social media

This is what happens when you give social networking to doctors

Curated on April 30, 2014May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

CArmel DeAmicis in PandoDaily: “Dr. Gregory Kurio will never forget the time he was called to the ER because a epileptic girl was brought in suffering a cardiac arrest of sorts (HIPAA mandates he doesn’t give out the specific details of the situation). In the briefing, he learned the name of her cardiac physician who he happened to know through the industry. He subsequently called the other doctor and asked him to send over any available information on the patient — latest meds, EKGs, recent checkups, etc.

The scene in the ER was, to be expected, one of chaos, with trainees and respiratory nurses running around grabbing machinery and meds. Crucial seconds were ticking past, and Dr. Kurio quickly realized the fax machine was not the best approach for receiving the records he needed. ER fax machines are often on the opposite of the emergency room, take awhile to print lengthy of records, frequently run out of paper, and aren’t always reliable – not exactly the sort of technology you want when a patient’s life or death hangs in the midst.

Email wasn’t an option either, because HIPAA mandates that sensitive patient files are only sent through secure channels. With precious little time to waste, Dr. Kurio decided to take a chance on a new technology service he had just signed up for — Doximity.

Doximity is a LinkedIn for Doctors of sorts. It has, as one feature, a secure e-fax system that turns faxes into digital messages and sends them to a user’s mobile device. Dr. Kurio gave the other physician his e-fax number, and a little bit of techno-magic happened.

….

With a third of the nation’s doctors on the platform, today Doximity announced a $54 million Series C from DFJ, T. Rowe Price Associates, Morgan Stanley, and existing investors. The funding news isn’t particularly important, in and of itself, aside from the fact that the company is attracting the attention of private market investors very early in its growth trajectory. But it’s a good opportunity to take a look at Doximity’s business model, how it mirrors the upwards growth of other vertical professional social networks (say that five times fast), and the way it’s transforming our healthcare providers’ jobs.

Doximity works, in many ways, just like LinkedIn. Doctors have profiles with pictures and their resume, and recruiters pay the company to message medical professionals. “If you think it’s hard to find a Ruby developer in San Francisco, try to find an emergency room physician in Indiana,” Doximity CEO Jeff Tangney says. One recruiter’s pain is a smart entrepreneur’s pleasure — a simple, straightforward monetization strategy.

But unlike LinkedIn, Doximity can dive much deeper on meeting doctors’ needs through specialized features like the e-fax system. It’s part of the reason Konstantin Guericke, one of LinkedIn’s “forgotten” co-founders, was attracted to the company and decided to join the board as an advisor. “In some ways, it’s a lot like LinkedIn,” Guericke says, when asked why he decided to help out. “But for me it’s the pleasure of focusing on a more narrow audience and making more of an impact on their life.”

In another such high-impact, specialized feature, doctors can access Doximity’s Google Alerts-like system for academic articles. They can sign up to receive notifications when stories are published about their obscure specialties. That means time-strapped physicians gain a more efficient way to stay up to date on all the latest research and information in their field. You can imagine that might impact the quality of the care they provide.

Lastly, Doximity offers a secure messaging system, allowing doctors to email one another regarding a fellow patient. Such communication is a thorny issue for doctors given HIPPA-related privacy requirements. There are limited ways to legally update say, a primary care physician when a specialist learns one of their patients has colon cancer. It turns into a big game of phone tag to relay what should be relatively straightforward information. Furthermore, leaving voicemails and sending faxes can result in details getting lost in what its an searchable system.

The platform is free for doctors, and it has attracted them quickly join in droves. Doximity co-founder and CEO Jeff Tangney estimates that last year the platform had added 15 to 16 percent of US doctors. But this year, the company claims it’s “on track to have half of US physicians as members by this summer.” Fairly impressive growth rate and market penetration.

With great market penetration comes great power. And dollars. Although the company is only monetizing through recruitment at the moment, the real money to be made with this service is through targeted advertising. Think about how much big pharma and medtech companies would be willing to cough up to to communicate at scale with the doctors who make purchasing decisions. Plus, this is an easy way for them to target industry thought leaders or professionals with certain specialties.

Doximity’s founders’ and investors’ eyes might be seeing dollar signs, but they haven’t rolled anything out yet on the advertising front. They’re wary and want to do so in a way that ads value to all parties while avoiding pissing off medical professionals. When they finally pul lthe trigger, however, it’s has the potential to be a Gold Rush.

Doximity isn’t the only company to have discovered there’s big money to be made in vertical professional social networks. As Pando has written, there’s a big trend in this regard. Spiceworks, the social network for IT professionals which claims to have a third of the world’s IT professionals on the site, just raised $57 million in a round led by none other than Goldman Sachs. Why does the firm have such faith in a free social network for IT pros — seemingly the most mundane and unprofitable of endeavors? Well, just like with doctor and pharma corps, IT companies are willing to shell out big to market their wares directly to such IT pros.

Although the monetization strategies differ from business to business, ResearchGate is building a similar community with a social network of scientists around the world, Edmodo is doing it with educators, GitHub with developers, GrabCAD for mechanical engineers. I’ve argued that such vertical professional social networks are a threat to LinkedIn, stealing business out from under it in large industry swaths. LinkedIn cofounder Konstantin Guericke disagrees.

“I don’t think it’s stealing revenue from them. Would it make sense for LinkedIn to add a profile subset about what insurance someone takes? That would just be clutter,” Guericke says. “It’s more going after an opportunity LinkedIn isn’t well positioned to capitalize on. They could do everything Doximity does, but they’d have to give up something else.”

All businesses come with their own challenges, and Doximity will certainly face its share of them as it scales. It has overcome the initial hurdle of achieving the network effects that come with penetrating the a large segment of the market. Next will come monetizing sensitively and continuing to protecting users — and patients’ — privacy.

There are plenty of data minefields to be had in a sector as closely regulated as healthcare, as fellow medical startup Practice Fusion recently found out. Doximity has to make sure its system for onboarding and verifying new doctors is airtight. The company has already encountered some instances of individuals trying to pose as medical professionals to get access to another’s records — specifically a former lover trying to chase down their ex-spouse’s STI tests. One blowup where the company approves someone they shouldn’t or hackers break into the system, and doctors could lose trust in the safety of the technology….”

Twitter Can Now Predict Crime, and This Raises Serious Questions

Curated on April 28, 2014May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Motherboard: “Police departments in New York City may soon be using geo-tagged tweets to predict crime. It sounds like a far-fetched sci-fi scenario a la Minority Report, but when I contacted Dr. Matthew Greber, the University of Virginia researcher behind the technology, he explained that the system is far more mathematical than metaphysical.
The system Greber has devised is an amalgam of both old and new techniques. Currently, many police departments target hot spots for criminal activity based on actual occurrences of crime. This approach, called kernel density estimation (KDE), involves pairing a historical crime record with a geographic location and using a probability function to calculate the possibility of future crimes occurring in that area. While KDE is a serviceable approach to anticipating crime, it pales in comparison to the dynamism of Twitter’s real-time data stream, according to Dr. Gerber’s research paper “Predicting Crime Using Twitter and Kernel Density Estimation”.
Dr. Greber’s approach is similar to KDE, but deals in the ethereal realm of data and language, not paperwork. The system involves mapping the Twitter environment; much like how police currently map the physical environment with KDE. The big difference is that Greber is looking at what people are talking about in real time, as well as what they do after the fact, and seeing how well they match up. The algorithms look for certain language that is likely to indicate the imminent occurrence of a crime in the area, Greber says. “We might observe people talking about going out, getting drunk, going to bars, sporting events, and so on—we know that these sort of events correlate with crime, and that’s what the models are picking up on.”
Once this data is collected, the GPS tags in tweets allows Greber and his team to pin them to a virtual map and outline hot spots for potential crime. However, everyone who tweets about hitting the club later isn’t necessarily going to commit a crime. Greber tests the accuracy of his approach by comparing Twitter-based KDE predictions with traditional KDE predictions based on police data alone. The big question is, does it work? For Greber, the answer is a firm “sometimes.” “It helps for some, and it hurts for others,” he says.
According to the study’s results, Twitter-based KDE analysis yielded improvements in predictive accuracy over traditional KDE for stalking, criminal damage, and gambling. Arson, kidnapping, and intimidation, on the other hand, showed a decrease in accuracy from traditional KDE analysis. It’s not clear why these crimes are harder to predict using Twitter, but the study notes that the issue may lie with the kind of language used on Twitter, which is characterized by shorthand and informal language that can be difficult for algorithms to parse.
This kind of approach to high-tech crime prevention brings up the familiar debate over privacy and the use of users’ date for purposes they didn’t explicitly agree to. The case becomes especially sensitive when data will be used by police to track down criminals. On this point, though he acknowledges post-Snowden societal skepticism regarding data harvesting for state purposes, Greber is indifferent. “People sign up to have their tweets GPS tagged. It’s an opt-in thing, and if you don’t do it, your tweets won’t be collected in this way,” he says. “Twitter is a public service, and I think people are pretty aware of that.”…

New York Police Twitter Strategy Has Unforeseen Consequences

Curated on April 24, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

J. David Goodman in The New York Times: “The New York Police Department has long seen its crime-fighting strategies emulated across the country and around the world.

So when a departmental Twitter campaign, meant to elicit smiling snapshots, instead attracted tens of thousands of less flattering images of officers, it did not take long for the hashtag #myNYPD to spread far beyond the five boroughs.

By Wednesday, the public relations situation in New York City had sparked imitators from Los Angeles (#myLAPD) to Mexico (#MiPolicíaMexicana) and over the ocean to Greece (#myELAS), Germany (#DankePolizei) and France (#maPolice).

The images, including circles of police officers, in riot gear poised to strike a man on a bench, or hosing down protesters, closely resembled those posted on Tuesday by critics of the Police Department in New York, in which many of the most infamous moments in recent police history had been dredged up by Twitter users….”

'Hackathons' Aim to Solve Health Care's Ills

Curated on April 8, 2014May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Amy Dockser Marcus in the Wall Street Journal: “Hackathons, the high-octane, all-night problem-solving sessions popularized by the software-coding community, are making their way into the more traditional world of health care. At Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a recent event called Hacking Medicine’s Grand Hackfest attracted more than 450 people to work for one weekend on possible solutions to problems involving diabetes, rare diseases, global health and information technology used at hospitals.
Health institutions such as New York-Presbyterian Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston have held hackathons. MIT, meantime, has co-sponsored health hackathons in India, Spain and Uganda.
Hackathons of all kinds are increasingly popular. Intel Corp. recently bought a group that organizes them. Companies hoping to spark creative thinking sponsor them. And student-run hackathons have turned into intercollegiate competitions.
But in health care, where change typically comes much more slowly than in Silicon Valley, they represent a cultural shift. To solve a problem, scientists and doctors can spend years painstakingly running experiments, gathering data, applying for grants and publishing results. So the idea of an event where people give two-minute pitches describing a problem, then join a team of strangers to come up with a solution in the course of one weekend is radical.
“We are not trying to replace the medical culture with Facebook culture,” said Elliot Cohen, who wore a hoodie over a button-down dress shirt at the MIT event in March and helped start MIT Hacking Medicine while at business school. “But we want to try to blend them more.”
Mr. Cohen co-founded and is chief technology officer at PillPack, a pharmacy that sends customers personalized packages of their medications, a company that started at a hackathon.
At MIT’s health-hack, physicians, researchers, students and a smattering of people wearing Google Glass sprawled on the floor of MIT’s Media Lab and at tables with a view of the Boston skyline. At one table, a group of college students, laptops plastered with stickers, pulled juice boxes and snacks out of backpacks, trash piling up next to them as they feverishly wrote code.
Nupur Garg, an emergency-room physician and one of the eventual winners, finished her hospital shift at 2 a.m. Saturday in New York, drove to Boston and arrived at MIT in time to pitch the need for a way to capture images of patients’ ears and throats that can be shared with specialists to help make diagnoses. She and her team immediately started working on a prototype for the device, testing early versions on anyone who stopped by their table.
Dr. Garg and teammate Nancy Liang, who runs a company that makes Web apps for 3-D printers, caught a few hours of sleep in a dorm room Saturday night. They came up with the idea for their product’s name—MedSnap—later that night while watching students use cellphone cameras to send SnapChats to one another. “There was no time to conduct surveys on what was the best name,” said Ms. Liang. “Many ideas happen after midnight.”
Winning teams in each category won $1,000, as well as access to the hackathons sponsors for advice and pilot projects.
Yet even supporters say hackathons can’t solve medicine’s challenges overnight. Harlan Krumholz, a professor at Yale School of Medicine who ran a many-months trial that found telemonitoring didn’t reduce hospitalizations or deaths of cardiology patients, said he supports the problem-solving ethos of hackathons. But he added that “improvements require a long-term commitment, not just a weekend.”
Ned McCague, a data scientist at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, served as a mentor at the hackathon. He said he wasn’t representing his employer, but he used his professional experiences to push groups to think about the potential customer. “They have a good idea and are excited about it, but they haven’t thought about who is paying for it,” he said.
Zen Chu, a senior lecturer in health-care innovation and entrepreneur-in-residence at MIT, and one of the founders of Hacking Medicine, said more than a dozen startups conceived since the first hackathon, in 2011, are still in operation. Some received venture-capital funding.
The upsides of hackathons were made clear to Sharon Moalem, a physician who studies rare diseases. He had spent years developing a mobile app that can take pictures of faces to help diagnose rare genetic conditions, but was stumped on how to give the images a standard size scale to make comparisons. At the hackathon, Dr. Moalem said he was approached by an MIT student who suggested sticking a coin on the subjects’ forehead. Since quarters have a standard measurement, it “creates a scale,” said Dr. Moalem.
Dr. Moalem said he had never considered such a simple, elegant solution. The team went on to write code to help standardize facial measurements based on the dimensions of a coin and a credit card.
“Sometimes when you are too close to something, you stop seeing solutions, you only see problems,” Dr. Moalem said. “I needed to step outside my own silo.”

Smart cities are here today — and getting smarter

Curated on April 3, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Computer World: “Smart cities aren’t a science fiction, far-off-in-the-future concept. They’re here today, with municipal governments already using technologies that include wireless networks, big data/analytics, mobile applications, Web portals, social media, sensors/tracking products and other tools.
These smart city efforts have lofty goals: Enhancing the quality of life for citizens, improving government processes and reducing energy consumption, among others. Indeed, cities are already seeing some tangible benefits.
But creating a smart city comes with daunting challenges, including the need to provide effective data security and privacy, and to ensure that myriad departments work in harmony.

The global urban population is expected to grow approximately 1.5% per year between 2025 and 2030, mostly in developing countries, according to the World Health Organization.

What makes a city smart? As with any buzz term, the definition varies. But in general, it refers to using information and communications technologies to deliver sustainable economic development and a higher quality of life, while engaging citizens and effectively managing natural resources.
Making cities smarter will become increasingly important. For the first time ever, the majority of the world’s population resides in a city, and this proportion continues to grow, according to the World Health Organization, the coordinating authority for health within the United Nations.
A hundred years ago, two out of every 10 people lived in an urban area, the organization says. As recently as 1990, less than 40% of the global population lived in a city — but by 2010 more than half of all people lived in an urban area. By 2050, the proportion of city dwellers is expected to rise to 70%.
As many city populations continue to grow, here’s what five U.S. cities are doing to help manage it all:

Scottsdale, Ariz.

The city of Scottsdale, Ariz., has several initiatives underway.
One is MyScottsdale, a mobile application the city deployed in the summer of 2013 that allows citizens to report cracked sidewalks, broken street lights and traffic lights, road and sewer issues, graffiti and other problems in the community….”

79 countries

Streetlight Effect

(stritlaɪt ɪˈfɛkt)

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