October 15th is Blog Action Day and the topic is poverty, so I thought I would post on some activities we have been up to in regards to raising awareness of the need for better education in developing countries. Better education is a key enabler to improving people’s situations.
Two weeks ago we held our first “Engineering 4 Health Challenge” at UVic and it was a great success — the local high school students came together to think about and develop paper designs for health applications that would run on the OLPC. The ideas were fantastic, providing interesting ways to improve education on health.
It also allowed me, in my way, to support a colleague who spent 10 months last year in Tanzania treating and educating the population there on HIV and AIDS.
We will be continuing these Engineering 4 Health Challenges later this year with more local high school students and in early 2009 with University students. It is a great way to get people being creative about a real problem.
I have been listening to some great stuff by Dave Gray and others on thinking visually. Not about clinical information systems design, but about approaching complex situations through visuals. Dan Roam’s book The Back of the Napkin is an excellent introduction to visual thinking and how to design sketches to help think and present ideas.
Definitely regretting not having gone to Viz Think ‘08 this last year, but thankfully they have shared several pieces online (check the blog in particular).
Much of the discussion is around making a complex and chaotic world make sense. Distilling the complex whirl of information into something that can be engaged and reasoned about. A story given a sense of time and knowing that stats don’t give people. Visuals engage the right side of the brain in a way words don’t, helping to process information in a different, more holistic way. The two help make sense out of the utterly complex.
(Note the irony that this post is the first without a visual.)
So not directly informatics related, but a few conversations and articles have come across my path that seemed worth sharing on the importance of taking time.
The Slow Leadership blog recently posted When Procrastination Works Better Than Action. While I don’t necessarily agree with using the word “procrastination” to describe thoughtful pauses, I do agree with the importance of thoughtful pauses.
People do feel rushed to provide an answer. Immediately. As a physician, I am trained to have the answers before the end of a visit - even if the answer isn’t readily apparent.
In Praise of Openmindedness discusses the idea of taking time to make sure you do not always follow your knee jerk reaction. The pressures of not having enough time makes the knee jerk reaction all too easy, and that might just mean you miss something grand.
And Roger Martin makes this the tenant of his book:
Holding onto opposite or contrary thoughts and taking a bit of time to explore each option to see what the impact might be comes natural to some. Cultivating this skill is a key to good leadership, according to the book. That action requires time as well.
Stephen Covey, puts it like this:
Between stimulus and response, there is space.
In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response.
Jeff Hawkins of Palm fame on Ted Talks - he speaks about “brain science” and I found some of what he talked about close to many of the cognitive science discussions I’ve had with my supervisor around clinical decision making, mental scripts, etc. “Decision making in Action” is a good book on this subject as well.
Also provides a different side to Jeff than the guy known for walking around with a wood block in his pocket.
So I haven’t had a chance to post some of the current work yet - but it is starting to gel.
Work on early requirements for clincial systems using agent oriented methods, such as i* and Use Case Maps is looking to be a possible gap to fit a PhD into.
I am also still quite interested in looking at design patterns for healthcare as that is also a gap.
