Advancing Healthcare Through Technology

I had the good fortune to attend two remarkable conferences recently, that each offer opportunities to share and learn about technology innovations related to health and healthcare:

Health 2.0 – San Francisco

This conference began in 2007 and focuses on cutting-edge innovation with the potential to transform the health care system.

There were four underlying themes: 

1)    How to acquire, store, and use individual and population data to drive decisions influencing health;

2)    The role that online patient communities play in healthcare, and how the integration of experts into those communities creates unique new opportunities and challenges;

3)    The demonstration of a whole new generation of clinical, data acquisition, and education tools that influence professional healthcare practice and self-management of health; and,

4)    Recognition of the emergence of “big data,” data sets so big and bulky that they are almost impossible to manage and use effectively with today’s tools. 

It was an exciting conference that left me with two take-aways: 

1. The good news is that technology is maturing and policy is evolving allowing for continued development and use of such technologies for health.  
2. The bad news is that in many cases technology is not the main obstacle to progress – there are many other human and social barriers and processes that slow progress.  The Health 2.0 website has links to this and previous conferences with videos of some of the presentations. You can also learn more by following the tweetstream at #health20

Connected Health Symposium

The second conference, Connected Health, is sponsored by Partners Healthcare Center for Connected Health, which was founded in 1995 by Harvard Medical School teaching Hospitals.

This meeting focused on:

1)    Moving healthcare beyond the hospital and clinic and into the day-to-day lives of patients.

2)    Exploring new technologies, from mobile devices and social media to sensors and home robots, to help people take care of themselves and their loved ones

At this meeting (tweetstream #chs11), I was struck by the exquisite quality of the plenary sessions.  Brent James, MD, MStat, Chief Quality Officer, Intermountain Health Care and Kate Pickett, PhD, FRSA, Professor of Epidemiology, University of York kicked off the first day followed by William Shrank, MD, MSHS, Director of Evaluation, the Innovation Center, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and Clifford Nass, PhD, Thomas M. Storke Professor, Stanford University; Director, Communication between Humans and Interactive Media Lab on day two.  

These were remarkable presentations that I suspect will be available online some time in the near future, but for now I’d recommend at least a few books for your consideration:

	Wilkinson R and Pickett K, (2011) The Spirit Level:  Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, Bloomsbury Press – illustrates through data why the gap between a nation’s richest and poorest citizens is the most powerful predictor of the health and functioning of that society;
	Nass C (2010) The Man Who Lied to His Laptop:  What Machines Teach Us About Human Relationships, Current Hardcover – provides insights through research into human interactions with technology.

I’d like to close with a reference to a truly remarkable TED video of Chris Jordan illustrating some absolutely shocking statistics.  Chris Jordan is a photographer that examines American consumption.  He has a way in 11 minutes to completely captivate you with his pictures because he’s found a way to describe things that bring new understanding – and more importantly most of what he’s talking about are threats to health and wellbeing.   Chris Jordan pictures some shocking stats | Video on TED.com