The scary thing about black holes is that their gravity inexorably drags in everything within its reach. Unless you are very far away or have sufficient escape velocity, you will get pulled in, and, once you are sucked in, you are never getting out. We call it our "healthcare" system, but usually what we mean is medical care. It treats illnesses, it puts us under the care of medical professionals, it turns us into patients. A doctor's visit begats prescriptions, and perhaps some testing. Testing leads to procedures. Procedures lead to hospital stays. Hospital stays lead to....you get the idea. What we might once have thought of as "health" -- or never thought about at all -- becomes "health care," a.k.a. medical care. And once you transform from a person, whose health belongs to you, to a patient, your health is never quite your own again. You've been sucked into the medical care black hole.

Read More »

If you've lived through a major, natural disaster, you know that during the first few days you'll probably have to rely on a mental map, instead of using a smartphone as an extension of your brain. Where's the closest hospital with disaster care? What about shelters? Gas stations? And how many soft story buildings-with their propensity to collapse-will you have to zig-zag around to get there? Trying to answer these questions after moving back to earthquake-prone San Francisco is why I started the Resiliency Maps project. The idea is to store information about assets, resources, and hazards in a given geographical area in a map that you can download and print out.

Read More »

HLN Consulting joined more than eighty organizations, institutions, and companies in imploring Congress to fund public health surveillance systems. The appropriations request letters – one to the House and one to the Senate – seek one billion in funding over ten years (and $100 million in FY 2020) for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). This funding would allow CDC, state, local, tribal, and territorial health departments to move from sluggish, manual, paper-based data collection to seamless, automated, interoperable IT systems and to recruit and retain skilled data scientists to use them.

Read More »

Maybe you don't work in a WeWork office setting. Maybe you haven't ever visited one. Maybe you haven't even heard of WeWork. In that case, then you'll probably be surprised that this audacious real estate start-up now has a valuation close to $50b, with over 400,000 "members" in 100 cities across 27 countries (and they claim to "touch" 5 million people worldwide). Or that their plans go well beyond their unique twist towards office sharing. Who in healthcare is thinking about them, and who should be worried...or intrigued?...WeWork was never just about finding people and companies office space: it wanted to "help people work to make a life, not just a living." It focused on building a culture in its spaces, complete with amenities and events to help build a community among its members.

Read More »

Data science, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and deep neural nets are all hot topics these days (and key terms that might help this post with some SEO, unless the AI sees through my attempts). Below I've shared several of the resources I use regularly while working on data science projects over the last few years. I don't read many books, so that I've shared even one is evidence of how important it is. There are enough resources here to get even the most novice engineer started on a path towards data science mastery in this new age where data science skills will be needed at every level. There is a tool for performing the work, a class taught by a renowned Stanford professor, websites with tutorials to give you real-life experience, and a site dedicated to making the latest research available to all for free so you can learn more if you want.

Read More »