Increasingly EHR systems like Epic are automatically releasing test results to patients. This release of health data should be a good thing. But when a machine delivers data alone we fail to help patients achieve understanding of what it means. Personal health data without knowledge and wisdom is just a spreadsheet. We have to figure out how to help patients ... Continue Reading about Health Data Without Wisdom is a Spreadsheet
Information Design
Information is one of this generation's greatest challenges. The explosion of information is matched only by new tools for sharing it with one another. Information design is the next frontier. Ambient monitors living on our wrists and pockets have created spaces for push notifications of all kinds. Endless pummeling of the inbox with this and that with no regard ... Continue Reading about Information Design
When Data Meets Doctors
This week while serving on the GI consult service at Texas Children's Hospital I was asked to evaluate a child in the Pediatric Heart Failure ICU. When I walked into the patient's room, I found this: A massive wall-mounted touch screen at the foot of the bed with all of the patient's critical data beautifully displayed. As the cardiac intensivists round, all of the ... Continue Reading about When Data Meets Doctors
Content – What Is It and Why Should You Care?
The word content is used a lot surrounding online communication. A colleague recently asked me to define content. After thinking about it, here's what I came up with. Content is: Retrievable information that can be consumed. It’s stuff that can be heard, seen, shared, curated and commented upon. A human creation, something translated from the realm of the ... Continue Reading about Content – What Is It and Why Should You Care?
The Value of Sharing Links We Haven’t Read
Try this experiment: Take a impactful message from a source, boil it down to 280 characters, then share it on Twitter with a broken link. Lots of folks will share your link. In fact, sharing links we have not read has become Twitter's latest bad habit. Sharing unseen links is a new kind of exhibitionism that’s had a lot of play recently. It’s an interesting ... Continue Reading about The Value of Sharing Links We Haven’t Read
Human Bandwidth Will Never Scale to Match Clinical Supply
In his book, Too Big to Know, David Weinberger suggests that information is becoming the problem rather than the solution. There used to be a nurse practitioner in another specialty in my hospital who copied those involved in a child's care with every encounter. Anything - phone calls, routine visits, etc. The rationale was that "it's better to be too informed ... Continue Reading about Human Bandwidth Will Never Scale to Match Clinical Supply