The KHIT Blog: On the DiMe

Wednesday, June 5, 2019

On the DiMe

Just saw this at STATnews during my morning rounds. Joined.

The Digital Medicine Society (DiMe) is the professional society for the digital medicine community. Together, we drive scientific progress and broad acceptance of digital medicine to enhance public health. Our mission is to serve professionals at the intersection of the global healthcare and technology communities, supporting them in developing digital medicine through interdisciplinary collaboration, research, teaching, and the promotion of best practices.

Put in a permanent link here in my right hand links column.

Given that I'm a fussbudget of late for "definitions," I liked this:

Defining Digital Medicine
What is digital medicine?

Digital medicine describes a field, concerned with the use of technologies as tools for measurement, and intervention in the service of human health. Digital medicine products are driven by high-quality hardware and software that support the practice of medicine broadly, including treatment, recovery, disease prevention, and health promotion for individuals and across populations.

Digital medicine products can be used independently or in concert with pharmaceuticals, biologics, devices, or other products to optimize patient care and health outcomes. Digital medicine empowers patients and healthcare providers with intelligent and accessible tools to address a wide range of conditions through high-quality, safe, and effective measurements and data-driven interventions.

As a discipline, digital medicine encapsulates both broad professional expertise and responsibilities concerning the use of these digital tools. Digital medicine focuses on evidence-generation to support the use of these technologies...

Ahhh... "evidence."

As noted at Forbes:

The Digital Medicine Society Is Developing Evidence-Based Standards For Digital Health
Professional groups and industry-wide collaborations are emerging to drive the growth of healthcare innovation. The development of high-quality, evidence-based products and services is now being supported by the Digital Medicine Society (DiMe) as well as the existing Digital Therapeutic Alliance (DTA).

The use of digital tools for better diagnosis and outcomes is rapidly progressing. The global digital health market is expected to reach $223.7 billion within five years based on increasing penetration of mobile devices, remote patient monitoring, and growing demand for advanced information systems. These products could represent a fundamental shift in healthcare services and actionable data generation according to experts…

Check 'em out. Sign up. Follow DiMe on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Wonder what the folks at HIMSS think about this. Lots of synergy potential, I would think.

BTW, apropos, I finished Susan Hockfield's book:

For the last couple of decades, as a dean and then provost at Yale, and then as president and now president emerita of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), I’ve had the privilege of looking over the scientific horizon, and what I’ve seen is breathtaking. Ingenious and powerful biologically based tools are coming our way: viruses that can self-assemble into batteries, proteins that can clean water, nanoparticles that can detect and knock out cancer, prosthetic limbs that can read minds, computer systems that can increase crop yield.

These new technologies may sound like science fiction, but they are not. Many of them are already well along in their development, and each of them has emerged from the same source: a revolutionary convergence of biology and engineering. This book tells the story of that convergence—of remarkable scientific discoveries that bring two largely divergent paths together and of the pathbreaking researchers who are using this convergence to invent tools and technologies that will transform how we will live in the coming century.

We need new tools and technologies. Today’s world population of around 7.6 billion is projected to rise to well over 9.5 billion by 2050. In generating the power that fuels, heats, and cools our current population, we’ve already pumped enough carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to change the planet’s climate for centuries to come, and we’re now grappling with the consequences. Temperatures and sea levels are rising, and large portions of the globe are plagued with drought, famine, and drug-resistant disease. Simply scaling up our current tools and technologies will not solve the daunting challenges that face us globally. How can we generate more abundant yet cleaner energy, produce sufficient clean water, develop more effective medicines at lower cost, enable the disabled among us, and produce more food without disrupting the world’s ecological balance? We need new solutions to these problems. Without them, we are destined for troubled times...

Hockfield, Susan. The Age of Living Machines: How Biology Will Build the Next Technology Revolution (pp. ix-x). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

Nice to read something evincing net rational optimism these days during a time of aggressive science/tech denialism,,. I would hope that cutting-edge biotechnologies ("living machines") make it into the DiMe mix.

JUNE 6TH OFF-TOPIC ERRATUM: D:DAY 75

I bought "Every Man A Hero" & read almost all of it yesterday, will finish this morning. An amazing, compelling memoir, highly recommended. My late Dad also served in N. Africa & Sicily (where he lost a leg). One of my Ma's brothers was in the D-Day landing. #DDay75thAnniversary pic.twitter.com/0ce90tazdx
— Bobby Gladd (@BobbyGvegas) June 6, 2019

_____________

More to come...

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Brave New Health

Commonwell Health Alliance

Another important read (pdf)

I love this kind of stuff. It sustains and humbles me. "As politicians, advertisers, salesmen, and propagandists for various political, economic, moral, religious, psychic, environmental, dietary, and artistic doctrinaire positions know only too well, fallible human minds are easily tricked, by clever verbiage... Common language—or at least, the English language—has an almost universal tendency to disguise epistemological statements by putting them into a grammatical form which suggests to the unwary an ontological statement. A major source of error in current probability theory arises from an unthinking failure to perceive this."

Quotes

"An economist is a person who sees something that works in practice and tries to figure out whether it will work in theory."

- J.D. Kleinke, medical economist
___

"The only person who enjoys change is a baby with a wet diaper."

"Every misspent dollar in our health care system is part of somebody's paycheck.

- Brent James, M.D., M.Stat

“We could do healthcare, at markedly higher quality, for everyone in this country, without rationing or denying anybody the care that they need, without having the government dictate how doctors practice or whether hospitals could expand, at half the cost we do it now.”

- Health Care Futurist Joe Flower

Most of the sciences, unlike parts of medical science, are not concerned with the impossible. There is not complementary and alternative physics, or chemistry, or biochemistry, or engineering. These disciplines compare their ideas against reality, and, if the ideas are found wanting, abandoned."

- Mark A. Crislip, MD

"Q: How much alcohol is too much?
A: More than your doctor drinks."

- a physician I once heard speak during a CME presentation

“Just because science doesn’t know everything, doesn’t mean you get to fill in the gaps with whatever fairy tale most appeals to you.”

- Dara O’Briain

'[I]t is one small step from using the computer for "helping" doctors to monitoring them, judging them, dictating to them what to do, and withdrawing payment for computer non-compliance. The use of computer data is a multi-edged sword. It can be used for the "good," facilitating diagnosis and treatment and making it more accurate and up-to-date, and for “evil,” invading privacy, inviting security breechs, and making decisions based on the opinions of remote authorities rather than those present at the patient-doctor encounter.'

- Richard Reece, MD

“[T]here ARE statistics which are non-political. Just because The Washington Post/Fox News reports the temperature is 75 degrees doesn’t mean it’s really snowing and sunscreen is a liberal/conservative plot. Even if you earn a living being ideological.”

- Michael L. Millenson

"It is a generally a fairly convincing argument that people shouldn’t have to be subsidized to undertake a change which is in their best interest.

The reconciliation seems to be that EHR is not supposed to make a doctor’s practice more efficient and higher quality. It is supposed to make the system of care more efficient and higher quality, which is not the same thing. Those of you who took calc recall that maximizing the total of variables is not achieved by maximizing any one variable and this is a perfect example of that.

Those of you have served in combat certainly noticed that too — if everyone works as a team the unit takes fewer casualties. If you try to save your own hide, you might, but at the expense of more casualties overall."

- Al Lewis

"There are two ideas to keep in mind about Bayesian reasoning and how we tend to mess it up. The first is that base rates matter, even in the presence of evidence about the case at hand. This is often not intuitively obvious. The second is that intuitive impressions of the diagnosticity of evidence are often exaggerated."

- Daniel Kahneman, "Thinking, Fast and Slow"

"Physicians apply advanced scientific knowledge, but they must do so without the favorable conditions that experimental scientists create for themselves. Multitasking is forced on physicians, often in chaotic environments and under severe time and resource constraints."

- Lawrence and Lincoln Weed, "Medicine in Denial"

"It’s time to stop the whining about Obama care and acknowledge we already have universal health care. We just pay for it in the stupidest way possible that ensures problems are that much more disastrous and complicated when they’re finally treated."

- Mark Hoofnagle, MD, PhD

"Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily."

- Thomas Szasz, MD
___

"Of course, one reason that process metrics* are so popular is that processes are much easier to define and measure than outcomes."

- The Skeptical Scalpel
___

"There is an “illusion of validity” for any random data point, a seductive sense that is colored by what we hope will be true. Mountains of pharmaceutical claims are often made from mere molehills of data."

- Danielle Ofri, MD
___

"Joy empowers people. It is a source of energy that enables people to hope and plan and change their lives for the better. Spend some time around someone who is relentlessly negative and how do you feel–drained, right? More and more research shows that joy is not something that just happens to you, like a bolt of lightening out of the blue. Joy is, instead, a habit to cultivate. Negative thinking and despair are the crabgrass of our souls–weeds that take root and spread, sometimes to all areas of life. Joy, in contrast, is a soul’s rose–hardy when cared for, able to put down roots over time and withstand disease and extremes. Like a rose, however, your joy can become blighted from neglect or harsh conditions. We all need to tend to our joy–to prune away the badness, and to know that, even though it may look like a prickly bare root, if you invest time in a joyous outlook, gorgeous things will bloom, even in the harshest conditions."

- Dr. Jan Gurley
___

"'Solutions' exist only in mathematics."

- Karen Martin
___

"The issue of how to regulate clinical software is, in the long run, indistinguishable from the issue of how to regulate medicine. The only difference is that medicine is practiced in the open, without secrecy, subject to peer review, and under a merit-based state license."

- Adrian Gropper, MD
___

"Economist, rope, tree: some assembly required."

- Source unknown

DISCLAIMER:

I write this blog wholly on my own time and my own dime. The views proffered are expressly my own as a concerned and active citizen/taxpayer (in addition to being the result of my substantive experience in the various IT fields), and in no way reflect any policy views of my former employer, notwithstanding that some of the thinking has indeed obviously been spurred by the implications of the work with which I have been doing for them.

FAIR USE POLICY
I cite a ton of news and web sources spanning the breadth of relevant technical and policy domains, sometimes at substantial length. I believe I remain well within the bounds of "Fair Use," as [1] I am not doing any of this for profit, [2] I always provide attribution and links -- which, [3] far from negatively impacting any copyright holders' commercial interests, might actually increase traffic to and interest in their offerings.

Nonetheless, should I post anything of yours regarding which you have any objection, just let me know and I will remove it forthwith.

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Wednesday, June 5, 2019

On the DiMe

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