Geekipedia

Sure…a little off topic, but understanding technology is one of the critical components (in my humble opinion) to driving innovation and change in healthcare. Healthcare is not an early adopter of solutions. There is too much fear about change (and litigation).

So, when Wired but out this magazine supplement called Geekipedia, I knew it was a must read. As it says on the cover “149 people, places, ideas and trends you need to know now”.

Here are a few that jumped out at me:

• AJAX – a suite of web-development technologies which produce squeaky clean surfaces. This allows web designers to build web sites that act like applications and accept user input and computing results without fetching entirely new pages from a server. I have worked with developers to use this before. Very cool. You see it on a lot more sites now, but anytime you enter data and the site changes without refreshing it…they built the site using AJAX.
• APIs – application programming interfaces are sets of rules that govern how apps exchange information. These have been around for years and typically only mattered to the programmers and your engineering staff…but today APIs allow you to create custom applications using desktop widgets and mashups to have personalized sites that do all types of cool things.
• Collaborative Filtering – this is the recommendation algorithm you see on Amazon or Netflix or many other sites. I can see healthcare one day embracing this in patient centric forums – patients with your similar benefits and genes were most likely to respond to this form of treatment.
• Distributed Computing – most of you should know about this as the use of our computers to solve problems has been part of the news (good and bad) for years, but the point is to leverage the memory of individual computers in a network design to create a virtual supercomputer to solve complex problems that look at lots of data over years – e.g., SETI@Home that looks for extraterrestrial intelligence or FightAids@Home which looks for new AIDS treatments.
• Mashup – these are sites / applications that are combinations of existing offerings that are cut and pasted together. For example:
  • Wheel of Fortune + Yahoo Local = Wheel of Lunch
  • Digg + Slashdot + del.icio.us = Doggdot.us
  • Wikipedia + Bible = Conservapedia
• Meganiche – with the Internet’s utilization now, it is possible to have a niche within a niche. For rare diseases, this could have some value.
• Neurologism – all of the new areas of research driven by the breakthroughs in understanding the brain.
  • Neurofitness
  • Neuroceuticals
  • Neuroinformatics
  • Neuromarketing
  • Neuroergonomics
  • Neurosemantics
• RNAi or Ribonucleic Acid Interference – “the silent assassin of cell biology”. It protects against viruses by tearing up the viral RNA and preventing it from making copies of itself.
• RSS or Really Simple Syndication – you see this everywhere – on my blog, on websites, even in the new Outlook. This allows you to stream information to your reader (e.g., Google Reader) to see new information without having to go to all the individual sites. I wonder how many managed care companies and PBMs offer this on their websites today. It would be nice to get this pushed right to my personal Google page.
• SEO or Search Engine Optimization – this is the use of tags and other links to maximize how your website shows up in a search.
• Ultrahigh-throughput gene sequencing – this is all about the speed at which genes are sequenced which is obviously a big driver of personalized medicine and genomics. I am not sure I buy the prediction of “it won’t be long before a stall at the local shopping center will work up your genome ‘while u wait'”.
• Widgets – these are small applications which can typically be embedded in a website using reusable code (e.g., a BMI calculator or mortgage calculator)
• Wikipedia – this is a site that provides the modern encyclopedia full of links and information that is created by the net community – are you out there? Is your company or product?

It makes you wonder. As healthcare moves to more consumer centric and sales to commercial patients mimics Medicare Part D, will you see a United Healthcare avatar in Second Life or a Medco Facebook page. And, when will be see YouTube and Flickr being used to paint positive pictures of our healthcare system for the many people that it does work for. If politicians can begin to use these sites and big corporations encourage personal advertising of their brands, healthcare should give it some consideration.