Temporal correlation
The Masters of data visualisation
Reading and interpreting data is a key skill for all medical professionals. We are quietly studying the landscape of this wonderful area because we need to enable you to see and understand your medical and lifestyle history quickly and easily within Lifetime Health Diary.
This is the best one I have seen yet. Hans Rosling takes just 4 minutes, but it’s full of data that would normally take a whole day to explain!
I like it when he flicks parts of the circles out to show how apparent groups of like data actually can be vastly different when split into its subgroups.
Take a look at this
Related articles
- Economist profiles Hans Rosling (flyingpenguin.com)
- Hans Rosling’s Wonderful World of Statistics (onecoolsitebloggingtips.com)
- Practical steps for improving visualisation (onlinejournalismblog.com)
Tools to assemble all the pieces of primary care data together – Part 2
Last Thursday (see my post from last week) I gave a talk to the General Practice Research Group at Otago University. one of the two main medical schools in New Zealand. It was a really interesting discussion, with much the interest being centered around providing General Practitioners with the ability to view medication regimes in a more easily and quickly comprehensible format.
There was also interest in using Lifetime Health Diary™ in extreme patient cases, where it can be difficult to draw up a complete patient background and keep track of it – particularly when a patient is seeing multiple practitioners and specialists. Some of the GPs present said they would like to try using it with some of their “problem patients”.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, there was also interest in Lifetime Health Diary™ assisting with smoother handoffs between different care settings and providers (including a better follow up and communication tool after discharge). One concrete example mentioned of interest was helping community pharmacies reconcile health and medication regimes of patients and providing a strong link between nursing homes, GPs and pharmacists. In other words, a genuine Health Reconciliation Tool.
This ties in strongly with another theme of interest – Distance Medicine and Rural Health. Rural pharmacies, as the only dispensary for many miles around, have the potential to serve as a pure source of community pharmacy usage – unlike in cities, where consumer choice in using any pharmacy creates data silos between patient and the various pharmacies and GPs they frequent.
I look forward to being able to release the view of our new medication optimisation tool in the next few days, I will post that on next week’s blog, and discuss why clinicians we have spoken to are looking forward to using it.
Yours in health,
Hamish
Our First Community Group Meeting! (Part 1: Introduction)
Yesterday, with help of Sue Russell from DCOSS, Ignite Consultants held a meeting under the theme: Healthy Community Enabled by Information: Social Innovation at Work. Representatives of nine different organisations attended. Despite very short notice they kindly came to share their ideas and feedback on what can be done to address some of the problems arising due to inefficient information management systems between patient, doctors, caregivers and other parties engaged in patient health management.
We started the meeting with everybody introducing themselves, I gave a short introduction followed by guest speaker Hamish MacDonald who presented his innovative technology, Lifetime Health Diary™
I met Hamish nearly one year ago, when running my Social Entrepreneurship Project. He approached me to tell me about the global mission of his company including the 5 billion plus of those who are the most health disadvantaged in the global community, including even in our communities such as the disabled, cultural minorities, people living with chronic conditions, the elderly, etc. who very often face significant challenges in obtaining adequate access and delivery of health services.
But it wasn’t till 2 months ago when he actually showed me what, together with his team, he managed to build and how the vision becomes reality. Intrigued, and seeing a huge potential in how this tool could help people with different disabilities, I took the idea to different organisations to see what they thought. The response was overwhelming.
Lifetime Health Diary™ is a secure, free, patient-owned, internet-based health diary for recording, monitoring and self-managing one’s health, as well practice health prevention. It captures and systemizes all data inputs into an easily understandable “Graphic Natural History” of your heath through lining up all your data by temporal correlation – which is a fancy way of saying your background lifestyle factors and life events are lined up by date alongside your clinical data. This allows your unique clinical story to be better understood by clinicians and caregivers that you personally invite by secure email link to view your health record.
During the meeting Hamish talked about his friend and business partner, Dr. Atsushi Matsunaga, the inventor of the software and a person very frustrated with the inability of the healthcare system to prevent illness in the first place. Hamish shared the history and idea behind the innovation outlining 7 Requirements for the system: i) Better health outcomes for you; ii) Quicker prognosis for your doctor; iii) Shared Patient Care among your Caregivers; iv) Interoperable amongst their different systems; v) All under your Control, vi) Transferable; Accessible, Portable & Private; vii) Free for both you and your doctor.
Hamish finished his short talk, and suddenly, “Access to information”, “Better health care delivery”, “Control and empowerment”, “Patient in the centre of the health system”…a lively discussion had suddenly started and Hamish was under a stream of questions. Details in the next blog post…!
