#Hereisflic! Flic is a wireless smart button “for your smartphone, smarthome and smartlife” as the website puts it. While I am rather deficient in the smarthome and smartlife departments, I do have a smartphone and had an enjoyable evening playing around with Flics. A Flic is a little button – the pack above contained 4:
Each is a pleasingly solid little artefact. Put very simply, there are three ways of pressing the Flic – single click, double click, and hold. Each of these can be linked with an action of your smartphone (or smarthome devices/system) or using If This, Then That a whole range of other apps and devices:
Playing around with Flic was great fun and had that you-can-do-that? factor which I don’t get all that much with technology any more. Indeed, messing around with Flic got me thinking of grandiose, utopian vision of healthcare (I suspect some of my aversion to grandiose, utopian visions of technology and healthcare is pure reaction formation. And obviously my grandiose, utopian vision is better than everyone else’s grandiose, utopian vision) – which to recap was:
So my vision for the future of healthcare is sitting in a room talking to someone, without a table or a barrier between us, with the appropriate information about that person in front of me (but not a bulky set of notes, or desktop computer, or distracting handheld device) in whatever form is more convivial to communication between us. We discuss whatever it is that has that person with me on that day, what they want from the interaction, what they want in the long term as well as the short term. In conversation we agree on a plan, if a “plan” is what emerges (perhaps, after all, the plan will be no plan) – perhaps referral onto others, perhaps certain investigations, perhaps changes to treatment. At the end, I am presented with a summary of this interaction and of the plan, prepared by a sufficiently advanced technology invisible during the interaction, which myself and the other person can agree on. And if so, the referrals happen, the investigations are ordered, and all the other things that now involve filling out carbon-copy forms and in one healthcare future will involve clicking through drop-down menus, just happen.
That’s it.
I suppose putting flesh on those bones would involve a speech to text system that would convert the clinical encounter into a summary form “for the notes” (and for a summary letter for the person themselves, and the GP letter, and for the referrals) – perhaps some key phrases would be linked with certain formulations and phrases (to a great degree medical notes, even in psychiatry, are rather formulaic) – with of course capacity or editing and adding in free text. While clicking Flic-type devices during a consultation would be distracting, a set of different Flic type buttons with different clinical actions – ie contact psychologist to request a discussion on this patient, make provisional referral to dietitian, text community nurse to arrange a phone call – would certainly smoothen things much more than the carbon-copy world I currently live in.
When I wrote the above vision I was not familiar with the illustration Bob Wachter uses in his talks of a young girls picture of her trip to the doctor:
Turned away, tapping at a keyboard, disengaged from the family. That is what technology should not facilitate. Perhaps the internet of things could be a way of realising my particular grandiose vision of invisible Health IT.
A Medical Education 