brown2020

Yesterday, I built a contraption that turned my already hideous treadmill into something even more aesthetically questionable: a home office. I am typing this blog post on my MacBook as I walk on the treadmill at 3.5 miles per hour.

Like millions of people around the world, this New Years I again resolved to exercise more. After a bunch of failed attempts in prior years, this year would be different. I decided to word my New Years Resolution a little differently as well:

Find a sustainable exercise pattern that works for me, together with the tools to support it.

Emphasis on sustainable, as in beyond the first quarter. I also said I would find a pattern that works for me by the end of the year. That way I don’t need to feel like a failure even if I have not found the right thing for me when summer rolls around. There still will be plenty of time to keep looking.

This year I also told a few friends about my goal, which implicitly makes me feel more accountable. Actually, I did that before, and no one really cares about someone else’s exercise goal. What’s new this year is that I wrote this blog post, shared it on Facebook and Twitter, and now the whole world can see my New Years Resolution, and my laptop treadmill contraption, if they happen to stumble across this site. More importantly, I changed the context for exercise.

The first principle of behavior change is that our behavior is highly context-dependent. Our behavior at the office is different than at home. Our behavior at home is different than at the ball game. Our behavior at the ball game is different depending on whether our team is winning or losing. When it comes to behavior, context is everything.

In my 2010 exercise experiment, I am changing the context of my morning email routine so that the default behavior, the path of least resistance, encourages something healthier.

By nature, we are lazy. And even if we don’t think we are, the laziness assumption is always a better strategy when designing new tools and processes. We seem to be obeying one of the most fundamental laws of physics, to find an equilibrium point that minimizes energy consumption.

For a lot of us, this laziness equilibrium point is on the couch with chips and drink in hand watching American Idol, which, this time of year is on TWO nights a week.

Since it looks and feels kind of stupid to stand on my treadmill and type on my laptop with the treadmill turned off, I turn on the treadmill and walk. Next thing you know, I have walked five miles, answered all of my emails, reviewed a new contract, checked in on Facebook, written a couple of tweets, and completed this blog post.

Maybe this year my resolution to exercise more is actually going to work! If I only can convince my wife that my new treadmill office contraption is as aesthetically pleasing as it feels…

This is a short blog post on the way home from Connected Health 2009. I’m in the air on Virgin Atlantic typing on my iPhone connected to the web with inflight WiFi — that’s why it’s short and may have some typos.

First of all, Connected Health is a much bigger idea than the original idea of telemedicine, which was all about laying the painful last mile of technology to finally reach those with the greatest needs to communicate about health.

Connected Health, in contrast, is not about devices, sensors and gadgets. It is about the idea that how people connect with each other has a profound impact on health.

As Nicholas Christakis, author of “Connected”, reiterated in his keynote speech, our connections to each other, probably even more so that our connections to our doctors and nurses, has a measurable impact on our health.

Despite the big idea of connected health, too many of the Connected Health sessions followed the same format:

1. Most of the trillions in health spending is the result of chronic illness which in turn is the consequence of our lifestyle and behavior.

2. There is compelling evidence that connected health can improve quality and reduce the cost of care, referring to proactive care models that coach and monitor patients at home.

3. The only barrier to widespread adoption of a more rational model of connected care that will save our health system from impending collapse is Medicare coverage of remote health monitoring technologies.

This is the same conversation we had six years ago when we introduced the first connected health ideas as part of the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003. Six years later, it seemed like nothing had changed.

In fact, much has changed, and the next few years will be profoundly different than the past six. The fact is, we are all becoming connected in a tighter web of relationships enabled by technology. 300 million of us are on Facebook, maintaining a constant awareness of how our social network is faring. Soon we all will be able to keep tabs on our most important relationships on our smartphones.

When Grandma is also on Facebook, and her friends and family know how she is doing and she knows they still care, do you think there will be fewer crises that lead to hospitalization? I think so.

In a world where we can blog and tweet from an airplane while watching satellite TV, we surely have the tools to create the kind of connection that will improve healthcare. It’s going to happen, not because of policies and reimbursement, but simply because connected health is far better for everyone than isolation.

The “Share To Win” Experiment

Last month, my company sponsored a “crowdsourcing philanthropy” experiment in which we offered to donate money to causes based on their ability to rally supporters online. Our premise with the Share To Win challenge was that a cause needs two ingredients to be successful in the modern world: An idea worth spreading, and a core group of passionate people to light a fire online.

A recent Harvard study found that just 10% Twitter users generate more than 90% of the content on the popular and fast growing microblogging service. The numbers must be even more skewed when it comes to the much more involved act of traditional blogging. If you have an important idea that you want to spread, and especially if you are a non-profit cause that relies on the generosity of others to back your idea, you are going to need to have some of those Internet extroverts on your side.

The methodology of our challenge was straightforward: Anyone could nominate a cause by creating a note on 3banana.com describing why people should support their cause, and then share that note through social networks like Twitter and Facebook. The five causes that attracted the most endorsements – as measured by unique visitors who left a comment – would win our donations, a total of $10,000. The challenge would give champions an excuse to spread the word about their cause, but without asking for money – which tends to reduce the virality of any idea online.

To encourage participation, we reduced the barriers to posting content online down to a minimum. The first tactic was simply positioning: Asking users to share a note was less formal and less work than authoring a complete article for a blog or website. The second tactic was to further reduce the actual effort required. Users could sign in with their existing Google account, and then type their idea freeform into an input field atop a notes page, without worrying about titles and categories. Press save, and you have created a private but sharable webpage with full functionality for threaded discussions. We were soliciting raw input of thoughts and ideas with as few barriers as possible.

Then we worked on increasing the fluidity of sharing these freeform notes with Facebook and Twitter. We just launched Facebook Connect and Twitter OAuth integration with 3banana Notes, enabling direct connections to those services so that users could share notes a with just a couple quick clicks. As a business, 3banana justified the cost of sponsoring the project as a “Beta That Gives Back”, creating an incentive to use the new sharing functions and giving the money we might have otherwise spent on traditional testing methods to some good nonprofit causes.

What Happened?

Over 50 causes were nominated for share to win. Some organizations nominated themselves, and some were nominated by one of their passionate supporters. We also asked our friends and family to nominate causes and to spread the word. The first big surprise was how the social media platforms we had taken for granted for some time now were still quite new and fresh to many people at non-profits. We found many causes to be extremely eager to figure it out, while other causes felt they needed to call a board meeting before even posting a note about their mission on Twitter.

Among the causes who were nominated, over 20 of them took Share To Win as a real opportunity to spread their message to supporters through Facebook, Twitter, blogging, and email. We had suggested at the beginning of Share To win that causes should consider the prize money as a token of appreciation, while the real benefit of the campaign would be to create an opportunity to reach out to more people and to galvanize support on social media channels without asking for any money, because we were putting up the cash if they could show they had supporters.

The top two contenders couldn’t have been more different on the surface. Grand prize winner SENS Foundation supports research in regenerative medicine and seeks to end aging. Runner up Los Angeles Habilitation House helps veterans with PTSD and traumatic brain injury get back on their feet. Underneath the surface, however, these two causes both are based on powerful ideas and both are championed by passionate supporters. Each cause was able to find over 2000 people who supported them enough to sign up for an online service they had never heard of, login and post their endorsement message. Remembering the Harvard study showing that most people don’t make the leap to generate content online, 2000 content generating supporters represents a much big number behind the scenes.

We also gave prizes to the top contenders in the fields of education, environment, and health, each of which gathered hundreds of passionate supporters to comment online: Art in All of Us helps kids express and share their experiences, their passions, and their dreams with peers around the world through art. Their vision inspired supporters from 80 countries to endorse them in Share To Win. Disaster Accountability Project recognizes that the number of climate-related disasters is bound to rise. Hurricane Katrina proved that we need better ways of responding to disasters, and DAP advocates grass roots monitoring and information sharing. The HeartMath Institute sees stress as one of the most important frontiers in healthcare and their research aims to help us better measure, understand and manage this driver of so much illness.

For some of the smaller causes, even though they did not have the numbers to win a top prize, they still found a way to bring together and galvanize dozens of supporters. These people felt part of a support community, and in the future will be even less inhibited to speak out online, to Tweet, and to tell a friend on Facebook. One of these causes is Friends of Kibera, a new non-profit started by students at Notre Dame to help people in Kibera, a very poor area in Kenya. Another was a group called Magical Bridge, raising money for new and better parks for kids. These causes and dozens of others were highly diverse in their missions but very similar in their ability to use social media to rouse the passion of supporters for very clear ideas that mattered to their respective communities.

What did we learn?

The final tallies of supporters were very nonlinear. The more support a cause received, the more rapidly the cause spread. Even though 3banana is an open and free service, and there were no barriers to signing up and commenting, we found surprisingly little abuse of the process, which we were able to validate by cross referencing the results of multiple methods of counting unique users.

It was very motivating to read comments from hundreds of people about why they supported their cause. On of the biggest fears that large donors sometimes have about helping small non-profit causes is that they will find themselves alone, and what started as an act of generosity will become a guilt-ridden dependency. When you see that a cause has hundreds of supporters willing to take the initiative to endorse the cause publicly online, it creates a lot of confidence that the cause has both an idea worth spreading and a critical mass of passionate support that will sustain the group through the inevitable ups and downs of any worthwhile mission.

Based on what we learned from a whole bunch of new users, we are refining both our note-taking applications and our methods for sharing notes. Then we may do something like Share To Win again, perhaps with partners who share our passion for using social media and mobile technology for good causes. Next time around, we will focus more on mobile information capture and sharing: We hope to make the engagement in the cause even more personal, allowing users to snap photos and to link them to locations, products, or events to connect with their cause.

If you want to be notified when we launch the next Share To Win challenge, simply start a free notebook at 3banana.com, create a note about your cause and about yourself, and use the share function to send us link to your note at sharetowin @ gmail.com. You can also find me on Twitter at @brown2020. We will keep you posted!

Here’s the presentation I gave at the Quantified Self meeting at Institute for the Future in Palo Alto this week. Sixty smart and passionate people on the frontier of personal life and health monitoring technology joined the discussion about using lifestream data to improve memory and cognition, enhance self-awareness, and understand health. Some attendees were researchers trying to discover signals in lifestream data, starting with their own. Some were developers and investors in health and behavioral monitoring companies. Some were from Google. Some were simply curious.

One presenter from Fujitsu demonstrated his around-the-clock blood pressure, heart rate, and blood oxygen monitoring results in an effort to understand which medications influenced his sleep apnea. Esther Dyson showed her 23andMe genetic profile and compared it to her family members and colleagues, while another researcher showed the challenges of posting his genome on Twitter. (Hint: at 140 characters per Tweet and 1000 Tweets per day, it takes two years and you have a high risk of being flagged as a spammer.) Others logged symptoms and environmental factors related to medical issues, analyzed language to passively capture information and insights on mental health, while one person showed his 10 year mind map.

The common denominators at the Quantified Self meeting were that everyone was interested in taking notes on their life experience in a quantifiable way in order to better understand their own experience and to solve problems. In each case, the limiting factor seemed to be the ability and persistence to take notes that could be converted into something useful. It’s just too much darned work.

Simplicity is the key to any kind of self-monitoring and information capture, because no one needs a bunch of extra work. I learned the strength of simplicity working in the field of personal health monitoring for many years as the founder and former CEO of Health Hero Network, the developer of the Health Buddy System, a pioneering effort of electronic “lifestreaming” to improve chronic care.

Initiated over 10 years ago, Health Buddy started as a rather limited pre-scripted four-button survey system to collect symptoms from patients while providing education and motivation on following a treatment plan. Despite its simplicity and limitations (or more likely, because of them), Health Buddy was tremendously successful in positively influencing health behavior and in reducing health complications for complex conditions ranging from diabetes and heart disease to mental health and obesity. Tens of thousands of patients are using Health Buddy daily. The Medicare project that we spent years in winning and implementing is showing great results where many others have failed. The company is now Robert Bosch Healthcare.

Earlier this year, my new company, 3banana Inc., introduced note-taking applications for iPhone and Android smartphones that offered the ability to sync with a free online notebook and share with social networks like Twitter and Facebook. My interest in Quantifed Self is to learn, share and discuss ideas about how to use smartphones to enhance our working memory and augment our brains by capturing information and connecting to useful services that can help us achieve our goals — and to do so with less work.

Can we shape our brains around mobile technologies to expand our working memory in much the same way we do in developing software? In developing software for mobile devices where memory resources are more limited, we don’t store all of the content in short term memory. Instead, we store the links to where we know we can find the rest of the information when needed, wherever it might be on the network. The same can work for our brains. Once we have a trusted memory accessory where we can easily park and retrieve notes, we can free up both short term and long term working memory.

The key to capturing information is simplicity, which is why 3banana Notes is freeform and unstructured. Who needs the work of thinking up titles and categories when you want to jot down a thought? Instead, structure can emerge from inline hashtags (the ubiquitous # sign that gives semantics to Twitter) and from context awareness: Knowing where you were and what you were doing when you took the note can improve pattern matching services that add value to your notes by appending useful information and filling in the blanks. On our Android smartphone app, for example, addresses within notes automatically turn into links to Google maps, and phone numbers automatically link to dialing a call.

The other way that 3banana on Android works to enhance your working memory is to enable you to store links to your content directly on physical objects by generating and scanning your own personalized two dimensional barcodes, or QR Codes. We have brain maps dedicated to the physical objects we find around us every day, and these objects can be powerful cues to recalling the information and actions associated with those objects if we can link to them in context. Simple examples include putting a QR Code on your furnace that you can scan with your phone to recall the logbook about changing the filters, or putting a QR code linking to your music practice chart or exercise log on the music stand or on the exercise bike.

At Quantified Self, I showed the example of scanning bottle of wine with a smartphone to access shared wine notes and wine tasting discussions with friends. Remembering bottles of wine is one of those “note to self” categories that always got lost until I started connecting it to my digital world. Now I can quickly snap a photo into my #wine notes, share with people who like wine, or post to social media sites Twitter and Facebook, using Twitter’s OAuth and Facebook Connect for one-click integration. Perhaps a wine distributor or retailer will want to use 3banana to tag expensive bottles wine so that each sale becomes a potential viral marketing channel leading to new customers and increasing the loyalty of existing customers.

Finally, we know from brain research that emotion is the most powerful trigger in the brain to put something in long term storage — to remember something rather than to forget it. That’s great when we need to remember something for survival, like how to get away from the lions and bears, but it doesn’t serve us well for all the non-life threatening content we might want to remember for business and personal interests. Just as teaching is the best way to learn something, I have found that writing, sharing, and discussing new ideas with real people is the best way to remember something. Sharing with other people using social media connects that information to our brain maps associated with people, and relationships are loaded with emotional content.

In the world of the brain, three is a magic number because we can remember and work with things in threes better than any other number. 3banana has three meanings: In the geeky world of code monkeys, 3banana describes those smart, flexible, fast learners adept with new technology. In the world Twitter and jotting down notes, 3banana is a unit of time that represents the minimum latency to capture and absorb an idea. And if you are looking at three bananas on your kitchen table, you probably know that bananas are brain food. Bananas are rich in potassium, which helps the brain transmit messages. But bananas don’t last long sitting around, so if you are looking at three, better share one.

Our mission at 3banana is to create tools that enhance your working memory and augment your brain. In addition to taking notes, we will keep enhancing these tools to become more and more useful in those areas of your life that you want to improve, both personally and for the planet. Give it a shot and let us know what you think.

Earlier this week, my company announced Share To Win, an experiment in crowdsourcing philanthropy. It’s not the usual campaign of trying to raise money from a lot of people in small increments over a social network. We are doing it the other way around: We committed to donate $10,000, and we will allocate the money to five charitable organizations serving unmet needs in health, education and the environment. We are using social networks like Twitter and Facebook to help identify the recipients of those funds, and then we will write checks at the end of September.

As active developers and users of social media technologies, we can’t imagine how anyone with an idea that depends on the ongoing support of a community of people giving money, time and energy can survive without them. In fact, we don’t believe a cause will be sustainable for long in the modern world without a keen grasp of social media and an ability to use social networking tools to identify and recruit new supporters and to keep them engaged and informed. Social media channels are how ideas spread. Word of mouth facilitated by social media – the viral channel – is the only cost-effective channel to spread ideas.

There is a catch to social media for causes, however. You need two key ingredients for success: A story worth spreading, and a core group of people active in social media who care enough about your story to get the ball rolling. Share To Win was designed to identify and reward causes with these ingredients.

The methodology of Share To Win is quite simple: Sign in at http://3banana.com and post a note answering the question: “Why should people care about our cause?” You don’t need to work for the cause to enter a cause in the competition, but your note must name a beneficiary that is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization in good standing. Next, share the link to your note with friends by email, Facebook, and Twitter. Visitors who click the link to your note can sign in with a Google account leave a comment with their thoughts on your cause. We will run a software script to count the comments from unique users starting Sunday, August 23 after 11:59 PM when voting starts, until voting stops on Sunday, September 27 at 11:59PM Pacific Daylight Time. The causes with the most comments can win cash donations and some attention.

Tweet the link to the 3banana note about your cause with the hashtag #sharetowin so we can find you. If you don’t know what that means, then share the link to your note with us by email at sharetowin [at] gmail [dot] com, and we will Tweet it for you. If your cause does not use Twitter or Facebook, you can still share the link to your note by email or by posting it on the web. We think you will see that even if you are not using Facebook and Twitter, the people who care about your cause and the people you need to reach with your ideas are using those channels already.

Why did we do it this way? First, we wanted to lower the bar to promoting your cause. We don’t want you to have to do a lot of work, like making a YouTube video, writing an essay, or making a fancy webpage design. ”Writing a Note” implies that it is informal, and you can just jot something down without being perfect. In fact, you can simply cut and paste your mission statement, organization, and website into the note and be done if you want to. On the other hand, the causes who take some time to make sure that their story is thoughtful and compelling are more likely to inspire support. What kind of story will that be? We have no idea, but we will soon find out.

We chose commenting as the method of voting because commenting requires more thought and engagement from supporters than simply voting something up or down with a voting button. We are looking for causes that inspire enough engagement and commitment that supporters are actually willing to leave a comment, hopefully a thoughtful comment and some words of encouragement. We are not asking supporters for any money, so this is purely a measure of moral support. If an idea is engaging enough that people are willing to type some words into their computer to indicate their support, we think that might indicate the kind of support community we are looking for. We’ll see.

Once a cause has a page and link, Share To Win is an opportunity to reach out to supporters and friends without asking for money, just moral support. In social networks, it is pretty unlikely that people will pass on to friends a request for money. Most people consider such requests to be spam. But if all you are asking for is a vote of confidence, and that vote can lead to funding, there are far fewer mental obstacles to passing on a request to more people. On Twitter, it’s just a matter of “Retweeting” the original Tweet with a link to the note describing your cause. On Facebook, your friends can see what you post, give it a thumbs up, and then all of their friends will see the link as well.

The list of comments could turn out to be a great list of supporter testimonials, something that the cause could reuse. In any case, these direct and unfiltered comments from people who care enough to sign-in and vote will be great feedback to any non-profit organization willing to listen. The non-profit world is full of passionate people who care about the causes they serve, but it also can be insular, with a lot of people preaching to those who already believe in the cause. Opening up a direct channel to more people who care, but without the usual filters, could be very instructive to cause leaders.

Once the five causes have been identified at the end of September, we will write checks to the winners. But the real work will have been done by the community of supporters who demonstrated their belief in the winning causes. That same community of supporters hopefully will continue to support and monitor the progress of the causes that they chose. If the methodology works, then it will be repeated, by us and by others seeking to support good causes that demonstrate that they have solid support communities.

Most cause-marketing campaigns you hear about are done by big brands and big companies, but as with a lot of things, the Internet changes everything. Even though we are a startup at a pretty early stage, we are moving fast. We hope more people will try 3banana, an easy way to take notes online or on your phone and selectively share notes on social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Putting our money toward some good causes is a lot more fun, interesting, and unpredictable than buying online advertising (sorry, Google). We get to try some new social media ideas, meet new people, and learn some things about how and why ideas spread they way they do. The learning from this experiment will help us grow smarter as a business and will help out some good causes along the way.

The panel picker for SXSW went live this morning, including our panel proposal called “Augmenting Your Brain with Smartphones and Semantic Technologies,” at the intersection of augmented reality, semantic web, mobile technologies, and brain science.

SXSW (South by Southwest) is one of the largest music festivals in the United States. In recent years, SXSW has also become a mecca for creative internet and new technology developers, entrepreneurs and designers. Augmenting Your Brain is a panel proposal for SXSW Interactive.

The next evolution of the web, the semantic web, is rapidly adding layers of intelligence to the connected information of the world. And we get to carry more and more of this intelligence around with us every day. How will that change us?

Soon we all will have two brains: one in our head and one in our pocket. At least one is getting smarter every day. How can we augment the squishy one? Learn how context-aware mobile devices connecting to semantic web services can give you ESP and new powers. Discuss how it might actually start to change our brains.

The questions that the panel will address include:

1. What are semantic web technologies?
2. What is augmented reality?
3. How can I augment my brain with technology?
4. How does context awareness change every application?
5. What is the bridge between human brains and silicon brains?
6. How will new media and semantic technology make me smarter?
7. What is brain plasticity?
8. How might semantic mobile technology change my brain?
9. What are the best use cases to illustrate the power and potential to augment our brains?
10. What happens when we connect a billion brains using mobile and semantic technology?

There are over 2200 proposals for panels for SXSW 2010, and the community vote partly determines which panels will be on the agenda at the SXSW conference. The Panel Picker is a fascinating list of ideas. This is a great way to organize a conference, with topics sourced from a very creative community of participants.

If you like the idea of Augmenting Your Brain with Smartphones and Semantic Technologies, and you would like to see this panel at SXSW 2010 or online, vote here: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/3253.

Thanks for your consideration, and please be sure to give this panel a Thumbs Up and leave a comment on the SXSW Panel Picker with your thoughts.

3banana Notes has been nominated as one of the best Organization & Productivity applications for the new Google Android smartphone!

3banana is a notebook that you can keep on your phone and on the web at 3banana.com. On your computer, clip stuff from the web or jot stuff down on your private 3banana page, and you also have it handy on your phone. Take a note or tag a photo on your phone, and you also have it organized on your computer. Your notebook is private, but you can selectively share and discuss pages from your 3banana notebook with your friends, like notes about books, restaurants, or wine.

3banana is free and simple to use. It functions like a private blog or private Twitter. We have been adding lots of new features to the Android smartphone app, like hashtags for organizing your ideas, barcode scanning and printing so you can connect virtual notes to physical objects, and easy sharing with Twitter and Facebook.

For a little more detail on 3banana, here’s my presentation from our launch at the Dow Jones Wireless Innovations conference on March 17, 2009. I presented some examples of how you can use 3banana to organize information and notes around the home and attach virtual notes to objects using your own personalized scannable QR Codes, or two dimensional barcodes.

Next up, I will be speaking at CTIA, the International Association of the Wireless Telecommunications Industry, at the Wireless I.T. & Entertainment conference in San Diego, October 7-9, 2009. My talk is in the Mobile Healthcare Track. An easy to use mobile journal comes in very handy if you are tracking your health, especially when you make it less work, more useful, and easier to share with services on the web. Look for some special new features at CTIA on October 7, 2009!

This year, the US will spend $2.5 trillion on healthcare, and no one really understands where the money will go. All we know is that we will spend twice as much as the rest of the modern world and we apparently will get worse results. We also know that there are wide variations in how medicine is practiced within this country, and there seems to be no clear correlation between spending and quality.

Escalating healthcare costs and the current crisis in the healthcare system has something in common with the recent financial meltdown. Both crises are rooted in information challenges: The underlying systems have not been transparent, with too many opportunities to game the system, until eventually the inevitable crisis hits.

Much like subprime mortgage applications, the underlying healthcare data that might reveal the true status and risks of the system are buried on paper and in silos. As a result, the risk is misunderstood, mismanaged, mispriced and ultimately shifted to the next sucker, the last one always being the taxpayer.

Just as the mortgage crisis has its roots in policies designed to help more Americans buy a home, healthcare also is full of good intentions gone awry. The fact is, the system has become far too complex for our old information technologies and methods to handle. Without a new information model we will continue to fly blind.

New Models for Linked Data

In 1998, Tim Berners-Lee, the architect of the web standards that enabled the Internet to fundamentally change the way the world is wired, described his vision for the web:

The Web was designed as an information space, with the goal that it should be useful not only for human-human communication, but also that machines would be able to participate and help. One of the major obstacles to this has been the fact that most information on the Web is designed for human consumption, and even if it was derived from a database with well defined meanings (in at least some terms) for its columns, that the structure of the data is not evident to a robot browsing the web.

The original web enabled the documents of the world to be linked together, and now we can find the world’s smallest needle in the worlds largest haystack in milliseconds. The next generation of the web, as envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee, is about linking data and meaning in much the same way we have already linked documents. This web of linked data enables a marketplace of ideas competing to create smarter and more useful services – without needing loads of capital to redevelop or integrate the old systems. (more…)

Here is the rough transcript of Today’s Healthcare IT Policy Committee Meeting. One of the active Twitterers on #hitpol asked someone with a blog to post it, and since I have been following these meetings on Twitter and via the webcast, here it is.

First, here is what the Health IT Policy Committee does:

The Health IT Policy Committee will make recommendations to the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (HIT) on a policy framework for the development and adoption of a nationwide health information infrastructure, including standards for the exchange of patient medical information. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) provides that the HIT Policy Committee shall at least make recommendations on standards, implementation specifications, and certifications criteria in eight specific areas.

What might look like mundane details in this work actually will determine the infrastructure of our future healthcare system, and we are about to spend a lot of money on it.

The biggest urgency is that if we don’t transform healthcare, our current approach will bankrupt our country. The biggest concerns are that if we act too quickly, we will lock in legacy approaches that have failed us already, and we will miss the opportunity for truly transformative approaches coming out of the Semantic Web and Open Source communities.

Here is the transcript, courtesy of  @cascadia on Twitter:

Event ID: 1364976
Event Started: 7/16/2009 9:50:16 AM ET
Please stand by for realtime captioning.

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You’d — you’dJudy, you’re all set.

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Judy, you’re all set.

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Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the third meeting of the health information technology policy committee. This is a federal advisory committee which means it is being operated in public. We have an audience in the room, telephone lines are open if you care to listen to the meeting, and it is being webcast. Minutes of the meeting will be put on our website in about a week following the meeting. Members of the committee, please remember to identify yourself when you’re speaking so we have proper attributes in the transcript. Let me go around the room and you can introduce yiewrgs beginning with la ton I can’t. (more…)

Last week, a healthcare executive asked me “What is social media”? I point out that it was a healthcare executive because many people in the $2.6 trillion US healthcare field are having intense debates right now about how to make better use of information technology and possibly how to use Web 2.0 technologies to support patients, accelerate research, and improve care. Most people in the healthcare field, however, know they are coming from behind and they are not sure where to start.

Nevertheless, I was taken aback by the question. Working one block from Twitter in the South Park area of San Francisco, I had taken it for granted that social media has become part of everyday life. When I tried to describe the idea that sharing more of yourself on the web can make life richer and more interesting, the good doctor looked at me with confusion and maybe a tinge of disgust. Sharing in healthcare is not social, and to a lot of healthcare people, “social media” sounds more like a communicable disease than a great new idea or solution.

Sharing in healthcare has always been, and probably for most of us should remain, an intensely personal and private act. It is not surprising that social media and healthcare haven’t come together, at least not under the auspices of major health care institutions. Despite some forward thinking efforts of a few pioneers like Mayo Clinic, which recently even sponsored a “Tweetcamp”, most of the use of social media in health has come from grass roots efforts as people find information and support from other people who share similar needs, experiences and circumstances.

Sharing through social media is an act of faith that the benefits of being “out there” with your ideas and content will outweigh the risks to your privacy and personal space. Millions of people have already gotten over than hurdle and have determined that social media makes life richer and more interesting. Social media is about people having a conversation online. For many, this already includes health.

Since I didn’t do such a great job in explaining social media at the time I was confronted with the question, I thought I would list the top 10 social media tools that I use routinely and explain why I use them. Some of these tools could have a profoundly positive impact on health, particularly in chronic care, wellness, and prevention, but I will leave that to a different discussion. These are the tools I use personally.

1. Facebook: Facebook is a website that helps you communicate with the people you already know, or at least with people you don’t mind publicly declaring that you know. It is great for sharing photos, videos, notes about your experiences and adventures, parties and get-togethers, books you are reading — things that you find interesting but would never send out in a mass email. Facebook is not really for work. It’s for friends. Although you shouldn’t expect your kids to “friend” you, it can be a great way to keep an extended family connected. You also can keep in touch with people you used to work with or used to go to school with, people in your community, or people you met along your life journey. Without Facebook, many of those relationships would wither and fade away over time. With Facebook, you maintain a constant awareness of your extended relationships and often find a surprising number of ways to reconnect.

2. Twitter: Twitter is for sharing thoughts and ideas and with people you don’t necessarily already know but with whom you share a common interest. These are the people you might want to get to know better in the future. Although there has been much hoopla about sharing trivial or mundane personal details, Twitter has actually evolved rapidly into a professional media. It is a great way to discover new people and professional connections as you cumulate a group that cares what you have to say. If all you have to say is what you had for breakfast, don’t expect to make a lot of interesting new friends. I used to get my news from the front page of Google News (the newspaper subscription is long gone). Rather than news from a front page determined by popularity, I am much happier to see what the people I follow on Twitter are reading and find interesting. Twitter is a broadcast channel, kind of like a modern ham radio. The whole world can hear your messages, and some of them start to tune in and talk back.

3. Meetup: Meetup is a fabulous platform that has been underrated and underreported in the past few years, despite the fact that milllions of events, mini-conferences, clubs and organizations regularly organize, recruit, and connect through Meetup, all over the world. If you want to meet real live people who share your interests, find interesting speakers, artists, or entrepreneurs sharing their stories and talents, or if you want to learn or try something new, look for a meetup near you. There are groups about everything, from semantic web technologies and artificial intelligence to rock climbing and paint dancing. I try to go to at least one meetup on some topic of interest every month, and it has been better than most conferences that I used to pay thousands of dollars to attend.

4. Wordpress: Wordpress is the leading blogging platform, a content management system that makes it easy to create your own website in a blog format. You can personalize your blog by choosing from thousands of styles and themes, or create your own with just a beginner knowledge of web design. This blog is done using Wordpress, and as you can see I created a style to make it look just like my Twitter page. In addition to changing the theme or style, many people have developed free extensions to the functions and features of Wordpress through plugins. These extensions and themes together with a thriving open source community makes Wordpress an extremely powerful content management system that you can use for just about anything.

5. YouTube: Millions of people use YouTube to discover and share videos. It has replaced television as the primary source of interesting new content that we talk about around the water cooler. YouTube feeds my secret desire to make a movie some day. I have posted a few videos of my own, which are extremely easy to edit and upload from a Mac using iMovie. Get ready for an explosion of real-time video content sharing on YouTube as it gets even easier for anyone with a modern smartphone to shoot, edit and upload short videos without even touching a computer.

6. Basecamp: Basecamp combines the functionality of blogging and discussion boards with to do lists, milestones and file sharing. It is designed and optimized to help small teams collaborate on projects, whether it is organizing a family reunion or developing an iPhone app. Basecamp is famous for not responding to user requests for new features and insisting on a minimalist set of functions. Because of their focus on simplicity, Basecamp is a project management tool that does not require a team a training session to instantly improve productivity and communication. Each project only can be accessed by those people who belong on the project team. Basecamp is a great example of social media tools applied to collaboration online.

7. Slideshare: When I make a presentation at a conference, I like to post the powerpoint file on Slideshare so that the participants can view it and discuss it after and even before then actual presentation. Viewers also can embed your slideshow in their blog, tweet about it, or share it on Facebook if they are so inclined. The presentation format remains the most pervasive way to share and idea and lead a group discussion, and Slideshare is a great way to share your presentations online. It is also a great way to find ideas and discover other the presentations of other people.

8. 3banana: 3banana is the easiest way to take notes online and on your phone and keep them synchronized wirelessly and always handy. I like to jot things down that I want to remember, clip things I find on the web, or draft random ideas that I might want to blog about or share later. I need the fastest and easiest way to get my thoughts and ideas into the system, and know that I can come back to them. With Facebook, Twitter, and even Wordpress, you need to have a pretty good idea that you want to share with the world before you start typing. I like to start with 3banana, because every note is private by default, but if I decide to share a particular note I can easily post a private link to it. Every shared note is then the onramp to a conversation because people you share with can leave comments.

9. Blip.fm: Blip.fm is like Twitter for music. You can find just about any song, add it to your channel as a DJ, and stream it right from the web rather than downloading it to your computer. You find songs because they were posted by other DJs, and then you can see what other songs that person was posting. You can follow and cheer other DJs that you like, and DJs that share your taste might start following you as well. It is a great way to discover music by discovering people with whom you share musical taste. The website design is great and it’s a lot of fun.

10. Ning: For most social networking activities, I like Facebook, but sometimes you are part of a private group or club that wants to have a dedicated private network with the same kind of functionality. Ning makes it easy to set up your own private Facebook-like website for your own group. You can use the content management system to design just about any web functions and modules you like, plus you have the ability to administer groups, blogs, friend list, mailings and all sorts of other things that are useful to just about any membership organization.

There are lots of other great social media tools that help you collaborate on documents, review books and restaurants, make and sell T-shirts, and even become a contributor to the world’s largest encyclopedia.

One question I will get from my professional friends is “What about LinkedIn? Isn’t that a social network?” LinkedIn is a place to post your resume, and maybe other people and recruiters will find it. But it isn’t really social in the same ongoing and interactive manner as my top 10, despite some attempt to add social networking features. If you use it once and rarely go back, it is not a conversation. It’s not social media.

Social media is about sharing and discovering, building and enhancing relationships with other people. It has already changed the world, from social life to the political landscape. Since healthcare is such an important institution in modern society, approaching 20% of our country’s economic activity, there is no doubt that social media will find tremendous uses in health as it will in every other field.

This is my current top 10 social media tools. I would love to hear your top 10, as well as your ideas for how to use them.

This June 8, Ruth Stone will turn 94. Author of 13 books of poetry and recognized by just about every literary prize there is, Ruth recently described on YouTube how she actually lost most of the poems that have ever come to her:

“I never felt that I wrote them anyways. I would feel them coming from way off, and then they would come toward me, and if I didn’t catch them they went through me and went on, so I just figured they were part of the universe, and not me.”

In her TED Talk, Author Elizabeth Gilbert (“Eat, Pray, Love”) described creativity as more like a genie than genius, as something that possesses you from the outside and takes hold of you rather than something that you can possibly generate yourself or take credit for.

That the best ideas come in flurries of inspiration and seem like accidents may be a function of how our complex and wonderful brains work. While we are aware of our one focal point of attention at any given moment, billions of parallel connections are still churning. What are they thinking about?

Whether the source of creative ideas is a muse or something equally mysterious that emerges in the neural networks of our brain, what can we do to call our creativity into action and apply it to the very present needs and challenges around us?

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In “Wrong Prescription,” Dr. Scott Haig correctly suggests that digital medical records are no silver bullet for the costly, inefficient U.S. health system, but for the wrong reasons [TIME, April 6, 2009].

Information technology (IT) improves efficiency with the rules of the game currently in play. If the rules reward treating disease complications but discourage management and prevention, IT will help health-care businesses churn out more complications per hour.

The fundamental flaw in our current system is that despite decades of debate, no one has an adequate stake in preventing those costly complications in the first place.

Steve Brown — Published in TIME

 
3banana Presents Android Smart Phone App at Dow Jones Wireless Innovations 2009 – Presentation Transcript
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Matthew Holt, the author of this presentation on Health 2.0, is the founder of The Health Care Blog and the Health 2.0 Conference, an event that has defined a new paradigm for ehealth and brings together a new generation of creative thought leaders. This year, the Health 2.0 Conference will be held jointly with the Center for Information Therapy on April 22-23, 2009 in Boston.

My Reaction to Health 2.0 and the Convergence with Information Therapy:

Health 2.0 makes Information Therapy practical and possible. Health 2.0 is about individuals creating and sharing more of themselves online in a way that improves their own health, the health of others they are connected to, and the health of the community as a whole.

Information therapy is based on the idea that what we think and believe — the content of our minds — can influence our health, either directly or through our behavior. We can change and influence the content of our minds and therefore also our health through information media.

Personalized health, however, is highly diverse, and if we had to design the right information therapy for the right person at the right time, we would never finish the job. So how does Health 2.0 make information therapy possible?

The needs in health care are complex, personalized, and ever changing. How can information therapy derived from a scripted template ever fully address them? Without Health 2.0, the greater the number and diversity of people with health needs, the more infinitely complex the situation becomes.

Health 2.0, on the other hand, changes the information therapy equation. The participants are co-creators, selectors, navigators, recommenders, and reviewers of content, so the more people involved and the greater their diversity, the more possible it is to meet an ever greater diversity of needs.

While some traditionalists might argue about the need for evidence-based information, the reality is that rich and diverse Health 2.0 communities are enabling an acceleration of evidence gathering. In the social media world, randomized controlled trials or A/B and multivariate experiments on the impact of information and ideas on user behavior are conducted every day.

This same quantitative and experimental methodology of the modern Web 2.0 Internet, when applied in Health 2.0, will start to advance our knowledge about information therapy, so that we may discover how the right information, at the right time, and in the right way can truly improve health.

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NEWS RELEASE: Health Hero Network Says Recent Successes of Deployments with Medicare, VA Signal New Era of Telehealth. Successful Multi-Year Trials at VA, Medicare Show Telehealth-based Health Care Interventions Can Improve Care, Reduce Costs.

PALO ALTO Ca., January 23, 2009 Health Hero Network said today that the first large-scale, multi-year rollouts and evaluations of its Health Buddy® System have shown success in helping improve the care of high-cost Medicare beneficiaries and veterans while reducing costs and hospitalizations — signaling a new era of telehealth that will reshape an American healthcare landscape strained by an aging population, a reduction in caregivers and shrinking financial resources.

VA Results reported in TELEMEDICINE and e-HEALTH, VOL. 14 NO. 10. Care Coordination/Home Telehealth: The Systematic Implementation of Health Informatics, Home Telehealth, and Disease Management to Support the Care of Veteran Patients with Chronic Conditions. Adam Darkins, M.D., Patricia Ryan, R.N., M.S., Rita Kobb, M.N., A.P.R.N., Linda Foster, M.S.N., R.N., Ellen Edmonson, R.N., M.P.H., Bonnie Wakefield, Ph.D., R.N., and Anne E. Lancaster, B.Sc. Department of Veterans Affairs, Office of Care Coordination Services, Washington, D.C.

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