The Gutenberg press disseminated ideas to a wider society. But in the clinical world, much information is still on "lockdown." (Wikimedia Commons)
The best things in life are free: friends, sunny days, beautiful vistas. Wouldn’t it be nice if knowledge were also free? Historically, libraries promulgated knowledge sharing because it was for the public good. We see this spirit increasingly embraced on the Internet – take the recent announcement of a collaboration between Harvard and MIT to make their courses freely available to users around the world via the edX platform.
But have we made all useful knowledge available in a way that allows for the greatest societal advancement? Not really. According to Ken Mandl, MD, MPH, director of the Intelligent Health Laboratory at the Children’s Hospital Informatics Program (CHIP), one important source of information still on lockdown is clinical trial data. In an article called, “Learning from Hackers: Open-Source Clinical Trials” published this month in Science Translational Medicine (not currently available in full text), Mandl and his coauthors call for making raw, de-identified clinical trial data free to the public. Full story »
National data suggest that up to 70 percent of sentinel events—the most serious errors in hospitals—stem at least in part from miscommunications. Communication problems are especially apt to occur during hospital shift changes, when a patient’s care is transferred to incoming doctors and nurses—known in health care as the “handoff.”
More than a year ago, a team led by Amy Starmer, MD, MPH, of the Division of General Pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital, developed and began testing a bundle of interventions to ensure that the hospital’s residents were thoroughly and accurately briefed on each patient’s medical history, status and treatment plan in a standardized way.
Through measures such as communications training, a mnemonic to help residents remember key information to pass on and a computerized handoff tool that integrated with the patient’s electronic medical record, they managed to move the needle: Medical errors fell by 40 percent—from 32 percent of admissions at baseline to 19 percent of admissions three months after the program started.
When children return home from the hospital after surgery, parents can be overwhelmed by the written information and instructions for follow-up. At the MIT Media Lab’s Health and Wellness Hackathon earlier this year, the focus was on empowering patients to take an active role in their health. As my colleague Brian Rosman described, our team from Boston Children’s Hospital attended and spent two weeks developing “Ralph,” a mobile application for managing post-operative care that incorporates an avatar and features of gaming to engage and motivate children to follow their regimen. I was one of the primary programmers for our group.
We won third place, working alongside five other talented teams. Here are some snapshots of what they were up to — helping patients manage asthma, diabetes, pain, cardiac rehab and more. Full story »
In his essay, “We, the Web Kids,” Polish poet and pundit Piotr Czerski writes: “We don’t use the Internet…we live on the Internet and along it…communicating with one another in a way that comes naturally to us, more intense and more efficient than ever before in the history of mankind.”
As Czerski emphasizes, we want the option of “here and now, without waiting for the file to download.” We (myself included) expect immediacy. So in my role as a public health advocate in the digital age, waiting for an official infectious disease outbreak report to come weeks after the outbreak started—as often happens with traditional reporting methods—is unacceptable. Earlier detection of disease outbreaks means earlier response—and more lives saved. This video produced by NPR illustrates the “web kid” mindset when it comes to public health:
Debra Weiner speaks with Emergency Department Fellow Joel Hudgins who holds one of the iPhones piloting BEAPPER
For Debra Weiner, MD, PhD, working in the Emergency Medicine Department is a numbers game. During a 12-hour shift she works with more than 50 other providers, sees up to 25 patients and analyzes multiple lab results. Every day she’s also meeting new staff members in addition to new patients.
“People don’t know each other,” Weiner said at a recent Innovators’ Forum, a monthly internal lecture series intended to showcase and encourage new developments at Children’s Hospital Boston. “We have over 100 nurses and physicians and over 200 trainees that filter in [every two to four weeks]… it’s hard to remember who everyone is and what they do.”
Coupled with the frenetic pace of Children’s Emergency Department (ED), remembering names and managing the flow of patients becomes a constant challenge. Full story »
When I entered the MIT Health and Wellness Innovation “hackathon,” it wasn’t with high hopes. I felt our team from Children’s Hospital Boston had a solid idea to develop, but I’d taken part in similar collaborations that fell victim to personal disputes, group member apathy and overzealous leadership. This time I was wrong.
Here’s a snapshot of the 10-day event/competition, sponsored by MIT Media Lab, and the digital health projects that came out of it. The idea for our project — a mobile telecommunication robot that could monitor children in their homes after surgery — originated with Bob Nguyen, a urologist at Children’s Hospital Boston.
Our mobile robot, the VGo, has the potential to be a great tool, but when we’re not using it to make remote visits, it just takes up space in the patient’s house.
Dr. Nguyen felt the robot could be enhanced if the family could interact with it to ask questions, through some type of artificial intelligence, while the child played with some kind of game or character that would help them stay on their post-operative regimen. Full story »
Children's Hospital Boston's first Innovation Day Feb 14, 2012
On Tuesday, Children’s Hospital Boston featured its first Innovation Day. Organized by the Hospital’s Innovation Acceleration Program, which seeks to promote grass roots innovation within the hospital, the TEDMED style conference featured talks by 17 of the Hospital’s clinicians. Our Chief Innovation Officer Naomi Fried welcomed a packed house, which included attendees from across the country. Here we’re featuring some of the technologies that were revealed on Tuesday and how they’re changing the face of pediatric medicine: Full story »
Improving or maintaining access to clean drinking water is the best way to prevent a cholera epidemic. Twitter could prove an excellent way to help stop one. (Julien Harneis/Flickr)
It was after the devastating 2010 Haiti earthquake that mobile-friendly social media services like Twitter and Ushahidi came into their own as disaster management and relief tools. With the nation’s already unsteady infrastructure destroyed, these tools helped speed the deployment of people and supplies to where they were needed by giving relief workers on-the-ground intelligence about what was happening, what was needed and where in nearly real time.
Valentine's Day is Innovation Day (image: Richard Giles/Flickr)
In a series of 17 short TED-style talks next Tuesday, February 14, clinicians and scientists from Children’s will present new products, processes and technologies to make health care safer, better and less expensive. The event, from 1-5 p.m. Eastern, is sponsored by the Innovation Acceleration Program. It’s now running a wait list, but you can also watch the live stream or track the proceedings on Twitter (#iDay) or via @science4care. Here’s a small sampling of next week’s presenters; for details, read the press release or view the full agenda.
Diagnosing lazy eye when it’s most treatable: in preschoolers
If lazy eye, or amblyopia, is caught early – ideally, before age 5 – it’s easily treated by patching the “good” eye, forcing the child to use and strengthen the weaker eye. But if it goes unnoticed, the weak, unused eye can slowly go blind, Full story »
Brian Rosman holds up a tablet app he and a team of Children's and MIT Media Lab staff developed over the past two weeks during the Health and Wellness Hackathon
At 10 a.m. he’s directing two actors on set, at 10:34 a.m. he’s filling up a catheter and at 11:01 a.m. he’s gushing about the importance of pediatric avatars. Brian Rosman, a Robotic Surgery Research Fellow in the Department of Urology at Children’s Hospital Boston, has been working non-stop at the MIT Media Lab’s Health & Wellness hackathon to create a new app for post-operative care. His duties have included directing a video about the app, rounding up realistic props and explaining how the program works to judges and hackathon attendees.
Rosman and his team of coders, clinicians and industry professionals are competing against five other teams for a $10,000 prize awarded to the best open source healthcare application. Full story »
