Crowdsourcing in Medicine

Today, more than 2.4 billion individuals, one third of the world’s population, are online. This is phenomenal. These networked individuals have access to real-time information and a means by which they can communicate and collaborate with anywhere in the world. Innovators are beginning to find ways to tap into this online collective resource through crowdsourcing, the outsourcing of a difficult task to the online community in order to complete the task more efficiently and accurately.

 Below are some of the exciting ways crowdsourcing is improving medical care and delivery:

 Scientific Research: Anyone can play Fold.it, an online game for protein structure prediction. By transforming the process of protein folding into a fun and challenging game, researchers have been able to engage the online community in a way that both players and researchers benefit. The proteins produced by players help researchers study diseases including HIV/AIDS and Alzheimer’s.

 Diagnosis: Recent examples of diagnosis by Facebook and widely broadcasted online posting reveal the potential benefits of sharing medical problems with the online community.While some may not feel comfortable with sharing their medical information with the public, there is room to innovate ways patients can receive the benefits of crowdsourcing while maintaining privacy. 

 Medical Treatment: Websites such as Webcina and PatientsLikeMe are allowing doctors and patients to share information, questions  and support in online communities to help patients navigate the healing process together, rather than alone. 

 Medical Transcription: The process of transcribing doctors’ voice recordings and written records into an electronic form is a tedious and slow process. Crowdsourcing this task to a broad base of transcriptionists online is a cost-effective and efficient way to get the work done.  

 Technology is empowering ordinary people by giving them the resources to accomplish tasks that even experts are unable to do. I think these examples are only the beginning of ways we can use our diverse online communities to continue to drive innovation and revolutionize healthcare for the better. 

Last Day of Class: The Importance of Curation

erinyr:

It is becoming increasingly important to find “voices” that we trust online. Although search engines spit out pages and pages of information, only a fraction is beneficial. A curation can provide a unique and valuable perspective. 

“People Staring at Computers”: Privacy in the Age of Technology

“When Art, Apple and the Secret Service Collide”

This is a fascinating article about an artist who was trying to investigate the effect that our use of technology (sitting in front of a computer) has on our facial expressions, or lack thereof.  He speculates that because of excessive computer usage, we become less expressive and less social.  That premise alone is pretty interesting, but the article also explores questions of privacy in public spaces; to investigate his hypothesis, the artist downloaded an app that would take photos of people’s faces as they used computers in Apple stores.  Do we automatically consent to have our photos shared if we are in public?  Was his project “art”?
The beginning of the article also discusses his other projects, which relate Quantified Self— such as his Twitter account which shares everything he typed.  I just thought the idea of quantifying everything for public access was worth sharing.  

Technology in EMS

The advent of ever more portable, effective medical technology gives EMS a wealth of new resources to use for patient care.

The use of ultrasound in EMS to diagnose internal bleeding, collapsed lungs, and damage to solid organs is quickly gaining traction. The images seen during an ultrasound in an ambulance could easily be broadcast to a radiologist for review, or even the phone of an EM physician or trauma surgeon waiting for the patient to arrive at the hospital.

Obtaining a verbal medical history and physically assessing a patient are two of the most difficult skills that an EMT must develop. Complex or rare conditions may warrant additional questioning or assessment that the EMT may not know when or how to do. FaceTime is an excellent option for bringing physicians on-scene with EMTs to assess patients. Along with patient assessment, FaceTime can be used to give physicians the bigger picture, by showing them the environment that the patient is coming from, which may give clues as to their medical problem.

Not all EMTs are certified to read ECGs, but ECG data may be easily transmitted to a paramedic, nurse, or physician who can interpret it and give feedback to the EMTs on scene. Though it does not offer this feature at this time, AliveCor’s iPhone heart monitor is an excellent example of a device that could easily send the ECG data is obtains from a patient to a provider qualified to interpret it. 

If these technologies were implemented in EMS, it would be easy to imagine how patient care could improve. With many EMS agencies already starting to use these technologies, it is not a question of if, but when they will be universally implemented.

Smartphones in a Hospital Setting: Using Everyday Technology to Better Healthcare

This video explores the use of adapted technology from a company called Vocera, and its possible role in increasing communication efficiency in hospitals.

Quantified Self: A Sticky Situation

Special thanks to Clara Roberts, Anastasia Bolshakov, and Lachezar Hristov!

Let’s Talk Culture

When I was younger, I once heard about how a group of people that believed that if someone took their picture, they would lose their soul. They must have been terrified by modern technology, since they didn’t understand it. This lead me to believe that surely, they wouldn’t be consumers of this new technology. These misconceptions and lack of education are not uncommon, so what are their affects on the relationships between technology, medicine, and people?

I first thought about how culture can make your one experience completely different from anyone else’s. Just like doctors can’t be blind to the probability of a certain ethnic group of have a specific disease, as seen in Doctor and Patient- Bridging the Culture Gap, we need to be aware that patients also vary in beliefs. We know this and yet expect all patients to have the same attitude about technology. 

Along these lines some people embrace alternative medicine and hold certain beliefs that conflict with a physicians’ standard plan. The article, When cultures collide with medical care, discusses how these beliefs can change patient compliance and negatively affect their health. These views can also mean refusal or mistrust of technology. Innovation seems like a threat, rather, than an advance. It’s plausible that a patient seeing a doctor practicing with an iPhone as a tool might think they are crazy or joking. These consumers do not understand the product. 

In fact, studies show that there are differences in openness to accept medical technology based on culture. This made me think of the placebo effect, in reverse. Will not believing in new technologies change their effectiveness? We know that the placebo effect is common, but can it happen in reverse? There is a disconnect between what the patients understand and what the doctor explains. 

Upon further inspection, I realized that these different attitudes might be caused by the Cultural Lag Theory, which states that culture takes time to catch up with technology and this causes conflicts. I see this as a marketing issue, we must help the patient understand the product using terms that they are familiar with, while being sensitive to their beliefs. 

The Largest Oxymoron

 

Medical school. I think about cramming a library’s worth of information into four years and non-stop training. Doctor school breads respectful, brilliant, robots that are hard to break. By nature, they must be strong to work long hours, see emergency after emergency, and be able to keep their sanity. They must be relatively desensitized to screams, blood, and tears that inevitably come with patients. But, doesn’t this seem dehumanizing?

 

In my opinion, one of the only valid arguments why a computer can’t replace a doctor is that we need comfort to accompany a bad diagnosis. Computers can give us the same diagnosis but won’t tell us “hey, it’s gonna be alright, I’m with you every step of the way. You are not alone”. We lose this human empathy when dealing with a programmed device. If this is true, why do we send those with the willingness to help to be dehumanized and robbed of this commodity? 

 

I believe that Med School is necessary, however, it needs to shift goals. Information is quickly becoming infinite and it cannot be learned in four years. Let’s accept that and learn how to deal with it. We must see technology as an ally and dedicate some time to truly understanding how it can help. Learning to build a tool-kit is appropriate. Learning to search, triangulate, and curating are skills that are just as valuable as memorizing books. Integrating computer science, technology literacy, and pilot quantified self courses would be extremely valuable for future doctors. 


This is not to invalidate the importance of keeping a good head on your shoulders. No patient wants an overly empathetic doctor giving a diagnosis or crying because he has to give you a shot. Balance and oversight into the future are key for the improvement of medicine. Unfortunately, this is risky. Risks in medicine can mean lives lost or quality of life diminished. So, what is to be done? 


Google glass is a revolutionary technology recently introduced to consumers by Google. While not marketed specifically towards medicine, this kind of technology can be utilized in many different fields. What kind of an impact will it have on medicine?