VP Thoughts

Engineering 4 Health - Highschool Challenge 2

We had our second Engineering 4 Health Challenge at UVic yesterday and it was another success! Some great students who participated and some really fantastic ideas that were generated. The topic for this challenge was the same — use the OLPC (One laptop per Child) as the design platform for creating health applications for students [...]

Blog Action Day: Poverty

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 [...]

Visual Thinking Thoughts

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 [...]

One Laptop Per Child Health

I have been working with a friend and colleague over the past month sketching out an idea to develop software for the XO laptop, which is part of the one laptop per child (OLPC) project. The idea is more about how to get others to design and build software for OLPC and we can help facilitate. We [...]

Think inside the box

The title of an article from Harvard Business Review keeps coming up Breakthrough Thinking from Inside the Box. While certainly not the first place to use the play on “out of the box” thinking, it is a good construct. I read this many months ago and do find the idea pops into my head whenever I [...]

Kermit Visualizes

Well, Henson, once again, was ahead of his time. Kermit Learns Visual Thinking

Space for Holding More than one Thought

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 [...]

Continuity of Care and Information Systems

I came across an article today in the BML, Continuity of Care: a multidisciplinary review. This was a good summary of some of the Canadian work and use of the continuity of care term. Their redefinition of Continuity of Care in to three broad categories is a useful way to organize my thinking as it [...]

Healthcare IS Requirements - Engineering or Science?

There is an excellent post I recently read to on How to Be a Good Product Manager on driving requirements not just gathering requirements. There is a good reflection on Usability Counts as well. I’ve often thought that requirements don’t grow on trees. They are not there to be picked. Requirements need to be engineered. They need [...]

Pecha Kucha Academia?

I was reading Presentation Zen , Garr Reynold's new book (link is to his great blog). In there he has a side bar on Pecha Kucha (Japanese for chit-chat) -- a night where architects get together and, if they present, they are only allowed to use 20 slides and each slide can only be on screen for 20 seconds.