Did you have a chance to read the July 2016 issue of Harvard Business Review (HBR)?
Why would anyone care to subscribe to HBR, you ask? Well, fine, you can read these for free on their website.
July’s HBR has a healthcare focus. First is Michael Porter and Robert Kaplan’s How to Pay for Health Care, followed by Brent James and Greg Poulson’s The Case for Capitation.
Still no? Here’s the quick run down for the closet MBA in you. Continue reading
Posted in Radiology Innovation and Quality
Tagged bundle, capitation, Harvard Business Review, kaplan, payment, porter, Quality
We often think of innovation as creating new technology, but innovation also comes in the form of new business models, new regulations, and new ways to perform a craft. Radiologists are in crossroads among a myriad of such “news,” the more comprehensively discussed among which are the reimbursement changes and regulation changes which have been discussed ad infinitum (e.g. here, here, here, and more).
Rather than discussing the impact of the new healthcare regulations on radiology and the emerging high-tech, social-media-connecting, cloud-based, deep learning, big-data-supporting, iPad-friendly, segmentation-compatible solutions , maybe it is worthwhile to take a few minute to think about innovating at a much lower level. On the level of our job description.
Photo Credit: debspoons; freedigitalphotos.net
Posted in Radiology Innovation and Quality
Dr. Keith Dreyer opens with a keynote during the Intersociety Summer Conference (ISC) with description of data science and overview of how machine learning have evolved over time.
He describes that machines and humans inherently see things differently. Humans are excellent at object classification, recognition of faces, understanding language, driving, and imaging diagnostics. Continue reading
Posted in Technology and Informatics
Tagged Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, Quality, Radiology, Value
Radiologists have a day job (or a night job, depending on your precise definition of “radiologist.”) Many people want to learn the syntax of a computer language, while some want to keep up on existing skills.
If your goals are similar to mine, these might help. Now these are not ways to learn to write code (I’ll write about that later), but ways to brush up on existing skills.
Here are five things to help keeping up your coding skills:
Most radiology practices can be improved by better use of technology Continue reading
Not long ago, the ability to create smart data visualizations, or dataviz, was a nice-to-have skill. For the most part, it benefited design- and data-minded managers who made a deliberate decision to invest in acquiring it. That’s changed. Now visual communication is a must-have skill for all managers, because more and more often, it’s the only way to make sense of the work they do.
A June 2016 Harvard Business Review article by Scott Berinato discusses the four types of data visualization, in their traditional “boil complex stuff down to a 2×2 matrix” method no less. In short, what works depends on the level of details necessary to convey the purpose.
Two axes of data visualization – what works best depends on the purpose
The overall concepts are reminiscent of concepts by Edward Tufte and his many, excellent, books on visualization.
The HBR article is worth a read for anyone interested in business intelligence, data analytics, or data visualization (which, as Berinato says, is probably a misnomer – it’s not the visualization that matters, but the question it seeks to answer).
Posted in Technology and Informatics
Tagged Big Data, business intelligence, Technology, visualization
Apixio, the company behind Iris, a big data computing platform for healthcare, just secured $19.3 million in venture investment to bring big data analytics to healthcare, a field notorious for its resistance to change. It’s an exciting time to be interested in healthcare data science – and it remains to be seen how fast and how far we can go.
Source: http://www.apixio.com/
While taking a break from studying for the Core Exam, I stumbled upon this 2016 document from Microsoft about password security (yes, in some circles that is considered “taking a break”).
As radiologists, every day we are being asked to type in some sort of authentication username and password at work. Every other week, we’re asked to change passwords for security reasons. Every month, we forget one of those 23 passwords we’ve created over the past 3 years for the VA or another affiliated hospital, or some software you’ve not used for a while, or even just plain forgot. Continue reading
Posted in Technology and Informatics
The use of the phrase, “Artificial Intelligence” has exploded within the past few years as the theme of dozens of our most popular movies and television shows, magazines, books, and social media. This is despite the difficulty that many experts have in even defining the meaning of the term, “intelligence”, much less “artificial intelligence”.
Artificial intelligence has been too loosely defined and too over-tread by dystopian science fictions to hold a meaningful definition.
I love Bill Gate’s quote, “Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years,” and think it aptly applies to machine learning as well.
FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) is healthcare’s solution to breaking down information silos. It’s an exciting time to enter medical imaging.
