The Documents You Need, When You Need Them

Few things drive an emergency room staff quite as nuts as a patient who has, yes, carefully considered her preferences, designated a health care decision-maker should she become incapacitated, and documented all that information in an advance directive — which is sitting in a locked safe deposit box or stashed in an bureau drawer at home.

But as we’ve discussed before, that’s hardly an uncommon scenario. In fact, the president of the American Bar Association, Jim Silkenat, told me that until recently, his own advance directive wasn’t easily accessible.

“It was in a file here in my office” in Midtown Manhattan, he said. “My kids knew about it, but they had no idea where it was. Nobody had really focused on it.” Fortunately, since his children live in Scotland and Arizona, Mr. Silkenat hadn’t encountered an emergency requiring them to show up at a hospital with the document.

But enough people do find themselves in that quandary that the association’s Commission on Law and Aging has developed a smartphone app, My Health Care Wishes, that allows you to store your own advance directive or family members’ on your iPhone or Android phone. When you need them, the app lets you present such documents — and other health information and contacts — via email or Bluetooth.

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The article was originally posted on The New York Times.

Predicting Social Trends Two Months In Advance

A new study from researchers at Yale, the University of California-San Diego, the Universidad Autónoma of Madrid, and NICTA of Australia, formulated a technique that they claim can forecast social media trends up to two months in advance.

 The study, described in a paper titled “Using Friends as Sensors to Detect Global-Scale Contagious Outbreaks” and published in the online journal PLoS One, focused on the role of “sensors,” meaning central individuals with more social connections who act as sentinels for wider networks, registering an emergent trend before it becomes prevalent across the network and the Internet at large. One advantage of the system is it allows researchers to predict trends based on a relatively small sample size using “local monitoring,” rather than trying to wrangle data from the entire social media universe.

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Link to the research article

Article originally published on MediaPost. 

Earlier this year, Twitter announced that it would provide six data grants to researchers looking to access its vast archives for big data insights. Last week, Twitter selected six proposals out of the 1,300 entries and three teams, HealthMaps, University of Twente, and UCSD, had health-related projects.

HealthMaps is a project from Boston Children’s Hospital that aims to mine data for food borne gastrointestinal illness surveillance. Another, from University of Twente in the Netherlands wants to study the effectiveness of public health campaigns for the early detection of cancer, and the third from UCSD is researching whether happy people take happy pictures.

Originally posted on mobihealthnews.com

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Tailored and Integrated Web-Based Tools for Improving Psychosocial Outcomes of Cancer Patients: The DoTTI Development Framework

Effective communication and provision of information to cancer patients and their families about their disease, treatment options, and possible outcomes improve psychosocial outcomes [7,8]. Recognition of the importance of effective communication has been driven by increased consumer activism, as well as legal imperatives to ensure patients are well informed of their treatment options and are able to exercise control over their role in making decisions regarding their care [9]. In order to make an informed decision, for example, a patient must be provided with clear and sufficient information about the risks and benefits of available treatment options [10]. Failing to fully inform patients about their condition, treatment options, and potential consequences, as well as misrepresenting information, can lead to legal challenges and medical litigation [11]. This has led to a shift from paternalistic approaches to information provision and disclosure within the health care system to a model that emphasizes autonomy and patient-centered care [12], which are reflected in changes to legislation, bioethical guidelines, and accepted principles within the medical profession [12-15].

Originally Published in JMIR

Link to full paper

Facebook Acquires Moves, a Fitness Tracking App

Facebook Messenger. WhatsApp. Paper. Instagram. And now: Moves.

Facebook announced Thursday that it has acquired Moves, a popular fitness tracking app, as part of its broader strategy to operate a set of standalone applications in addition to the flagship Facebook app.

“As part of Facebook’s multi-app strategy, we’re excited to announce that the popular Moves app will be joining Facebook’s suite of applications," a Facebook rep said in a statement provided to Mashable.

The app launched for iPhone in early 2013 and is also available on Android. It has reportedly been downloaded more than 4 million times, and will continue to operate as a standalone app, while some members of its team join Facebook at its headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif.

Full article here.

Originally posted in Mashable.

What Big Data Can't Tell Us About Health Care

Jean Malouin, a family doctor in Michigan, woke up one morning earlier this month to an e-mail from a Washington Post reporter, who informed her that a vast release of Medicare payment data from 2012 had identified her as the highest female biller in the country, and the seventeenth-highest over all, with more than seven million dollars in payments. Malouin was soon inundated by interview requests from reporters, and her name appeared in newspapers across the country.

Malouin is a family doctor, which is not a specialty that one typically enters hoping to get rich. Delivering primary care is seen by doctors as hard work that earns comparatively little pay, and it is a job that is only getting harder. That’s because the Affordable Care Act, with the broad ambition of containing costs while improving quality, hopes to move away from a fee-for-service model, toward one in which doctors are paid primarily for keeping their patients healthy, a responsibility that will fall largely on primary-care doctors. At this point, nobody quite knows how to make this vision a reality, but Medicare has funded various demonstration projects to test innovations in care—one of which is led by Malouin, who supervises three hundred and eighty primary-care practices that treat a million patients in Michigan. Payments for care improvement from Medicare at all these clinics are made under Malouin’s name, which is how she ended up in dozens of newspaper reports on the data dump.

Full article here.

Originally posted in The New Yorker.

Tweets about hospital quality: a mixed methods study

Background: Twitter is increasingly being used by patients to comment on their experience of healthcare. This may provide information for understanding the quality of healthcare providers and improving services.

Objective: To examine whether tweets sent to hospitals in the English National Health Service contain information about quality of care. To compare sentiment on Twitter about hospitals with established survey measures of patient experience and standardised mortality rates.

Design: A mixed methods study including a quantitative analysis of all 198 499 tweets sent to English hospitals over a year and a qualitative directed content analysis of 1000 random tweets. Twitter sentiment and conventional quality metrics were compared using Spearman's rank correlation coefficient.

Link to full study

This study was published in BMJ Quality and Safety

Are Public Health Organizations Tweeting to the Choir? Understanding Local Health Department Twitter Followership

Results: Local health department Twitter accounts were followed by more organizations than individual users. Organizations tended to be health-focused, located outside the state from the local health department being followed, and from the education, government, and non-profit sectors. Individuals were likely to be local and not health-focused. Having a public information officer on staff, serving a larger population, and “tweeting” more frequently were associated with having a higher percentage of local followers.

Originally Published in JMIR

Link to full paper

Your Trainer Saw That: Devices Like Fitbit and Up24 Being Used by Gyms to Track Clients' Activity

Angela Harrigan, a personal trainer at Life Time Fitness, sees each client maybe two hours per week, but she knows exactly how much of the other 166 hours they’ve spent furthering — or undoing — their efforts.

With a glance at her phone, Ms. Harrigan can tell, among other things, who stayed up too late, who has hit the gym — and whose only steps have been to the office vending machine. That’s because like all trainers at Life Time, which has gyms in 24 states, Ms. Harrigan encourages clients to buy a wearable activity tracker (the gym began selling Fitbits in 2012), then accept her friend request, which allows her to monitor every move.

“She’ll text me and say, ‘So-and-so is ahead of you in steps; what’s up?’ ” said Zhanna Muchnik, who trains with Ms. Harrigan in Commerce, Mich., a Detroit suburb. “And if she can’t see what I’m doing, she’ll text me to sync it.”

Ms. Harrigan said, “I know if they’re keeping me from seeing the data, they’re probably up to no good.”

Check out the full article here. 

Originally posted in The New York Times.

M.I.T.’s Alex Pentland: Measuring Idea Flows to Accelerate Innovation

...Mr. Pentland has been identified with concepts — and terms he has coined — related to the collection and interpretation of all that data, like “honest signals” and “reality mining.” His descriptive phrases are intended to make his point that not all data in the big data world is equal.

Reality mining, for example, examines the data about what people are actually doing rather than what they are looking for or saying. Tracking a person’s movements during the day via smartphone GPS signals and credit-card transactions, he argues, are far more significant than a person’s web-browsing habits or social media comments.

But Mr. Pentland argues that even the less valuable information in current flood of personal data could help open the door to what he calls “social physics.” That topic is the subject of his new book, “Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread — The Lesson From a New Science.”

Central to the concept of social physics is the ability to measure communication and transactions as never before. Then, that knowledge about the flow of ideas can be used to accelerate the pace of innovation.

The best decision-making environment, Mr. Pentland says, is one with high levels of both “engagement” and “exploration.” Engagement is a measure of how often people in a group communicate with each other, sharing social knowledge. Exploration is a measure of seeking out new ideas and new people.

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Originally published in The New York Times' "Bits" blog.  

Google Unveils Project Ara, a 'Modular' Smartphone

Google Inc. is planning a "modular" smartphone that consumers can configure with different features, executives said on Tuesday.

Google envisions hardware modules, such as a camera or blood-sugar monitor, that would be available in an "app store," like its own Google Play store for software applications.

The modules would fit into a metal "endoskeleton" designed for the phone, which Google calls Project Ara. Flat rectangular "modules" can be slotted into this frame, where they will be held in place by magnets, designers said.

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Originally published in The Wall Street Journal. 

The Parable of Google Flu: Traps in Big Data Analysis

In February 2013, Google Flu Trends (GFT) made headlines but not for a reason that Google executives or the creators of the flu tracking system would have hoped. Nature reported that GFT was predicting more than double the proportion of doctor visits for influenza-like illness (ILI) than the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which bases its estimates on surveillance reports from laboratories across the United States (1, 2). This happened despite the fact that GFT was built to predict CDC reports. Given that GFT is often held up as an exemplary use of big data (3, 4), what lessons can we draw from this error?

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Article published by Science Magazine. Link to pdf of article provided by authors on the Complexity and Social Networks Blog of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science and the Program on Networked Governance, Harvard University

Social Media Helped in Probe of Md. Rabies Death

HAGERSTOWN, Md. — Public health investigators say they used Facebook and other social media to find people potentially exposed to the rabies virus after a Maryland man died from the disease last year in a rare case of transmission through a transplanted organ.

Social media played an invaluable role in the investigation, the investigators said in an article detailing their work. But investigators must use such tools responsibly to avoid violating patient privacy and confidentiality, lead author Ryan M. Wallace of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday.

Originally Published at CBS DC

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Disease Outbreak Warnings Via Social Media Sought by U.S.

Whooping cough first sickened the Illinois high school cheerleaders, then it struck the football players, the cross-country team and the band.

As it spread within the Chicago suburb of McHenry County in late 2011, another outbreak took place -- on social media. A small business called Sickweather LLC said it detected the online flare-up on Twitter Inc. (TWTR:US) and Facebook Inc. (FB:US) postings in early October that year. That’s about two weeks before local health officials issued a public statement.

Originally Published in Bloomberg Businessweek

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How Google Glass Could Help People with Parkinson's

Though Google Glass is not commercially available yet, explorers and businesses continue to figure out new ways to leverage the wearable device.

A new one: using Glass as a support system for people with Parkinson’s disease.

Researchers at Newcastle University in England believe that Glass can provide automated reminders in a user’s field of vision.

“We’re looking at the ways in which people with Parkinson’s can use this technology to provide them with prompts whilst they’re out, reminders, and to help them live more independently," said Dr. John Vines, senior research associate at the Digital Interaction group at Newcastle's Culture Lab.

Full article here.

Originally posted in Mashable.

Twitter Just Bought a Startup That Could Remake the Service

Twitter just unveiled a new incarnation of its popular microblogging service, and it isn’t exactly a big step forward. Basically, it’s a Twitter that looks more like Facebook, and though that makes good sense for Twitter as a company, it doesn’t change a whole lot in the larger world of online user experience.

But the day before the arrival of its new redesign, Twitter made a far more interesting move, acquiring a tiny startup that offers an entirely new interface on your smartphone screen. This startup is called Cover, and though Twitter isn’t saying what it will do with the company, Cover’s technology opens the door to several new ways Twitter could more closely tie its microblogging service into your smartphone and other devices. It could not only push the service to the front of your OS, but extensively tailor the service to where you are and what you’re doing. In short, it could provide Twitter with a redesign that actually pushes the ball forward.

Link to the full article

• Additional article on Twitter's new design from Fast Company

Originally published in Wired. 

I Used the Internet to Quit Smoking

Searching for methods to quit smoking on the Internet is like searching for weight loss tips — there are thousands of different approaches that all claim to be the best, but not all is right for you.

The patch seemed too weird for me, the gum made my mouth itch, prescription medication was definitely out; I had no insurance, e-cigarettes hadn't caught on yet, and reading a self-help book just made me feel like a drug addict, which I was. 

One method that did peak my interest was apps. Along with cigarettes, my phone was the only other thing I couldn't leave my apartment without, and now it was my only clutch.

Link to the full article

Article originally published on Mashable.com

Want to Help Heal the World? Start by Sharing Your Health Data

What can you do to help yourself, family, friends -- and why not everyone? -- to heal from and perhaps avoid deadly diseases? Why not share your personal health data to help a new multi-industry, collaborative effort to improve therapies?

That's the drive behind a new website, MeForYou.org, part of a University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) awareness campaign around precision medicine, the topic of its recent OME Summit.

Link to the full article

Originally published on HuffPost Healthy Living

The Cofounder Of 23andMe’s Next Project: Mining Your Quantified Self

Online forums are overflowing with people’s burning health questions and anecdotal advice: “What are the long-term effects of running?” and “Can I turn myself into a morning person?”

This is why the rise of wearable technology that tracks everything from our footsteps to our sleeping habits has a far bigger potential than just quantifying the “self.” The next phase could turn everyone and anyone into a researcher who can help answer health and wellness questions that even doctors aren’t too sure about.

Linda Avey, a health startup veteran who co-founded of 23andMe--the company that made the idea of exploring one’s genome appealing to mainstream consumers, has been quietly thinking about this problem for the last two years.

Link to full article

Originally published on Fast Company

Apple’s Upcoming Health App Is the Start of Something Huge

Apple is poised to launch a body-monitoring app known as Healthbook, tracking everything from sleep to nutrition to exercise to vital signs.

 That’s the word from 9-to-5 Mac, which published a detailed look at the app on Monday, and as described, this project could prove to be a tipping point for mobile healthcare — a computing sector that has long been on the brink of explosive popularity without actually breaking through.

Link to full article

Originally published on Wired.com

Pharma companies still fail to embrace social media

As the pharmaceutical industry awaits social media guidance from the FDA, drug makers have avoided involvement over regulatory fears.

Although social media use in healthcare continues to grow, a new study has found that about half of the top 50 pharmaceutical companies are not actively engaging with patients through social media and the same amount of companies are not using social media effectively. More specifically, as drug makers experiment with social media to engage consumers, they are reluctant to use these tools to bolster their efforts in designing and developing clinical trials.

Link to full article

Originally published on insidecounsel.com

App review: CHOP's Vaccines on the Go: What you should know

Looking for a resource that has all you need to know about vaccines from a trusted source? The Vaccines on the Go: What You Should Know app from The Vaccine Education Center at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia offers a breadth of information on vaccines in an easy navigable format.

The app includes information about:

• Vaccines and the diseases they prevent, along with potential side effects 
• Vaccine safety topics, including autism, vaccine safety monitoring systems, and too many vaccines 
• Types of vaccines and how they’re made 
• Recommended immunization schedules for children, teens and adults

Read the full article

The article was originally posted on Philly.com.  

Dr. Facebook gives contraceptive advice

Social media are particularly popular among young women; thus, a new study investigated whether providing young women with contraceptive advice via social media, specifically Facebook, would be effective for increasing their contraceptive knowledge and use. The study was published in the April edition of Obstetrics & Gynecology by researchers at New York–Presbyterian Hospital–Weill Cornell Medical Center and Columbia University.

Link to the full article
Link to the original research paper

Article originally published Examiner.com.