing and assembling as many data channels as possible into a single “scrapbook on crack” stream. At 19 volumes, this project that has fed most of my OCD tendencies, needs to take on a new form so that I can get on with my life.
I didn’t fully realize what I needed in an interface to execute this phase change until I was intensely interviewed (for 3 hours) last November by a team from Jump Associates. Apparently I met the requirements for an “extreme user” of notebook documentation and thus made the perfect subject to probe for ideas. The session turned into therapy for me as I dolled out all my “in a perfect world” scenarios for documenting my life.
The key take-away for me was that this new interface MUST be tangible. If I can’t move stuff around with my hands, feel textures, physically arrange images/ideas/data in a space, then it just ain’t gonna work for me.
The problem is that the technology just hasn’t fully arrived yet. But there is some cool stuff out there for content access (a la Minority Report, but called the g-speak spatial operating environment) and for content entry/interaction (who hasn’t seen Pattie Maes & Pranav Mistry’s TED talk from last year?).
The questions is, how do you combine these technologies (instant tangible data entry with instant tangible data access)? I want to gather information, sort it, rank it, edit it and then store it in the appropriate category all within a few simple moves. In fact, maybe I could turn it into an interpretive dance…
I’m going to speak about this during the Quantified Self Meet-Up next Wednesday the MedHelp offices at 927 Market Street.