Better
Can't resist posting this anecdote from Atul Gawande's (best known for his New Yorker medical pieces, such as the one about checklists) book, Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance...at the end, he describes spending some time in India as a visiting surgeon to see how innovation was possible in comparatively squalid circumstances. The Nanded hospital he describes below serves 1,400 villages, about 2.3 million people, with just 9 surgeons (Gawande says that'd be comparable to the state of Kansas having 9 surgeons): http://www.amazon.com/dp/0312427654 note: It's a little OT, but I guess…
Thanks. I've reluctantly come to agree with your conclusion. There is no silver bullet. Repeating myself: Another low hanging fruit is transition from free-for-service to rewarding wellness (capitation). Some are already doing this. I'd like to understand if, how, why cost disease is a factor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol's_cost_disease I have zero understanding, intuition about this. Feels like black magic. But some of the experts I've read say it's important. There's no shortage of management efficiency and quality of care innovations to explore. In the spirit of Atul Gawanda's…
I like this paragraph of the article best (but there are a lot of other good paragraphs, building to an overall good whole, so I encourage you to read the whole article): "In Better, Atul Gawande argues that when we think of improving medicine, we always imagine making new advances, discovering the gene responsible for a disease, and so on — and forget that we can simply take what we already know how to do, and figure out how to do it better. In a word, iterate." That's exactly it. Medicine improves most dramatically simply by spreading the word about how to prevent and how to treat illnesses…
I grew up in India. It wasn't uncommon at all to see people of my parents' generation with pockmarks from Small Pox or handicaps (and stories of deaths) from polio. Their generation saw first hand the horrors of these diseases and recognized the importance of vaccines. They still speak fondly of how lucky it is that vaccines were available by the time their kids (my generation) were born. So developing countries are pretty serious about vaccinations. However, things are changing with the new generation. The new generation (born in 70s/80s) have been exposed to far less horrors and…
>Not science. Their stylistic goals are blatant in the work they produce, this article in particular. That's a pretty loose and fundamentally unsupported statement. >the absence of any reference to the metric system in an allegedly scientific article is notable. The metric system isn't magic. It's normal to use the system most familiar to the audience being addressed. It is definitely weird that you're so hung up on this. My assumption, based on your strange snark regarding TNY, is that you just dislike the magazine for some reason you probably haven't really examined. Fortunately, no…
Atul Gawande wrote about 'non-human' tools in medicine [0]. He advocated using checklists but he has also written about other tools. One I remember was a flow chart to predict some sickness. It outperformed humans solidly. The biggest problem with checklists, flow charts and software (one older example is MYCIN [1]) is adaption. If the medical practitioners don't want the systems they are going to fail. He also writes a lot about that in the book. He tried to introduce it into hospitals but the professionals often ignored the lists or just checked the boxes without actually checking the…
Two examples of structural problems with our health care systems: 1. We lead the world in transitioning from inpatient to outpatient care; for instance, I read a source last night that said the majority of hernia repairs in the NHS were inpatient, and the overwhelming majority of them in the US were outpatient. That's good, but an unintended consequence of it is that it's easier to route a patient to a surgical procedure if it's done outpatient, and as a consequence US patients get a lot more of these procedures, some of them (cardiac stents being a recent well-publicized example) of dubious…
Nice page and explanation (though you'll need your own domain)...I'll have to echo what notastartup said...this is probably a textbook case of when not to go on a hacker binge and the concept of "there's a time for everything"... A. Because of the timing of your finals, and B. the idea you have, while useful and well-thought out, is one that is going to take some time to gain traction. Quantified-self is important, but not that many people get it, or would know what to do with it. Even if your intention was to go all into tech, it probably would've been better to just spend your off hours on…
What stood out to me: > After enrolling just 30 patients, the ARREST trial was stopped early by an N.I.H. board because the patients who got ECPR did so much better than the control-group subjects who received standard resuscitation, and it would have been unethical to continue the study. After six months, 43 percent of the 14 patients who got ECPR were alive with good brain function, compared with zero in the control group. > Yannopoulos has invited physicians from all over to visit his program; afterward, he often hears from them that replicating his work at their home institutions —…
Read the article by atul gawande linke in thee. As a programmer i do wonder what has caused my performance in terms of learning longer, massive subjects to peak. I think as a kid I used to just storm and power through learning things, even though my technique was still flawed. I just applied shear will power to get through hard subjects I had no fucking clue about. I picked and learnt pre modern C++ to build NNets as my first CS project in 2002 and I had never coded in my life. It took me 3 months to just learn the damn MS Visual Studio c++ toolchain. But I did it anyway. I taught myself…