A few days ago ProPublica had a headline I wished I'd written: If It Needs A Sign, It's Probably Bad Design. Although the article started with a health care example (EpiPen of course, citing Joyce Lee's brilliant post), it wasn't focused on health care -- but it might as well have been. Health care is full of bad design, and of signs. Take, for example, the waiting room. When most patients enter a provider's office or facility, the first thing they are likely to see is a waiting room. The waiting room probably has other would-be patients already waiting there, each full of their own health concerns. In some instances, the initial waiting room is merely a staging area; once processed, patients may be sent to yet another waiting room to wait some more. And, of course, once they eventually do reach an exam room, they'll probably endure some more waiting, no matter how long their wait has already been...
Innovation
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Silicon Valley, Meet Innovation From Great Rift Valley
Across Africa, an innovation culture is starting to emerge. In Kenya, PesaPal piggybacks on the popular M-PESA mobile payments service, enabling Kenyans to buy and sell on the Internet. Tanzania's Techno Brain is selling software for managing businesses in 13 countries. And South Africa's Cobi Interactive... is developing popular applications for smart phones. Read More »
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Singing A New Tune: Redefining Innovation In The Medical Device World
In the world of medical devices, innovation has traditionally been defined as the invention of a new device or a new technology that can be packaged into a device, expanding the number of possible medical procedures or at least replacing old ones with those that are new, improved and lemon-scented... Read More »
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Sivak Named New HHS CTO
The Department of Health and Human Services has named Bryan Sivak as the department’s next chief technology officer.
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Slow Ideas
Why do some innovations spread so swiftly and others so slowly? Consider the very different trajectories of surgical anesthesia and antiseptics, both of which were discovered in the nineteenth century... Read More »
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SMART On The Agenda At AMIA 2012
The AMIA 2012 Annual Symposium begins today in Chicago, where it is currently “Informatics Week” as declared by Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Read More »
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Social Change And New Media In Africa
Cathal Gilbert looks at technologies being used by activists and discovers that many of most innovative ideas have come out of Africa. Read More »
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Social Entrepreneurship On The High Seas
Sailing some of the most promising socially and environmentally-focused technology companies around the world to meet local business leaders, investors and fellow entrepreneurs may not be the most conventional way of helping scale and grow their ventures, but that’s precisely what Unreasonable at Sea are attempting in a bold experiment in global entrepreneurship. Read More »
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Socrata Joins Open Data Institute (ODI)
Cloud Software Company Provides Tools, Technology and Expertise to Boost Government Decision-Making and Efficiency While Aiding Economic Growth Read More »
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Software Forethought
Here's an all too common scenario. A bunch of really smart scientists and medical researchers get together. They envision a research program of unprecedented scale. They obtain funding, tens to hundreds of millions of dollars, from academic, commercial, non-profit enterprises, and from investors and philanthropists. The plans are drawn up, brick and mortar is under design and soon to be built! Read More »
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Software Is About to Eat Chronic Disease and Save Us
Changes are coming. Unprecedented access to data about providers, results of procedures and quality of hospitals and other care giving institutions will be expanding in amazing ways as electronic health records legislation ripples through the industry. The BlueButton Health project is a great example and this is just the beginning. Read More »
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Software Patents And The Return Of Functional Claiming
Commentators have observed for years that patents do less good and cause more harm in the software industry than in other industries such as pharmaceuticals. They have pointed to a variety of problems and offered a variety of solutions...Most software patents today are written in functional terms. If courts would faithfully apply the 1952 Act, limiting those claims to the actual algorithms the patentees disclosed and their equivalents, they could prevent overclaiming by software patentees and solve much of the patent thicket problem that besets software innovation. Read More »
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Software That Tracks People On Social Media Created By Defence Firm
ERaytheon's Riot program mines social network data like a 'Google for spies', drawing ire from civil rights groups Read More »
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Solving Design Problems in Healthcare Starting with the Waiting Room
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Sometimes Innovation Requires Disobedience
The M.I.T. Media Lab is taking nominations for its Disobedience Award, which was first announced last year. As the award's site proudly quotes Joi Ito, the Director of the Lab and who came up with the idea: "You don't change the world by doing what you are told." I love it. The site, and the award's proponents, make clear that they are not talking about disobedience for the sake of disobedience. It's not about breaking laws. They're promoting "responsible disobedience," rule-breaking that is for the sake of the greater good. The site specifies...
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Sonatype Launches Insight Application Health Check
Sonatype, the leader in Component Lifecycle Management (CLM), today announced the launch of Insight Application Health Check, the first easy way to analyze the components that make up an application and the latest service in the Sonatype Insight product suite for ensuring the integrity of open-source components at every phase of the software lifecycle. Read More »
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