Future of Health IT: Trends and Scenarios

A better way to browse the Web: Google Notebook

I often wish for a better way to browse the Web than what I have had up to now. The way I work, like many people, is as Marcia Bates described in her invention of the berrypicking metaphor for search - I wander here and there, following a train of thought; I get diverted onto a side path; I pick up bits and pieces here and there, like berries in a berry-patch. You can read her 1989 paper, the Design of Browsing and Berrypicking Techniques, at http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/bates/berrypicking.html.

Delicious (http://del.icio.us) has been the best tool for this up to now, at least the best I've found. But Delicious breaks my chain of thought by taking me off to another Web page every time I want to record something for later.

Now, though, there's what looks to be a better tool, from the folks at Google Labs: Google Notebook. I haven't played with it much, so I'll be sure to report on it more later. It's a browser plug-in, for IE only so far, that lets you gather text and images and save them for later, without leaving the page you're on. You select text or an image and right-click on it. If you haven't selected anything, it captures the URL and the page title. This may be the best tool yet for online search and browsing.

EDS' Next Big Thing Blog: Models with Alternative Vocabularies

I often look to the EDS Fellows' Next Big Thing Blog for ideas about the future of technology. Although a bit more uneven and cursory than some of the quality blogs by mavens at Microsoft and IBM, the EDS Fellows can be counted on to be at or near the cutting edge of the IT world. A recent entry entitled EDS' Next Big Thing Blog : Models with Alternative Vocabularies is a great example, and one with tremendous practical implications for those of us in health IT and clinical research informatics.

UPDATED: Towards 2020 Science

UPDATE 3/31/06: A colleague pointed out to me that this site reports the same research described in the Nature Web Focus site I mentioned in my earlier post entitled Quickie: 2020 Vision @ nature.com. I haven't delved into either enough to know if I'm being redundant here - apologies if I am. I only have a life where I can read at leisure on the weekends, and both items are in the queue, both of things to read and things about which I hope to say something intelligent sometime in the future.

Many of the blogs that popped up today on one of my trolling searches (Dr. Web's Domain and Psychology and the Singularity, to name a couple) are bombarding me with pointers to Microsoft Research's new site called  2020 Science that encapsulates the results of their "Towards 2020 Science" effort. The description in the opening page's meta tag is this:

2020 Science sets out the challenges and opportunities arising from the increasing synthesis of computing and the sciences. It seeks to identify the requirements for technology to accelerate a decade of scientific advances, particularly those driven by computational sciences and the new kinds of science the synthesis of computing and the sciences is creating. Already this synthesis has led to new fields and advances spanning genomics and proteomics, earth sciences and climatology, nanomaterials, chemistry and physics.

I have just begun to delve into this, but it seems to be the deep-ocean equivalent of the little frog-pond in which I have been immersed, trying to get my colleagues focused on taking the future potentialities seriously.

Healthcare Input: mission impossible? Possible solutions

I was just about to write a post reviewing my Nokia 770 as an input device for study coordinators and investigators in clinical research, when I noticed a post in Colin Jervis' Future Health IT blog entitled Healthcare Input: mission impossible?. Colin sums up nicely some of the negative things I was about to write, including one or two that hadn't occurred to me. Ultimately, to my surprise, it made me more optimistic about devices like the Nokia 770 than I had been before I read his article.

Nokia 770 Update

It has been a while since I have posted about my work with the Nokia 770, which is because I haven't done anything much with it other than use it the past few weeks. Today I do have some progress to report on the development front.

Light Blue Optics: miniature laser-driven holographic projectors

This from a comment on my Minority Report post: Light Blue Optics is demonstrating holographic laser projectors small enough to fit into bulkier PDAs and cell phones. LBO is looking for manufacturing partners to whom it can become an OEM supplier. It turns out someone "stole" my idea over a year ago at least. More power to them!

Minority Report

I saw  this entry in HealthNex which is actually a guest post by Doug Krell, MD. It talks about the future of healthcare IT from the perspective of thinking about what was in the movie Minority Report. It got me thinking too.

Creators, Synthesizers, and Consumers

Bradley Horowitz, head of the Technology Development Group at Yahoo! Search & Marketplace, has posted a great analysis of what it takes to make an online social networking community work, entitled Creators, Synthesizers, and Consumers. (Thanks to the social software weblog for the heads-up on this).

Key points: a successful online community has at least 1% contributing content, 10% actively participating (adding content or commenting on existing content), meaning 89 to 90% of the community can lurk and the community can still be successful.

Chipping goes public

I saw two entries in the Serppentino Weblog aboutt "chipping", the implantation of RFID chips under people's skin to make their identity and medical record more accessible in times of need. They discuss the risks as well as the benefits and name names of people being chipped, so it's more than just marketing hype.

While you are there, check out Serppentino's links to The Community Engine blogsite, run by Bud Gibson of UMich's Ross Business School. I am taking his Business Blogging Bootcamp right now and it is awesome.

Nokia 770, part one

SO- I have had my Nokia 770 for a few days, and am waiting for my 1GB RS-MMC to arrive. The 64MB chip that comes with it may be adequate for casual users, but I want to do some development on it.

I can already see that in its out-of-the-box configuration it is not ready for prime time in a healthcare environment, even the relatively relaxed environment of a GCRC's inpatient unit.  It looks and probably is somewhat fragile, though Forbes ran a story about a Nokia executive hurtling his across the room into a wall without hurting the instrument. I'm not sure clinicians and support staff will believe it is that rugged (I certainly can't, sitting here holding it).  One solution might be to have the hapless persons responsible for deployment hurtle theirs at the wall during training to demonstrate how tough the little things are, while fervently praying that Murphy's Law is somehow momentarily suspended.

But the biggest problem is also its biggest advantage, an 800x480 display. This is enough pixel-width to provide adequate display of many websites, but its 800 pixels across are on a screen about 4 inches on the diagonal, not 14", 15" or 17" like most folks now have if they use computers intensively. A colleague of mine tested his with some typical forms used in electronic data capture, and found that the type was almost too small to read and certainly too small for patients or for use in low-light conditions.

Moreover, a common usability flaw in Web-based workplace data entry software is using too much screen real estate for vanity decorations (e.g., logos and slogans), and titles across the top of the page, and often the sides as well. Product vendors, including health center IT product architects, seem to be afraid that the worker bees will forget where they work or what product they are using.  If the UI designer allocates space for such things across the top and left sides of the page using typical assumption of 1024x768 pixel screen dimensions, the available visible screen real estate can be reduced by as much as 50%, forcing potentially vital information or data capture points out of the area to which the user is attending.

I'm going to get a ruggedness test done this week, assuming I can convince my colleague to hurl his 770 at the wall with sufficiently believable force. (Not.)  I'm also going to try to put together a Typepad blog site whose template has been adjusted to fit the 770 screen and increased font size for better readability. Hopefully with some experimentation and some collegial interaction, we'll find a way to put this beautiful little machine to work.

On the good-news side, the Wi-Fi works beautifully.