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!

Poet Ruth Stone describes her creative inspiration

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?

Declaring our intentions to ourselves and to others is powerful because it sets in motion the rest of our brain, the part that is out of our current field of view, but which keeps scanning and processing and thinking. That is why the key to innovation is the clear definition of a problem. Once a problem is well defined and focused, ideas may surprise us when we least expect them. We truly may wake up in the middle of the night with a novel idea or even solution.

John F. Kennedy’s challenge to go to the moon was so successful because he defined one clear and unambiguous problem. Though complex and varied in the details of its execution, the moon shot was crystal clear in the statement of the challenge. Everyone could understand the goal. Everyone could visualize it. Many minds could synchronize.

In contrast, the current challenge of climate change is vexing in its ambiguity. Al Gore’s climate crisis challenge in “An Inconvenient Truth” generates in us more stress than inspiration. “All of the above” might be the right answer to the question of what to do, but such a task is hard to lead. We can’t even start to visualize the solution.

With the large and amorphous cloud of problems and challenges in the world today, our brains do not know were to start. On the other hand, when we define and envision a very clear mission, the wheels can turn and the neurons can fire, even when they are not in the focal point of our current and immediate attention.

Jeff Immelt, CEO of GE, one of the most powerful companies in the world, defined his company’s mission as focused on the great sustainability challenges of the century — water, energy, health. For GE, the reason to engage in the great challenges of the century is because the solutions represent the great opportunities of the century.

When it comes to the big challenges of the day, even when the problems are broken down into sub-problems and sub-domains, they are still daunting. They appear to require large institutions and large amounts of capital rather than individual creativity. It appears we need to “boil the ocean” in our attempt to slow it’s warming.

Where can our own individual creativity have an impact, and what intentions can we declare for ourselves as individuals that will rouse our muse to inspire us?

At the World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi on January 20 of this year, the World Wildlife Federation director Jean-Paul Jeanrenaud presented the most focused statement of the challenges facing our planet: The people of the earth currently consume resources at a rate that actually requires more than one planet earth – another three planets if everyone consumed resources like developed countries. But we only have one earth, and we need a one-planet strategy.

A one-planet strategy can be translated into a one-community, one-home, one-person strategy–something that we all can ponder.

To muse is to meditate on something. A muse is a guiding spirit and source of inspiration. Amuse is to cause joy and laughter. Ruth Stone’s poetry creates visions of a simpler life in a magical, funny, and beautiful earth. Today, Ruth Stone is my muse.

April 20, 2009, Page 9

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

Taking notes can translate a fleeting conception in our brain into action, and that action usually involves sharing our experience or idea with someone else. As we carry more and more powerful technology around with us every moment of the day, might it be possible that we can start to translate more of our otherwise forgotten notes-to-self and fleeting experiences into shared experiences? Into the start of conversations that make our lives richer?

In 1995, Bill Gates concluded his book The Road Ahead with a prescient but disquieting idea: Carrying around mobile technology connected to networks would lead to the fully “documented life”:

“Your wallet PC will be able to keep audio, time, location, and eventually even video records of everything that happens to you. It will be able to record every word you say and every word said to you, as well as your body temperature, your blood pressure, the barometric pressure, and a variety of other data about you and your surroundings.… It will be able to track your interactions with the network—all of the commands you issue, the messages you send, the people you call or who call you.”

What made the “documented life” such a scary idea was the notion that we were not the ones doing the documenting. Someone else, enabled by pervasive computing technology, was documenting us, and using our data for some other purpose—perhaps understanding insurance risk, perhaps figuring out how to best persuade us to buy something, perhaps something more nefarious. The passive voice of the “documented life” left open the question: Documented by whom? The function of technology might be one of monitoring us rather than empowering us.

Sometimes monitoring can be a good thing—health monitoring, for example. If we have a chronic health condition like diabetes or heart disease, then we might want the reassurance that someone is monitoring us in order to identify problems early, before something gets worse. Health, after all, is rife with cognitive dissonance: We often do not do or pay attention to the things that we know consciously are healthy or are the right things to do. Remote health monitoring can help us share that responsibility with someone else, someone who can coach us and support us.

Remote health monitoring is, even if good for you, usually implemented by someone else with their own interests in mind. A telehealth monitoring device can query me at my bedside:

How are you feeling today, [insert patient name]?
Did you take your [insert prescription name] medications?
Do you have any new symptoms of your [diabetes, heart disease, asthma, COPD]?
What is your [blood glucose, blood pressure, weight, peak respiratory flow, temperature, blood oxygen saturation, pulse]?

Of course, remote monitoring systems can be more thoughtful and personalized than the example above, but the fact that remote patient monitoring encounters are pre-scripted makes them inherently impersonal, no matter how good the algorithms are at inserting my name and my needs in the right place at the right time. And the stated purpose is the automation and increased productivity of someone who otherwise might have to pay for my hospital bill.

Social media, on the other hand, is all about me sharing my experience, through my networks, with others that I choose, or with the world at large, if I so choose.

Wikipedia, the global experiment in sharing knowledge that has replaced every other encyclopedia, currently defines social media as follows:

Social media are primarily Internet- and mobile-based tools for sharing and discussing information among human beings. The term most often refers to activities that integrate technology, telecommunications and social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio. This interaction, and the manner in which information is presented, depends on the varied perspectives and “building” of shared meaning among communities, as people share their stories and experiences.

This is the current definition of social media, but it could change. In fact, if you are so inclined, you can register at Wikipedia right now and try your hand at improving on this or any other article. But you better be a great writer and know your references, or the TheRedPenOfDoom will undo your work. Wikipedia has become so robust and accurate because the collective intelligence of an extensive community, constantly checking and curating the content, is far greater than any individual writer or editor. In Wikipedia, together we are documenting the life of the human race.

Social media enables a documented life, but unlike The Road Ahead, the subject is clear: We are the primary actors doing the documenting. We can share our photos on Flickr, our videos on YouTube, our friends on Facebook, our musical tastes on MySpace, what we are doing right now on Twitter or FriendFeed, news and websites that interest us on Digg or StumbledUpon or Delicious, our resume on LinkedIn, our contact information on Plaxo, our ideas on WordPress or Blogger, and much more.

Despite the plethora of opportunities to share using social media, we remain challenged by the fact each service only feels appropriate for a subset of our ideas, for a subset of people with whom we might want to share. With all the fragmentation, sharing becomes work. But in the end, each service aims to do the same fundamental thing: Help us record and share our ideas. And each service is based on the same fundamental premise: That our lives are richer when we share.

When we participate in social media today, we need have a good sense of what we want to share, with whom, and with which type of media, before we even login. It doesn’t matter that every idea I might want to share starts with a private mental note to myself, that every idea that starts with a mental note might evolve to include many media types and might be something to share with many different audiences. I need to be comfortable enough with what I want to say, to whom, and how I want to express it to thrust myself into a particular public space when I login.

What I am looking for is a better way to capture and share my thoughts and experiences—first as mental notes to myself, and then later, after I refine and edit them, after I decide with whom and when and where, to share them. I am looking for something that requires no effort, no work, yet can help me record rich and detailed information. Something that can capture my shorthand chicken scratches, but knows what I mean enough to fill in the blanks and complete the sentences. I am looking for something unscripted, yet intelligent, so that the right services can do something useful with the information I collect in ways that help me.

Every WordPress blog, every Facebook update, every Digg news post, started with an experience or an idea that, for whatever reason, someone thought might be worth remembering. When we want to remember something, it is because we want to act on it; if not now, then someday. Time slips away, but some of the stream of ideas and experiences beg to be captured so that they can be shared. Each note that we want to remember has a purpose; it is an idea that seeks to achieve some result. That result is most often achieved by sharing.

Note taking is a social act. A fully documented life enabled by technology might scare us, but a life that we document more fully, so that we can share more fully, is one that just might be richer.

Partners in Health has been improving chronic care in rural communities in Rwanda through an innovative model of care inspired by Paul Farmer. The regional hospital sees its mission as training community members to extend care into the community and monitor patients at home in order to prevent disease complications and the need for hospitalization. The hospital tracks symptoms and medications using electronic medical record (EMR) systems based on open source technologies. Meanwhile, the United States continues to neglect reforming our crisis-oriented health system because “we can’t afford it”, and the cost of chronic care continues to explode as the population ages. With far fewer resources, but with more creativity and courage, innovative leaders in Rwanda are creating new models of care based on prevention because they can’t afford not to. Maybe we can learn something from Rwanda.

In the most innovative models of care on both continents, health care providers have discovered that delivering better care with fewer resources can be possible with a proactive approach to supporting and monitoring patients at home rather than waiting for the inevitable complications of neglect. On both continents, healthcare providers have discovered that technology can be a useful tool to improve the effectiveness of care providers and to increase rather than replace personal touch.

In the United States, our healthcare system too often still penalizes rather than rewards prevention, especially in the largest fee-for-service system, Medicare. When it comes to innovation in disease management and prevention, we claim that we “can’t afford it,” while in a much poorer country in the heart of Africa, the government and the health system are working together to embrace innovation in home and community-based care because they can’t afford not to do it.

We have something to learn from innovations arising in places like Rwanda, where necessity truly is the mother of invention. Learning from such innovations can help us expose some of our own false dichotomies that too often have become an excuse to stifle innovation.

On Lok High Tech Chronic Care Transcript

• Slide 1: High Tech and Personal Touch: Case Studies in Chronic Care from United States and Africa Steve Brown, Founder and Former CEO, Health Hero Network On Lok Lifeways Conference, October 22, 2008 Sustainable Long Term Care: Ethics, Technology and International Perspectives
• Slide 2: Agenda   Background – Health Hero Network   Chronic Care Models   Example from US   Example from Africa   False Dichotomies in Chronic Care   A Better Mental Model
• Slide 3: Background: Health Hero Network We recognized a problem Too much effort spent treating the complications of chronic disease, and not enough on preventing them We had an idea A technology platform to enable a better model of care based on identifying problems early and changing behavior
• Slide 4: Health Buddy in 2008: Patients receive better support and monitoring at home   Daily check-in starts with “how are you feeling today”   Reporting symptoms and device readings like glucose and weight   Receiving supportive feedback and education
• Slide 5: Health Buddy 2008: Nurses can identify problems early and prevent complications   Dashboard to see how all patients are doing today.   Patients needs are triaged using red, yellow, green coding   Full picture includes symptoms, behavior and knowledge
• Slide 6: Why is innovation addressing the chronic care problem so painfully slow?   It is well known that monitoring high risk patients at home can improve care and reduce hospitalizations.   ABC World News Tonight featured Health Buddy way back in 1999 and predicted a new model of care for the 21st century.   The business of healthcare – especially in Medicare – still rewards treating complications far more than preventing them
• Slide 7: Meanwhile in Rwanda Africa, necessity is the mother of invention   Community health workers support and monitor at-risk patients at home   Focus on the simple things that have the biggest impact   Everything starts with “how are you feeling today”
• Slide 8: Partners in Health is a community-based model focused on prevention and education   The regional hospital sees its mission as preventing hospital admissions   Training community health workers to extend care into the community   Keeping organized and tracking patients with an open source electronic medical record system
• Slide 9: False Dichotomies in Chronic Care   High Tech versus Personal Touch   Improving Care versus Saving Money   Information Technology versus Simplicity
• Slide 10: False Dichotomy: Tech versus Touch. Explain the growth in social media! Life can be richer when we share more of it. 10 Lifeways Conference – Steve Brown 10/22/08
  Slide 11: False Dichotomy: Improving Care versus Saving Money
• Slide 12: False Dichotomy: Hi Tech versus Simplicity How About a Better Mental Model! Value Potential Value Cost Opportunity Realized Value Complexity
• Slide 13: Content can change the shape of the Potential Value Curve   Example: congestive heart failure, the leading hospital admission in Medicare   Focus on areas where you can make a difference.   Start with the simple things first
• Slide 14: Design can change the shape of the Realized Value Curve   Simplicity must be a strength
• Slide 15: Disruptive technology has radically changed the shape of the Price Curve   Cloud computing and resources   Open source tools for everything   Consumer electronics with open APIs   Result: 100x or greater capital efficiency
• Slide 16: Conclusions   High Tech can increase Personal Touch   Technology is just a tool, not a transformation   Apply the mental model to choose wisely   We can gain insights and inspiration in how to improve care and leverage technology from innovative models of care in highly resource constrained environments

Abstract:

In the last century, technological innovation was propelled by a race to conquer nature and spread a modern lifestyle premised on an unspoken belief in unlimited resources. Now we find with ourselves with depleting resources and unsustainable systems for healthcare, energy, agriculture, water, and the environment. As Plato wrote over 2000 years ago, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” The great unmet needs of the current century relate to sustainability: How can we create sustainable systems for quality healthcare, agriculture, energy, and other sectors? These challenges are uniquely appropriate for innovation in life sciences, with new solutions enabled by the convergence of biotechnology and information technology. With the new challenges of our time, a new generation of entrepreneurs, scientists, and inventors will be inspired to apply their energy and ideas by starting new ventures. This talk will describe an entrepreneurial approach to life sciences innovation and will discuss how to create and foster an innovation culture targeting the great needs and challenges of our time.

Bio-VC Innovation Transcript

• Slide 1: Creatng
a
Winning
Life
Sciences Innovation
Strategy
in
an
Era
of
Scarcity; Steve
Brown,
Chairman,
Billionlights
Foundation; Founder
and
Former
CEO,
Health
Hero
Network (acquired
by
Robert
Bosch
GmbH);
Saturday,
October
11,
2008
 Dalian,
China
• Slide 2: Necessity, who is the mother of invention.
Plato,
360
B.C.
• Slide 3: Creatng
a
Winning
Innovation
Strategy; An
Entrepreneur’s
Perspective; Roots
of
Life
Sciences
Innovation: 1. Identify
Great
Problems; 2. Seek
New
Connections; 3. Tap
Into
Passion; Questions
to
ask
Innovative
Companies
• Slide 4: Health
Hero
Network
Story;
We
recognized
a
problem: Too
much
effort
spent
treating
the
complications
of
chronic
disease,
and
not enough
on
preventing
them; We
had
an
idea: A
technology
platform
to
enable
a
better model
of
care
based
on
identifying problems
early
and
changing
behavior
• Slide 5: We
Filed
Some Patents
• Slide 6: Raised
Capital
and
Built
a
Technology
Platform
• Slide 7: Won
Key
Customers
and Proved
the
Idea
Worked
• Slide 8: Lobbied
Government
to
Recognize Remote
Monitoring
• Slide 9: Showed
Promise
in
Medicare,
• Slide 10: Then
a
Large
Company
Acquired
Us.
• Slide 11: We
Also
Had
Some
of
This
in
Between…
• Slide 12: Innovation Key #1: Identify Great Problems
• Slide 13: This
is
a
New
Era
with
New
Necessity;
20th
Century:
 Conquer
Nature;  Assume
Unlimited
Resources;  Physical
Sciences
and Industrial Technology; 21st
Century:
 Respect
Nature; Assume
Limited
Resources; Life
Sciences
and Information
Technology
• Slide 14: Emerging
and
Drug
Resistant
Disease
• Slide 15: Lifestyle
that
Begets
Chronic
Disease
• Slide 16: The
Most
Basic
Needs:
Food
and
Water
• Slide 17: Sustainability:
Promise
and
Peril
• Slide 18: Not
Everyone
Agrees
on
Solutions
• Slide 19: Solutions
Include
Technology
and
Behavior
• Slide 20: Every
Problem
is
Part
of
a
Network
• Slide 21: Innovation Key #2: Seek New Connections
• Slide 22: Innovation
Happens
at
the
Connections
• Slide 23: Multiple
Paths
Address
Same
Problems: Both
innovations
improve
diabetes
care; Both
combine
preexistng
elements
in
new
ways; One
is
a
chemical
entity,
the
other
IT; One
treats
the
human
body,
the
other
behavior
• Slide 24: Life
Science
is
Information
Science
Part
of
the
DNA
code
to
determine
eye
color… Part
of
the
binary
code
to
make
an
eye
image…
• Slide 25: Valuable
Innovations
Simplify
Complexity… and
Stand
on
Many
Shoulders
• Slide 26: Beauty is truth, truth Beauty, ‐ that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. John Keats
• Slide 27: Innovation Key #3: Tap Into Passion
• Slide 28: Is
it
Popular
Passion
or
Real
Passion?
• Slide 29: Barometer
of
Popular
Passion
• Slide 30: Pusng
Popular
Passion
in
Perspective
• Slide 31: Pusng
Popular
Passion
in
Perspective
• Slide 32: Pusng
Popular
Passion
in
Perspective
• Slide 33: New
Connections
are
Stirring
• Slide 34: People
Desire
Connection…Passion
is
Infectious
• Slide 35: Why Passion Matters
• Slide 36: Questions
to
ask
Innovative
Companies: What
is
the
big
idea? Does
this
company
address
a
big
problem,
or
is
it
a
 “tuck
in”
to
someone
else’s
big
idea? What
is
the
new connection? Where
is
the
solution
on
the
overall
network
of
 approaches
addressing
the
problem? Do
innovators
stand
on
many
shoulders
to
find
new connections
and
simplify
complexity? Where
is
the
root
of
the
passion? Is
there
a
source
of
passion
strong
enough
to
attract the
best
people
and
enable
them
to
persevere?
• Slide 37: What Passion Looks Like

A patent recently issued to Health Hero Network describes a simple but powerful idea that addresses the pandemic challenge by enabling near-real-time syndromic surveillance that can be adapted on the fly. Easy-to-navigate survey devices collect data from hospital waiting rooms, school nurses, and other points of care. The survey script can be changed and updated remotely by public health authorities based on the latest information. The devices report data to central computers that look for any unusual patterns and then alert public health authorities immediately so that they can investigate further.

Disease outbreaks that look like the flu at the beginning can be hard to detect early because flu-like symptoms are common and are not always reported. The first cases of an outbreak may be spread out over many different clinics, hospitals, and schools in a metropolitan area. Unusual patterns might emerge only when looking at a broader cross section of a region. The other challenge is that we may not know what data is relevant and important at the beginning stages of an outbreak. Where it might have been fever, rash, and working in a mail room for one threat, it might be diarrhea and travel to a specific region or eating a particular food in another threat.

While many efforts have been discussed and may even be underway to facilitate early detection of outbreaks by sifting through electronic medical records and pharmacy data, the most important information might be missed because no one knew to ask the right question. When we do figure out what question to ask, we won’t have time to add fields to medical records or change forms. Our public health authorities need the ability to change the script as soon as they learn new information.

Despite the simplicity of the approach, it is not easy to organize health systems around new ways of doing things. On the other hand, maybe we won’t need to. Public health surveys could be pushed to iPhone users, for example. There just might be enough iPhones out there by now to provide a statistically significant sample size enabling highly sensitive early detection of potential public health emergencies.

More information on Health Hero Network patents.

Yes, We Can! – Si, Se Puede!

Song & video by Will.i.am of The Black Eyed Peas. Inspired by Barack Obama’s ‘Yes We Can’ speech.

http://www.yeswecansong.com

http://www.barackobama.com

It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation.

Yes we can.

It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail toward freedom.

Yes we can.

It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness.

Yes we can.

It was the call of workers who organized; women who reached for the ballots; a President who chose the moon as our new frontier; and a King who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the Promised Land.

Yes we can to justice and equality.

Yes we can to opportunity and prosperity.

Yes we can heal this nation.

Yes we can repair this world.

Yes we can.

We know the battle ahead will be long, but always remember that no matter what obstacles stand in our way, nothing can stand in the way of the power of millions of voices calling for change.

We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics…they will only grow louder and more dissonant ……….. We’ve been asked to pause for a reality check. We’ve been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope.

But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.

Now the hopes of the little girl who goes to a crumbling school in Dillon are the same as the dreams of the boy who learns on the streets of LA; we will remember that there is something happening in America; that we are not as divided as our politics suggests; that we are one people; we are one nation; and together, we will begin the next great chapter in the American story with three words that will ring from coast to coast; from sea to shining sea –

Yes. We. Can.

Featuring: Jesse Dylan, Will.i.am, Common, Scarlett Johansson, Tatyana Ali, John Legend, Herbie Hancock, Kate Walsh, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Adam Rodriquez, Kelly Hu, Adam Rodriquez, Amber Valetta, Eric Balfour, Aisha Tyler, Nicole Scherzinger and Nick Cannon

The images above came from a live Webcast of a gastric bypass surgery performed at Tufts-New England Medical Center in Boston by Dr. Scott Shikora, Chief of Bariatric Surgery at Tufts-NEMC, along with bariatric surgeons Dr. Michael Tarnoff and Dr. Julie Kim. Click on the images to watch the complete video on YouTube.

You also can watch Dr. Stan Hoehn perform a minimally invasive gastric bypass at Shawnee Mission Medical Center in Kansas by clicking on the image below.

A Consensus Panel convened by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) indicates bariatric surgery for people with a body mass index (BMI) of 40 or higher, or people with a BMI of 35 or higher with one or more related comorbid conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease.

Bariatric surgery is regarded by leading physicians on the panel as a lifesaving tool that enables, or in fact forces, the patient to change lifestyle and eating habits.

With 100 million Americans struggling with at least one chronic condition, and over 60 million Americans considered to be clinically obese, we can expect a lot of bariatric surgery ahead. Can we really address the issue of obesity by forcing ourselves to change behavior under the knife, or are there other ways to address this epidemic?

Much has been blogged about the ex-employee of video game company Midway and his purported plan to sue Nintendo for stealing the idea for the Nintendo Wii controller. Bloggers and commenters are raising two lines of questions: First, if accelerometers for detecting motion were around before 2000, how could Goschy claim to have invented the accelerometer-based game controller? Second, if Goschy did invent the video game motion controller over seven years ago, why did it take so long for this to come out?

Accelerometers may have been around for a while, but Pat Goschy’s video still looks like it could be full of inventive ideas given the fact that this was over seven years ago. It is not the invention of the accelerometer that is in question, and maybe not even the accelerometer as a game controller. The inventive steps may have been a series of innovations around design, coding, and calibration that would give game players the agility and speed to take on B. Knoximov in Ready 2 Rumble from the comfort of their living rooms.

Inventing is about taking that next creative step past the current frontier and making things a little better. The fact that Goschy was building motion-based controllers and hacking a Dreamcast interface in what looks like a very workable system seven years before the technology matured and became popular tells us there probably could have been some patentable material back in 2000.

There are two patents that list Goschy as a co-inventor: Patent 6,545,661, filed on June 21, 1999, entitled Video Game Systems Having A Control Unit With An Accelerometer For Controlling A Video Game, and patent 6,315,673, filed on October 5, 1999, entitled Motion Simulator For A Video Game. Both patents are assigned to Midway. These patents do not appear to claim the motion controller from the Goschy video. The 661 patent is the closest, but it is really about sensing light from the screen to know if you hit your target with a game controller gun.

The light sensor is required in all the claims. Here is the exact text of the first independent claim:

1. A video game system comprising:
a game controller;
a hand-held control unit coupled to the game controller and housing an accelerometer and a light sensor,
the accelerometer sensing tilt of the control unit with respect to an axis, the accelerometer producing an acceleration signal indicating the tilt of the control unit with respect to the axis,
the game controller processing the acceleration signal to control the movement of a game character on a video display coupled to the game controller and further processing the acceleration signal to control directional navigation of the game character through a game environment, said navigation corresponding to the tilt of the hand-held control unit,
the light sensor detecting one or more light pixels from the video display corresponding to a direction in which the hand-held control unit is pointing, the light sensor producing a detection signal to the game controller, the game controller determining from the detection signal the light pixels from the video display detected by the light sensor.

The question is not how did Goschy get a patent on this. He didn’t. The real question is why didn’t Midway patent the controller that Goschy is showing in the video? That would have been valuable, but then again, hindsight is always 20/20.

According to some of the blogs, Goschy circulated the video among Midway employees back in 1999 to show his idea, but the company obviously didn’t file patents and didn’t develop the technology either. This is a common fate of many great inventions. If you are early enough to have something truly new and innovative, and you are sufficiently ahead of the crowd to get great patents, chances are you are way ahead of the market and way ahead of the marketing people as well.

Great ideas and great patents need to be five to ten years too early, and they are usually only recognized in hindsight. Thank you, Pat Goschy, for reminding us of the many years of innovation and creative work that leads up to what most people see as an instant sensation when a product like the Nintendo Wii becomes a hit. We also shouldn’t forget that Nintendo has been a grandfather of the modern video game field, at it for the past two decades, and who knows what they also have in their labs that started many years ago.

The question is not why the video took so long to come out. The market has only just now emerged. If the video had come out earlier, we never would have found it.

It is not just the fact that Bill Clinton and The Clinton Foundation negotiated a deal on antiretroviral (ARV) drugs. It’s not just the fact that the once complex cocktail regimen of pills can be combined into one generic pill. It is because an army of community health workers visit patients in their villages every day, checking in to make sure everything is OK, and to make sure that everyone is taking their medicine.

Daily support and monitoring at home, working with informal caregivers in the community to surface problems early so that bigger problems can be prevented: That is the key to improving quality of care with limited resources.

Dr. Paul Farmer, as chronicled in the book “Mountains Beyond Mountains” by Tracy Kidder, realized this in Haiti a decade ago, and now the Partners in Health “accompagnateur” system is being rolled out in developing countries around the world. Is there something we might learn from Rwanda?