The myth of digital natives and health IT

I have a post on the CCIO website on the Digital Native myth and Health IT. 

The opening paragraph: 

We hear a lot about digital natives. They are related to the similarly much-mentioned millenials; possibly they are exactly the same people (although as I am going to argue that digital natives do not exist, perhaps millenials will also disappear in a puff of logic). Born after 1980, or maybe after 1984, or maybe after 1993, or maybe after 2007, or maybe after 2010, the digital native grew up with IT, or maybe grew up with the internet, or grew up with social media, or at any rate grew up with something that the prior generation – the “digital immigrants” (born a couple of years before the first cut off above, that’s where I am too) – didn’t.

#flicishere, the #IoT and invisible health IT

 

#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.

Unintended consequences and Health IT

Last week along with other members of the Irish CCIO group I attended the UK CCIO Network Summer School. Among many thought provoking presentations and a wonderful sense of collegiality (and the scale of the challenges ahead), one which stood out was actually a video presentation by Dr Robert Wachter, whose review into IT in the NHS (in England) is due in the coming weeks and who is also the author of “The Digital Doctor: Hype, Hope and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age”

Amongst many other things, Dr Wachter discussed the unintended consequences of Health IT. He discussed how, pretty much overnight, radiology imaging systems destroyed “radiology rounds” and a certain kind of discussion of cases. He discussed how hospital doctors using eHealth systems sit in computer suites with other doctors, rather than being on the wards. Perhaps most strikingly, he showed a child’s picture of her visit to the doctor. in which the doctor is turned away from the patient and her mother, hunched over a keyboard:

This reminded me a little of Cecil Helman’s vision of the emergence of a “technodoctor”, which I suspected was something of a straw man:

Like may other doctors of his generation – though fortunately still only a minority – Dr A prefers to see people and their diseases mainly as digital data, which can be stored, analysed, and then, if necessary, transmitted – whether by internet, telephone or radio – from one computer to another. He is one of those helping to create a new type of patient, and a new type of patient’s body – one much less human and tangible than those cared for by his medical predecessors. It is one stage further than reducing the body down to a damaged heart valve, an enlarged spleen or a diseased pair of lungs. For this ‘post-human’ body is one that exists mainly in an abstract, immaterial form. It is a body that has become pure information.

I still suspect this is overall a straw man, and Helman admits this “technodoctor” is “still only [part of] a minority” – but perhaps the picture above shows this is less of a straw man than we might be comfortable with.

Is there a way out of the trap of unintended consequences? On my other blog I have posted on Evgeny Morozov’s “To Solve Everything, Click Here.”  a book which, while I had many issue with Morozov’s style and approach (the post ended up being over 2000 words which is another unintended consequence), is extremely thought-provoking. Morozov positions himself against “epochalism” – the belief that because of technology (or other factors) we live in a unique era. He also decries “solutionism”, a more complex phenomenon, of which he writes:

I call the ideology that legitimizes and sanctions such aspirations “solutionism.” I borrow this unabashedly pejorative term from the world of architecture and urban planning – where it has come to refer to an unhealthy preoccupation with sexy, monumental and narrow-minded solutions – the kind of stuff that wows audiences at TED Conferences – to problems that are extremely complex, fluid and contentious. These are the kind of problems that, on careful examination, do not have to be defined in the singular and all-encompassing ways that “solutionists” have defined them; what’s contentious then, is not their proposed solution but their very definition of the problem itself. Design theorist Michael Dobbins has it right: solutionism presumes rather than investigates the problems that it is trying to solve, reaching “for the answer before the questions have been fully asked.” How problems are composed matters every bit as much as how problems are resolved.

As will be very clear from my other article, I don’t quite buy everything Morozov is selling (and definitely not the way he sells it!) , but in this passage I believe we are close to something that can help us avoid some of the traps that lead to unintended consequences. Of courses, these are by definition unintended, and so perhaps not that predictable, but by investigating rather than presuming the problems we are trying to solve, and not reaching for the answer before the questions have been fully asked, perhaps future children’s pictures of their trip to the hospital won’t feature a doctor turning their back on them to commune with the computer.