Posted: November 30, 2009 | Author: Cameron D. Norman | Filed under: behaviour change, complexity, design thinking, eHealth, public health, Science & technology | Tags: complexity, complexity science, design thinking, eHealth, evaluation, innovation, public eHealth, public health, social networks, systems thinking, technology, Twitter, wave |
Successful evaluators know the power of benchmark. The Oxford English Dictionary describes the act ‘to benchmark’ as “evaluate or check (something) by comparison with a standard. The Wikipedia definition of Benchmarking is:
“Benchmarking is the process of comparing the business processes and performance metrics including cost, cycle time, productivity, or quality to another that is widely considered to be an industry standard benchmark or best practice. Essentially, benchmarking provides a snapshot of the performance of your business and helps you understand where you are in relation to a particular standard.”
From an evaluation standpoint, a benchmark provides us with a comparator to help assess how well (or poorly) a particular program is doing. From corporate leaders to university presidents to healthcare administrators benchmarking serves as the referent and focus for programming activities and the foundation for ‘best practice’. But what if best practice isn’t good enough? Or put another way, what if following the leader means going the wrong way?
In the world of consumer or behavioural eHealth much of what we use as our benchmarks are derived from a type of healthcare model that is institution and often technology-centred rather than patient-centred. It is more often something tied to medical treatment of specific problems and technology focused using a highly linear approach to treatment.
Yet in the age of Google Wave, these linear models don’t look to fare well. The future of healthcare, as Frog Design recently opined, is social. What are the benchmarks when your eHealth intervention is not a single technology, but a suite of interacting tools that are online, collaborative and mobile in different measures at different times within a diverse context of treatment and preventive behaviour? How do we measure success? What happens when the ‘effect’ of an intervention is social in nature and supported by multiple tools working in different combinations each time?
In evaluation, we often look for the most likely cause of a particular effect. Yet, what is the effect of any one wave in an ocean of influence? While it is impossible to deconstruct the influence of that wave, it is possible to anticipate what a wave might do under certain conditions and, if the timing is right, it might be possible to get on top of that wave and surf it to shore.
What if we took a wave model and, like surfers, read the seas to determine the appropriate time to dive in, acknowledging that the break will occur differently, the velocity might vary, the height of can’t be predicted, but through activity and practice we can enhance our anticipatory guidance systems to better select waves that might lead to some fine surfing? My research team at the University of Toronto has begun working on these models and methods because as anyone in public health can tell you, the tide is high and with complex problems like chronic disease, the waves are getting big. Twitter, Facebook, blogs, iPhone apps big and small are all collectively influencing people’s behaviour in subtle ways and through acknowledging that these collective tools are the cause and consequence of change can we begin to develop evaluation models to make sense of their impact on the world around us.
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Posted: October 17, 2009 | Author: Cameron D. Norman | Filed under: design thinking, Science & technology, Social media, social systems, systems thinking | Tags: brain research, design thinking, Social media, social networks, statistics |
So far the Amazing Stuff I’ve shared seems to be a hit with some folk. Perhaps this is the week that you’ll find something that I found pretty interesting relevant to you.
This week’s Amazing Stuff post features some thoughts on design. I first thought the word ‘designer’ had to mean going to design school or something to that effect. Thankfully, the many brilliant design thinkers out there who are promoting that way of seeing the world have shown me the error of my ways and illustrated how we all can be designers — and how with some thought and creativity we can become good ones. I design public health programs and resources and find myself fascinated by the myriad benefits that design thinking (like systems thinking) has to offer our enterprise.
1. The Value of Empathy . The Design Observer Group has a great website for ideas on design and this they featured an essay by Andy Chen on the role of empathy in design. He also writes a sharp, sometimes biting, critique of the way in which designers (and marketers) play on emotions to stir empathy on one hand, while being totally oblivious at other times. His illustrations from advertisements such as the RED campaign really take this message home and provided me with one of the most inspired reads of the week.
2. Is Social Media the New Cigarette? Probably the most provocative read I had all week was this post from Bill Ives and his Fast Forward blog. Bill goes way out on a limb and points to some rather disturbing and sometimes humorous parallels between cigarettes and social media both in how we use it and how it gets regulated in society as a result.
3. The Book of Odds. Did you know that the odds of choking to death on a non-food object is about 1 in 92,950? I didn’t either — until I discovered the Book of Odds, which was launched this week. The ‘Book’ is a compendium of stats on all kind of things serious and, well, odd, taking odds-ratios to a level of prominence that we’ve never seen before. Entertaining and useful all in one well-packaged site.
4. The Democratization of Social Networks. A little more on the academic side of things, Amanda Lenhart from the Pew Internet & American Life Project posted a presentation showing how the landscape of social networking is changing rapidly. Almost half of Americans are now engaged in some type of social networking activity online, which is up from less than 10 per cent last year. If you think social networks are a fad, you might want to look through Amanda’s presentation.
5. The Chemistry of Information Addiction. Another science-based gem this week was a report in Scientific American about research that looked at monkeys and information needs and the neural basis for our ‘need to know’. It turns out that we just might need to know the answer. The research is laying the foundation for future studies looking at human information use and testing the hypothesis that, in some way, we are information junkies and, when given the opportunity, will do whatever we can to get more information about the things that are important to us and that this is a hard-wired part of the brain.
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Posted: October 12, 2009 | Author: Cameron D. Norman | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: design thinking, ecology, eHealth, food systems, leadership, science, social networks, systems thinking, technology, urbanism |
What a busy week (it seems I say that a lot). Akin to Sergio’s White Hot Top 5 on Current TV’s Infomania, here are the five things that I found amazing (or at least really interesting) over the past week:
1. The NY Times Freakonomics Blog featured a guest post from James McWilliams on the question of locavores and their true environmental impact. Like the Freakonomics guys, I am attracted to contrarian perspectives on received wisdom. McWilliams post suggests that we question claims that eating locally is necessarily better for the planet. He doesn’t dismiss the many reasons why people like farmers markets and getting to know who produces your food, but he does question if that isn’t used to inflate the economic and environmental benefits of eating locally. Something to think about and question on both sides.
2. The Future of Healthcare is Social. I love this slideshow on Fast Company’s website. It describes a wired future where handheld devices and (I’m reading into this — maybe projecting??) interoperable databases and tools will allow health practitioners and patients to learn from one another and create a truly social health system based on the best knowledge from the whole system. Dare to dream.
3. Imagine Leadership. This short YouTube video also adds some contrarian and received wisdom on leadership and what it takes to truly lead. It’s short and provocative. Developed by Nitin Nohria and Amanda Pepper of Harvard Business School’s Leadership Initiative and the XPLANE visual information consultancy group.
4. I love WorldChanging. They always post some innovative and provocative material. This week, the post that caught my eye was corresponding to International Walk to School Day and got me thinking about how design thinking can contribute to a much healthier, better and safer setting for our children by giving them back what I had as a child: a walk to school.
5. Wired Science has profiled the best microscope photos from the past 35 years. Once you get your head around the fact that these are REAL pictures taken of microscopic things you can enjoy some of the most beautiful images that nature produces for us every day.
Have a great week everyone!
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Posted: October 7, 2009 | Author: Cameron D. Norman | Filed under: eHealth, public health, Social media, systems thinking | Tags: book, eHealth, innovation, social networks, transparency, trust |
In eHealth we trust?
Today it was reported that the Ontario Minister of Health has resigned, presumably on the wake of the eHealth scandal (which I discuss in an earlier post) that engulfed the current Liberal government since it was revealed that there were considerable questionable expenses made by eHealth Ontario. It’s all a mess, most notably because at its root eHealth is all about trust and that seems to be the element that is most absent in this political spectacle. The elected officials do not trust the bureaucrats at eHealth Ontario, while the public loses its trust in the elected officials. Mingled in with this is a problem with trust of the government to develop a reasonable eHealth information system on its own and the simultaneous distrust of the private sector to do it for a reasonable fee and deliver an effective and efficient service. So far, all these fears are well-grounded as played out in this scandal (and when you spend $1B on a system that can be delivered for a small fraction of that and wind up with little to show for it, it is a true scandal).
The irony in all of this is that eHealth is founded on trust. We trust that our records will be stored in a manner that is secure, but also accessible. We trust that the most appropriate use of health information gleaned from information we provide to health professionals or online will follow from having these systems in place. There are the tools and resources to do this and they are not that hard to develop. That isn’t to say that this is something one person can slap together in an afternoon on a PC, but it doesn’t take a billion dollars to do it either. In the United States, The Veteran’s Administration has its own eHealth University to train people on how to use the eHealth system they developed (and it is going to be open-source I might add, meaning that the world can take it and adapt it). They have put the resources into building trust among health care professionals by offering training, developing a transparent model, and in doing so, fostering trust in their patients.
eHealth in the public sphere is equally about trust. Social networks — the foundation of nearly all of the leading websites and tools from Google to Facebook to Twitter — are all based on trust. Karen Stephenson, a pioneer in the early research on social networks in organizations, says that trust and its ability to broker relationships serves as a kind of backbone of innovation, by leveraging social capital across organizational boundaries. From a systems science perspective, trust is the mechanism by which diversity can be better engaged in the system — whether that is diversity of ideas, opinions, cultural expression (example) , sexuality, and identity.
Marketers Chris Brogan and Julien Smith recently published a book that argues that marketing — the spreading of ideas about a topic or product — is essentially about creating and engaging trust agents. From a public eHealth perspective, this means providing ways to get people connected in a safe, secure manner that enables them to share their ideas, innovate and learn in a way that supports — even enhances — trust.
The challenge in Ontario is building that trust back up. eHealth has become a ‘four letter word’ and its name — fairly or unfairly — has been sullied by the events of the past few months. Let’s find some ways to build it back up and do it in a way that makes us all better for it. Ideas are welcome.
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Posted: October 2, 2009 | Author: Cameron D. Norman | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: design thinking, environment, food systems, Internet, politics, psychology, social networks, urbanism |
Today I am launching a new feature on my blog: Amazing Stuff. It is a way for me to share the neat ideas, hot innovations, challenging ideas and random bits of ‘stuff’ that I find quite compelling, inspiring or just fun that somehow touches on the myriad issues related to making ‘CENSE’ of the world around me. Yes, you can always follow my Delicious social bookmarks, or what I Stumbleupon, but I’m not always good at social bookmarking great ideas, particularly after a busy day away from my desk when I’m staring at 200 updates on my Google Reader feed.
My choice of the term amazing is inspired by comedian Louis C.K. from his appearance on Conan O’Brien’s show a few months back. Watching this, I think you’ll agree that we are living in amazing times and this is a sample of the amazing things I’ve found over the past week:
1. The Design Thinkers Reading List. This is a summary of the must-have books and documents for those interested in design thinking (like systems thinking, only for how we shape the human activities and environments we live in).
2. How to Turn Urban Spaces Into Food Spaces. Taking unused land and using it more efficiently to help feed the poor and create a more sustainable food system for urban centres.
3. How Our Moral Roots Damage Our Thinking. A blog post and interview at TED with social psychologist Jonathan Haidt who discusses how the U.S. Healthcare debate is being shaped by forces that are not likely to lead that country into a good place.
4. Interview with Paul Hawken on Our Environmental Future. Environmental economist and leader Paul Hawken discusses his views on the future of the planet and the reason he still has some hope.
5. The Dark Side of Political Discourse on the Internet. Tim Bevins from Wikinomics shows us what happens when democracy meets the unbridled opportunity of having everyone speak their mind and its not pretty.
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