Virtually Priceless Thoughts

I scanned an article this morning on MacWorld about Jonathan Ive and his recent honorary doctorate. He’s the Senior VP for industrial design at Apple and has won many awards for his work and the work of his teams. Here is the quote that stands out for me:

“I love making prototypes. We go right from idea to prototypes. I just love making objects. Prototypes create this dramatic shift in the conversation—suddenly it becomes tangible and the silence goes away.” – Jonathan Ives

This is so true in my experience as well. Although there can often be a form of discussion / debate where people are clearly are speaking about completely different things. Prototypes bring a level of focused discussion and tangible feedback that is key. They don’t have to be physical, they can be software and / or paper prototypes.

Prototypes are the tangible artifacts that can be commonly experienced rather than simply discussed.

My grandmother built models of her larger sculptures for this reason as well.

I spent the day at Oregon Health Science University with Dr. Joan Ash and her team today.

I was invited to spend the day there and was able to present on my current research for my first time to a surprisingly large audience (thank you all for attending). I also spent time with some great people learning and getting feedback. They have a productive and energized group there. I think that is what most impressed me. There was play in the rooms as they discussed dreadfully dull (to most people) topics like CDSS taxonomies, thematic coding and findings from months of qualitative analysis review.

Yes, I was thrilled to find some like minded folks on my trip.

I was also excited by the exchanges I was able to have, even in the short period of time. There were several people working on, or had worked on ideas that very much compliment the work I am doing now on Circles of Care and Continuity of Care.

The discussions will, I have no doubt, add to the richness of my evaluation, both from the perspective of adding some new ideas but also from the simple energizing from this visit. Thank you for that.

Nine years ago I started a little research / development project on the palm PDA called Palm Prevention. This was my resident research project in family medicine and I eventually did a “pilot” study (forgive the pun) and was published. In the nineties I was very interested in PDAs in healthcare and had several projects looking at clinical education, decision making, access to reference materials, and creating tools that took simple context into account.

Palm Prevention was a quick, patient specific screening tool that essentially took 50 or so evidence-based clinical practice guidelines and presented them to the user, filtered based on a few key criteria that fit on a single palm OS screen. Here are a couple of screen shots. The first screen is the start screen where the user provided a few key elements of patient history. The second is the filtered list of guidelines ranked in order based on evidence level (A being the strongest for). From there, tapping on any line brought you details of that guideline.

I released it free on the Internet PDAGuidelines.com. (now deunct, but had several of my projects on it)

Today, I was on the AHRQ site and rediscovered their ePSS. Using the USPSTF guidelines, that have a similar approach and a tool that is available on multiple platforms, including the iPhone:

More slick GUI thanks to the more advanced platform, but similar approach to what I was working on nine years ago. I do not have anything to do with the AHRQ or their tool, but I am happy to see that the idea is still alive and people are finding it useful enough to have a very similar design 9 years later.