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Ben Sawyer of Games for Health will be a guest on Jack Olmsted’s internet radio show and Podcast this Tuesday at 2pm EST. Ben will be talking about the intersections of games and health as well as the upcoming Games for Health Conference. Click here tomorrow to listen to the live show. To chat during the show, you will need to set-up a Now Live account. The Podcast of the interview will be available on the Seattle PI Reader Blog.
Last month, in a post entitled, Does ZipCar have lessons for health care?Rosemary Gibson wrote about Health Care Without Harm, a new Pioneer grantee, and their efforts to make the health care sector environmentally sustainable in ways that improve peoples’ health.
This Thursday, April 24, PBS Nightly Business Report will air a story about the growing movement to green the health care industry as part of their Bill of Health series. The story will report on the efforts the nation's hospitals are making to become more environmentally friendly and better members of the community -- all while controlling costs. We are excited to see that the story will feature an interview with Anna Gilmore Hall, RN, executive director of Health Care Without Harm.
Check the PBS website to find out what time and on what channel the program will air in your area.
Last Friday, in his thoughtful blog, Tactical Philanthropy, Sean Stannard-Stockton, wrote about the often-missed opportunity philanthropies have to focus on the long run. Stannard-Stockton directs the philanthropy practice at Ensemble Capital Management, a position which informs his perspective, as you’ll see in this excerpt from his blog:
It is human nature to want results as quickly as possible. But to achieve success, we must match our investment decisions to our time horizon. If we want to fix a local school because our child will be attending starting next year, then it might make sense to focus on short-term solutions. But most donors fund issues because they want to have a sustained impact on a situation. The techniques that might reduce crime in a bad neighborhood the most over the next month are unlikely to be the techniques that will have the largest, permanent impact on reducing crime rates over the next couple of decades.
Financial market participants are often short-term focused. They often focus on metrics which describe short-term conditions, but do little to illuminate long-term trends. But great investors and great philanthropists must focus on the information that matters to the long-term success of their projects.
On the Pioneer Portfolio, we’re interested in understanding those long-term trends, because they are driven by forces and create conditions that make today’s radical ideas tomorrow’s successes.
Recently, we’ve been watching trends of patient empowerment, IT/communications technology, and data mining/rapid learning. What trends are you watching and what implications do you think they have—long term—for health and health care?
Part of our role in the Pioneer Portfolio is to keep an ear open for those who challenge the conventional wisdom – those who don’t jump on the bandwagon, but wonder openly about where it’s headed. So when Gordon Moore came to us a few years back, when there was so much excitement about the prospects for a nationwide health information network of interconnected electronic health records in every practice, and suggested that EHRs, as we knew them, missed the point, we listened. We gave Gordon a small grant to develop his ideas and the results are now posted – in the form of two white papers – on our site.
Gordon’s central concern is that the emphasis should not be placed on the documentation of information about a patient so that it can be retrieved later but rather on the workflow and transactions of care – the entry of orders and the follow up activities. He gives examples of how care can be diagrammed as a series of loops: a test is ordered, the patient then (one hopes) shows up for the test, the result is communicated to the physicians and the patient, and then follow-up action is planned and taken, as appropriate. He also notes that in his own experience, and the experience of a small practice he visited, documentation of notes in the EHR is resulting in added time. This theme is echoed in a recent viewpoint paper – “Promoting Electronic Health Record Adoption. Is it the Correct Focus?” – in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association by Donald Simborg. Simborg discusses the trade-off between speed and accuracy in documenting notes. The methods for achieving speed – notably using templates or copying and pasting from previous notes – raise questions of accuracy.
Moore’s and Simborg’s papers open up an interesting discussion, which I would argue is not simply about whether EHRs as a concept are valuable and desirable. After all EHRs are systems that involve many functions to a greater or lesser extent depending on the implementation. Instead, they suggest the importance of identifying priority functions that ought to be implemented within (or even outside of) EHRs. The Center for Information Technology Leadership's work has provided some important insights in this regard – their study on Ambulatory CPOE analyzed value by different levels of functionality and their research into IT and disease management (that we supported) showed that of all the IT interventions typically applied in diabetes management, disease registries had far and away the most value. Add to that Tom Frieden and Farzad Mostashari’s recent JAMA commentary, in which they argue that most EHRs are missing many of the functions necessary for quality preventive care, and we have the seeds of an important discussion.
The Games for Health Conference is just around the corner, and with all of our recent posts about games, I wanted to remind folks about this exciting event.
The conference sessions are too numerous to name here, but if you have any interests in the future of exergames, exergyms, rehabitainment, and improving health outcomes for gray gamers – this event is for you. The conference will highlight games that are being used to train health care professionals, reduce stress and improve health behaviors, as well as the research that is being done to understand how and why games can improve health and health care. The conference will also feature a panel of representatives from the nation’s largest health insurance companies, including conference sponsor, Humana, to discuss their current and future health game initiatives. If we’ve piqued your interest – you can check out the complete list of conference sessions here.
The Details
Games for Health Conference 2008
May 8-9, 2008
Baltimore Convention Center
Baltimore, Maryland
