Recently Robert Scoble disclosed on FriendFeed that he has a rare kidney disease. It is an inherited disease, his father had it, and can be managed to being a chronic nuisance by changing diet. Interestingly, what the post did prompt was a further discussion on why privacy is dead. Working for a health insurance company we have all sorts of privacy issues, mostly governed by just plain ethical common sense, but also specifically enumerated through HIPAA and the Patient Safety Act. These are important pieces of legislation, but I wonder what will happen as a generation of people who view privacy differently. Think about how Facebook, Twitter and many other social networks have made what were usually, private exchanges to be public. Think about how people are ready and willing to trade their own privacy for group support and the wisdom of crowds? Individual choice of disclosure is at the heart of privacy (full disclosure I am a member of the ACLU ). However, I’m with Scoble in thinking that many people are going to choose to go public with their health because it is just the way the operate in every other part of their lives. These sorts of disclosures and the questions they raise can only be helped by having prominent people (yeah, so Scoble is only prominent in nerd town, but that’s a pretty big place these days) jump in the deep end and start paddling.
Scoble is not alone either. Steven Pinker seems to be taking it to the extreme by making his own genome public. Nick Jonas of Jonas Brothers fame has disclosed his being diabetic.
I’m reminded of the Reason Magazine cover for June 2004. For each subscriber a custom cover was printed that pictured a satellite photo with their house, school, institution or whatever circled. Maybe a little spooky, but the message was clear.
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DISCLAIMER ALERT: The ideas expressed in this post came out of my own head, were researched by my own eyes and were expressed by my own hands. They are not intended to serve as medical advice in any way, shape or form. And they do not reflect the views of Humana Inc. or any of its subsidiaries. I take full responsibility if you think this post is awesome or not awesome.
Twitter is quickly becoming a buzzword with many permutations. Suffixes, prefixes, and infixes give the denizens of the twittersphere (see what I did there) a new vocab mash-up opportunity the likes of which haven’t been seen since Blog was added to the Oxford English Dictionary. But more than just buzzing words, Twitter has quickly become the chosen method of communication for social media mavens world-wide, including people interested in health care. When I first heard about Twitter I thought, "Well that seems like a waste of time. Why would I spend my hours sending out status updates when I could just blog?" The fact is people didn’t really want to read my blog. It was generally too long and too hard to find. What Twitter offered me was a way to connect to people in short bites of information that others actually subscribed to. Because that’s what a twitter ‘follow’ is–a subscription to your words. And there is no easier way to get people to start listening to you despite ever decreasing attention spans. But speaking out is only a fraction of Twitter’s functionality.
Twitter thrives because it enables its users penchant for link-love. The service puts tools in place that allow you to share and share alike, in line with the Creative Commons mantra. When I post something interesting, my followers will re-tweet it to their friends and eventually someone might blog about it. In the gradients of media, with television news still at the top, Twitter remains a bottom feeder, but unlike archaic news channels of the past (sending in submissions via mail or phoning the paper) Twitter is a massively populated, rapid news-sharing medium. Tweets turn into blogs which turn into interviews which feeds into traditional journalism. When the US Airways jet crashed into the Hudson this past week, Twitter was abuzz before anything hit the NY Times homepage or CNN. In the hours following the crash, CNN correspondents started to gather photos and videos taken from tweets via cellphones equipped with cameras. The service has since passed Digg in popularity. Citizen journalists have enhanced the news from the attacks in India to the crisis in Gaza. Twitter is more than a chance to post photos of your cat (no matter how genuine that makes you feel), it is a powerful, wonderfully social communication tool.
But what does this mean for health innovators? On my twitter stream I follow doctors, health policy experts, medical librarians, health IT developers, insurance agents, nurses, and scientists. When I have a health related question, I can usually get an answer in five minutes or less. When I want to learn something new, I can generally discover someone willing to be interviewed. When we do something great, we have friends to talk about it with. But more significant than all this is my ability to keep abreast of the latest developments in science, technology, and health care through the constant flow of updates. Twitter allows me to synthesize information in a whole new way: through the help of others, hundreds of times a day. Then, when I feel I’ve learned and thought and questioned enough to take action, I can start to rally people to me by asking everyone to meet up and enact a bit of change. It all starts with a message, 140 characters at a time.
So join our conversation. Many Innovation Center associates are already there. Start an account at www.twitter.com and follow our tweets. We’ll be sure to follow you back.
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DISCLAIMER ALERT: The ideas expressed in this post came out of my own head, were researched by my own eyes and were expressed by my own hands. They are not intended to serve as medical advice in any way, shape or form. And they do not reflect the views of Humana Inc. or any of its subsidiaries. I take full responsibility if you think this post is awesome or not awesome.
Having recently finished a two-year stint as Director of Consumer Research for Humana, insights are near and dear to my heart. I’ve also been a reader of David Armano’s blog for some time. So it was a bit of fun to find Armano has written a white paper on using insights for his agency Critical Mass. It is worth a read, so give it a bit of your attention.
Armano has written a good concise piece on the power of using insights. He’s updated the usual process and has placed it in the context of constant change. Normally this process is described in linear fashion (i.e., DMAIC) and sometimes described as a loop (i.e., design thinking). The claim that this process is both new or an outcome of web 2.0 is a bit naïve. Certainly, these technologies allow a new level of community interaction, but this is really the same work that database marketers, total quality management and (most recently trendy) design thinkers have been using for a long time. Some are just more successful then others in fully embracing a continuous change model.
What does this have to do with healthcare? Easy. We’ve all been bludgeoned to death by the IDEO hospital gurney case study, but as yet no one is using this sort of thinking to improve health – much less healthcare. So far, most in the health field are just hawking product or philosophy with little in the way of continuous feedback/improvement. Wonder what would come out of insights related to day-to-day health?
BTW, Bruce Nussbaum is trying to rename all this as transformation, since apparently trendy is the death of effectiveness. Perhaps using the word transformation will finally get executives to stop thinking of all this as just better packaging and prettier pictures. He writes for BusinessWeek, so I’ll be keeping an eye on how that goes. We’ve been doing a lot of work with consumers talking about health and healthcare. We are starting to see new trends about how finance is playing into people’s thinking about health. Maybe some of Bruce’s transformation ideas can be used to that end in the industry.
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DISCLAIMER ALERT: The ideas expressed in this post came out of my own head, were researched by my own eyes and were expressed by my own hands. They are not intended to serve as medical advice in any way, shape or form. And they do not reflect the views of Humana Inc. or any of its subsidiaries. I take full responsibility if you think this post is awesome or not awesome.
So far, we’ve kicked off two installations of Freewheelin-donated B-cycle systems. Earlier in the month, we presented a system to the National Parks Service in Washington, DC – and just last week we did the same with the city of Denver. Both visits were marked by very appreciative comments and praise for Humana’s generosity and leadership in the environmental health space.
I was impressed not only with the short speeches from officials and Humana leadership, but also with the turnout at these press events. In both cases, the body of system users really came to find out what the donation meant to them. NPS employees, wearing the traditional "Smoky Bear" hats, were eager to get started using the bikes, despite the less-than-friendly January weather. Denver lucked out with fantastic sunshine, and not only drew city employees to the kickoff, but also dozens of interested local residents, who came to hear what the mayor had to say.
And he said some pretty amazing stuff. After accepting a check for one million dollars from the DNC, he announced the expansion of the pilot system with those donated funds. This will do great things for the city of Denver, and positions it as the first ever US city equipped with a functional city-wide bike sharing program.
Great news for the city, certainly. Great news for B-cycle, too. Next, look for the kickoff of the replacement system for our corporate hometown, in Louisville.
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DISCLAIMER ALERT: The ideas expressed in this post came out of my own head, were researched by my own eyes and were expressed by my own hands. They are not intended to serve as medical advice in any way, shape or form. And they do not reflect the views of Humana Inc. or any of its subsidiaries. I take full responsibility if you think this post is awesome or not awesome.
I love the NYT’s yearly publication of a “Year in Ideas”. This year they highlighted an idea that we have been batting around and didn’t name. Take a look at Positive Deviance in the article and at this website. Traditionally problems are solved by looking at the middle 68.2% and trying to figure what they are doing wrong. That evolved over time to segmentation, splitting the world into discrete pockets and then solving for the middle 68.2% within each segment.
Eventually more and more powerful computers became available and we learned that smaller and smaller segments could be formed by continuously experimenting to get the best one-to-one match. You mix this with the idea of using ethnography as a tool for innovation/insight development and you begin to use positive deviance to identify those people you want to study. Who knew that it was a thing, with science behind it and everything? (Apparently the NYT) The rigor added to identifying whom to study is going to help us immensely.
Either way, it seems like a good idea to develop an online repository of PD stories to share across the world. There are a number of different case studies where hospitals and mobile communications firms have used the developing world to identify new uses of existing technology or alternative methods for solving problems with non-western tools. It would be interesting to use a similar approach to health and make the stories available open source.
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DISCLAIMER ALERT: The ideas expressed in this post came out of my own head, were researched by my own eyes and were expressed by my own hands. They are not intended to serve as medical advice in any way, shape or form. And they do not reflect the views of Humana Inc. or any of its subsidiaries. I take full responsibility if you think this post is awesome or not awesome.
