Prezi will Rock your Presentation

I discovered the wild and playful world of Prezi this week.  I was a die hard PowerPoint fan since the 1990s able to build those boring slides with lots of word.  I was reluctant to leave my world.
I built a complicated PowerPoint slide for Professor Armstrong's class rich with animation and proudly showed it to my team.  Well, what can I say...I abandoned PowerPoint and ended up learning Prezi!  I was so engaged that I worked well into the night and woke up the next day to start again. Why?  Prezi lets you think in multiple dimensions and perspectives.  I wasn't bound by those four edges of the PowerPoint slide.  Anything can fit into the screen!  The scalability of images is truly AMAZING zooming into a tiny image to full resolution.

Prezi is not only fun and easy, you can work collaboratively online with ten of your friends.  Prezi must have been designed by person with a silly imagination because each online friend is represented by a colorful stick figure that bobbles about the screen.

This is a great read...take a look and let your mind appreciate the innovation and talent in this world.

The 20 Most Innovative Startups In Tech

Lunch Launch at DC Week

On the second floor of a lovely old DC building in Dupont Circle there was standing room only for entrepreneurs who want to startup a new business or learn more about their fledging business.  The room  had an air of excitement, an expectation that secrets would be shared that will help all of us succeed.  The Dupont Circle Business Incubator opened its doors this fall and it's founder Carter Ferrington is welcoming and genuinely interested in helping people succeed.

So what did I learn?  First off, I learned that GW is teaching us the same stuff that these folks were talking about when it comes to market research, financial analysis and business plans.  Surprisingly about half the attendees didn't have a business plan...hopefully, they didn't have a business either!
The take home point was: Don't keep your great ideas to yourself. Talk and share to get feedback.  Your idea is great, but 50,000 others have had the same idea. What will make you succeed?  Be open to feedback and let it change your idea to be even better.  Don't be afraid of contrary feedback...it may hurt, but it will also make your idea better.  You need to understand your customer and your competition.  Of course there are risks that someone may "steal" your idea, but the benefits of growing and shaping your idea through sharing outweigh the risk of losing it.

Read about other incubator labs in DC where innovators and entrepreneurs incubate great ideas.

New Biochip will Save Lives

Wireless EPIC device (10x10x3 mm)

Watch the Plessey EPIC video!

EPIC biochip... Superhero

EPIC...Just like a Superhero


What if a tiny device could locate a baby trapped under the rubble after a massive earthquake or help a firefighter find an unconscious victim in a burning building?  

Amazing? Yes and It is already here ready for sampling.  

What is EPIC? EPIC (Electric Potential Integrated Circuit) was designed by Plessy Semiconductors of England for EKG (electrocardiogram) readings on heart patients, but it can do so much more.  

How does EPIC Work?  This little device detects extremely small milivoltage changes in magnetic fields across the body's muscle (like your heart...yes it's a muscle) and nerves.  It is so sensitive it can even detect changes through walls!

Japanese Rescue Team

• What in the world could we use this for? Let me count the ways!  

EPIC is a quick way to capture the patient's EKG.  This could be life saving for the paramedic responding to a heart attack victim.  In a hospital, EPIC will continually monitor the patient without all the pads stuck on their skin and cords attached to a machine.

EPIC could make the first responder a hero by locating human life after a natural disaster.  Global organizations like the Red Cross will pursue this technology due to the promise of drastic cost reduction and saving lives of those cannot help themselves...this is a WIN-WIN-WIN!

Holds promise for the disabled...EPIC can help a quadriplegic move a wheelchair through eye movements or help an amputee control their prosthesis through residual muscle activity. 

"It's elementary my dear Watson"

Watson will make its debut in the healthcare industry early next year making recommendations to both doctors and patients.  IBM and WellPoint have partnered to bring"evidence-based" medical decision support to you.

What is Watson?  Watson is a super computer powered by a server cluster that has a total processing capacity of 80 teraflops (A teraflop is one trillion operations per second).  

But Watson is more than a machine.  Watson can read using natural language processing and prefers unstructured text.  Watson can learn and reason.  Watson can even play Jeopardy and win.  But that wasn't enough for young Watson.  He is a high achiever and is now learning medicine.  Hmmm...now I am calling Watson "he".  Now that's just like Hal in the movie, "2010".

Last week, I talked about patients who are seeking medical advice from the virtual community, but the average person is poorly informed about medicine and their advice may not be the best.  Is Watson the answer?  Watson could be the real-time consultant physician who can understand the intent of your question and respond with a prioritized list of recommendations for you to consider.  Watson may offer just the type of clinical decision support we have only dreamed of before.  Not only will this benefit the individual patient, but hopefully result in a healthier population overall.

WellPoint (Blue Cross/Blue Shield health plan) will pilot Watson in the clinical setting early next year.  Stay tuned.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/358871/IBM_s_Watson_to_Diagnose_Patients
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/12/ibm-watson-wellpoint_n_958227.html

Health Innovations are not stagnant

I just want to say that the innovative minds in health IT are not idle.  During a DoD/VA electronic record summit, I heard enough exciting ideas to fill all my blogs for the rest of the semester. it is great to know that people are questioning our very assumptions of how and why doctors interact with patients the way they do.  It sounds like a revolution is around the corner and I want to be part of it.  I'll drop a few crumbs next week. (not for credit)

DoD/VA Health Information Exchange Summit

I attended a fantastic DoD & VA Electronic Health Record and Health Information Exchange summit conference today in DC where several speakers talked about "disruptive" technologies and how mobile devices are the latest development in the electronic health record arena.   A few extolled the value of social tools and crowd sourcing, but others could not grasp it.  I hate to think that our user base missing out on so much if they only had a virtual meeting place.  The VA is doing exciting things in the area of open source and soliciting innovations from creative VA employees and industry.  It's good stuff. (not for credit)

Who needs doctors anyway?

http://www.telytic.com/why-do-you-want-a-smartphone.html 

People will seek medical advice from the virtual community instead of their doctor!  How can this be?  Well, that's what Healthcare IT News reported on Oct 4, 2011.  Clayton Christensen, Harvard Business Professor predicts that the 5 most disruptive technologies will hit the medical field in full force and revolutionize the way people seek medical care.  Christensen defines disruptive technology as "cheaper, simpler, smaller, and frequently, more convenient to use".
http://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/5-most-disruptive-health-it-innovations.

Leading disruptive technologies in Healthcare

• In-house applications monitor and treat patients within their own home, not in the doctor's office.  This works well for patients with chronic disease that require frequent monitory, such as heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes.
• Lightweight tools...there's an app for that!  Lots of great apps are on the market for things like nutritional counseling, weight loss or how to treat routine illnesses.
• Health communities make the best of crowd sourcing.   People will take advice from the community instead of going to the doctor.  Just wondering...is that a good thing?
• Mobile content that is easy to find from a mobile device.  People will use their smartphone to learn about an illness instead of asking the doctor.
• e-Commerce will become essential to patient care and require interfacing with payment portals.

A future that is easy and good

http://www.passporthealthusa.com/colorado/index.html

As a medical professional, this future is a bit scary to think that people will follow the most popular trends to treat symptoms instead of getting the right medical care that they need.  And that could lead to bad health outcomes.

http://mhealthwatch.com/

That is why I am pleased to see sites like mHealthWatch that "keep the pulse of the mobile health community".  See http://mhealthwatch.com/  A Seattle-based non-profit offers an app that delivers secure messaging between the patient and doctor to make it easy to get good advice.  This offers the best of both worlds, individualized care and it's easy.

Technology is changing the game in collaborative healthcare

Canto Mobile App for the Epic Electronic Record used
at Kaiser Permanente
 http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/epic-canto/id395395172?mt=8

I listened to an Intel Healthcare Innovation webinar yesterday where a panel of three healthcare experts discussed changes in collaborative care.

John Mattison, MD, Chief Medical Information Officer at Kaiser Permanente envisions a future where the patient record and healthcare itself will be transformed as we adopt a collaborative care model.  We are seeing early culture changes how physicians engage their patients moving towards a time where the patient accepts more responsibility in their own care.

Today, electronic records are focusing on mobile technology like the Canto app for Epic's electronic medical record used at Kaiser Permanente http://www.epic.com/.  The home page is a patient summary screen for the doctor.  Innovations are still needed to help filter the massive amount of information available and to individualize the display for the healthcare team based on the condition of the patient. But how is this collaborative?  How does the patient get involved?  Well, Kaiser's patient portal gives the patient access to his or her own health record anytime so they can stay informed.  But the collaboration comes with the secure messaging feature where the patient can have two-way communication with the healthcare team.  The panel also pushed for incorporating social networking and even gamification into the collaborative care model.  This is driving change in the way medicine is being delivered.  Culture changes don't happen overnight, but we can start with small changes that add value and pretty soon we will see visible changes.

Mattison is concerned over the rising cost of healthcare in America and is looking to technology to help reduce it.  Kaiser has already demonstrated cost reduction with a rise in virtual care outside the walls of the hospital or clinic, especially for the chronically ill population.  Mobile technology holds the promise to reduce the overall cost of healthcare.

Medicine may be changing to a different model and its innovators are looking to technology and social tools to shape a patient-centered collaborative model that will improve health outcomes and cut the overall costs of healthcare.

https://vshow.on24.com/event/35/09/25/rt/1/resources/care_coordination.html

Code Security...How to find and fix vulnerabilities

During our studies at eMSIST, we have read and discussed security risks and vulnerabilities, but it never dawned on me that the vulnerabilities may be within the code itself.  I had the opportunity to learn about the HP Fortify code analyzer the other day while speaking to an HP analyst https://www.fortify.com/products/hpfssc/index.html.

The Military Health System analyzed over 5 million lines of code in their electronic health record using both static and dynamic code tools this past year and discovered thousands of vulnerabilities.  Two good things came out of this.  First, we integrated code analysis into all new software development projects to identify and fix problems immediately.  This reduced costs dramatically because we fixed problems early.  Secondly, we used the analysis findings to prioritize code defect fixes that bubbled up from trouble tickets to prioritize which defect to fix first.

OWASP or Open Web Application Security Project encourages the use of a code analyzer during software development as a powerful tool that gives the developer immediate feedback with recommendations how to re-write the code. https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Source_Code_Analysis_Tools  Although code analyzers are excellent tools, they cannot detect all vulnerabilities and have particular difficulty in the area of authentication, access control and encryption.  Because the only look for problems in the code, they cannot identify configuration or infrastructure issues.

On September 12, 2011 Information Week reported that HP Expands Security Offerings http://www.informationweek.com/news/security/app-security/231601254 providing dynamic analysis for web applications in the cloud.

Is your electronic health information safe?

Brian Horwitz posted an article on eWeek on September 8, 2011: 

71 Percent of Health Care Companies Suffer Data Breaches in Past Year: Report, see http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Health-Care-IT/71-Percent-of-Health-Care-Companies-Suffer-Data-Breaches-in-Past-Year-Report-332736/ 

A Saas-based company, Veriphyr analytic and access intelligence reported what most of us already knew - our electronic personal healthcare information may not be safe.  Although most of the breaches were from insiders looking at the medical records of family and friends, this is by no means reassuring.  Nearly 80% of those surveyed are concerned that current processes will not detect a breach when it occurs.

The future sharing of health data is a wonderful thing that will provide the medical and dental teams with access to the right information at the right time, no matter the source (private sector, military or VA).  But this comes with a great responsibility to protect the privacy of that patient's information.  Breaches must be detected and stopped quickly.  Patients must be notified.  The healthcare field needs to look for industry experts to provide this skill set.  

Page McNall