brown2020

Last month, I had the chance to speak at South By Southwest 2010 — 15 minutes of fame in the Future 15 mobile track of the world’s hippest interactive conference. I was invited to talk about the Android ecosystem, where Snaptic is a leading developer with over 2 million active installs of our note-taking and geo-tagging applications. Here’s my presentation, entitled “Augmenting Your Brain With Android.”

SXSW started as a music and film festival, but has emerged as one of the biggest affairs for the Internet and new interactive technology. Since tech turned the music industry on its head and is in the process of disrupting the film business as well, it makes sense to combine tech with film and music. 2010 also was the first year SXSW had a track dedicated to mobile, which also makes sense as we enter another phase shift with the next billion connections to the internet coming through smart mobile devices.

With such powerful, always on, always connected technology in our hands around the clock, we posed the question of what this means for our brain. How can we use smart mobile technology to become smarter in managing the increased flow of information? With the flood of content generated by others people and important to other people, what is happening to the content that is most important to us?

Snaptic is developing technology to augment your brain, and we are looking to the brain for design inspiration. There are no database schemas, no tables with rows and columns, in your brain. Instead, your brain is a vast network of synaptically connected notes that grows and evolves as you capture and connect information that is important to you.

The information model for Snaptic note-taking applications is a network of interconnected elements of data, retaining and using context so that your notes make more sense and are easier to find with less effort. We have opened our notes platform to developers, making it easy to capture and connect information from any app.

We can’t do it alone, which is why we are open-sourcing more of our technology every day and inviting more developers to work with us to create a new information space designed like the brain and for the brain. Check out http://github.com/snaptic to follow our open source projects, and check out http://snaptic.com/events for information on our upcoming developer challenge and developer conference.

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. (more…)

This presentation accompanied a talk I gave recently to a group of health care executives at an ABL Roundtable event in San Francisco. I was asked to discuss the meaning, importance and potential application of social media in health care.

Social media is often defined as “people having a conversation online.” In contrast to mass media produced by a few, social media is generated by grass roots efforts of millions of people. It has become the largest and most interesting use of the web.

Despite the fact that health care is one of the most information intensive fields, the health care industry notoriously lags behind every other industry in its adaptation of information technology. To get our initial bearings, we decided to kick off the discussion by asking the audience to describe their own personal use of social media.

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For a decade now, just about every service industry has taken for granted the benefits of information technology: Increased productivity, faster and better service, and access to services from home. All actionable information is recorded and shared electronically so that ever smarter information systems can help us anticipate and prevent problems. Whether it is retail, financial services, or even fast food, productivity in everything has gone through the roof.

Every service industry except health care, that is.

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Last week I spoke at the On Lok Lifeways Conference on October 22, 2008 in San Francisco, entitled “Sustainable Long Term Care: Ethics, Technology and International Perspectives.” The organizers asked me to draw insights from my experience in developing new models for chronic care as the founder and former CEO of Health Hero Network, and to compare that to what I had learned while traveling in Rwanda with Partners in Health last year. Here is my presentation.

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.

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Here are the slides from Steve Brown’s keynote presentation at the Bio-VC BIT Life Sciences’ Bio-Venture Capital Forum 2008, Dalian China, October 11, 2008. The Presentation discussed how to create a winning Life Sciences Innovation Strategy in an Era of Scarcity.

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.

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This is my presentation from the plenary session of Silver Economy, a conference held in Maastricht, Netherlands in November 2006.

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This is the presentation I gave for the Emerging Opportunities in Home Management and Health Applications session of the Connections Digital Living Conference hosted by Parks Associates and CEA, May 4, 2006.

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In this presentation at the World Congress for Health & Human Capital Management in Wasnington DC, I described a new Chronic Care Model based on the Health Buddy system and designed to align incentives and enable health care providers to monitor and support patients at home, identifying problems early and educating patients in order to prevent expensive and painful complications of chronic disease.

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This is a presentation I gave on February 22, 2005 at a conference in London about a common theme and issue that affects people and governments in Europe, Asia and America: How can we create a better model of care to serve the rising incidence of chronic illness and the aging population?

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Health Hero Network CEO Steve Brown speaks at the eHealth 2003 Conference in London, England, in the eHealth and Patient Centred Care session on October 16. The presentation entitled Networks for Patient Centred Care in Chronic Disease describes how health care providers can proactively monitor and educate patients in a model of care enabled by eHealth networks and technologies.

You can find the presentation on the eHealth International website at: http://www.ehealthinternational.org/pdfs/Brown.pdf

London, England and Mountain View, CA – October 15, 2003 – Health Hero Network, Inc. Chief Executive Officer Steve Brown will speak tomorrow at the eHealth 2003 Conference in London, England. Mr. Brown is participating in the “eHealth and Patient Centred Care” session at 11:30 am on October 16.

In a presentation entitled “Networks for Patient Centred Care in Chronic Disease,” Mr. Brown will describe how health care providers can help patients prevent the worsening of chronic disease by proactively monitoring and educating patients in a model of care enabled by eHealth networks and technologies. Mr. Brown will review chronic care programs in the United States that have resulted in improved quality of care, increased patient and provider satisfaction, and reduced cost. Mr. Brown also will discuss policy initiatives that will encourage wider adoption of patient centred chronic care by emphasizing continuity of care for patients with chronic illness rather than episodic, crisis-driven care.

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Plenary Presentation at the DMAA – Disease Management Association of America Annual Meeting entitled New Models of Disease Management: Improving Quality and Access through Remote Health Monitoring Technology

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Steve Brown’s Presentation delivered at the Telemedicine in Care Delivery conference in Pisa, Italy, June 13 2002.

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