“Company culture is another area that I think the experts get backwards. The common belief is that you need a good company culture to create success. But isn’t it more likely that companies with awesome employees get both a good culture and success at the same time? A good corporate culture is a byproduct of doing everything right; it’s not the cause of success as much as the outcome. Success improves culture more than a good culture can cause success.”
Author Archives: Steve Mays
Medical scenarios for Google Glass
- An emergency responder arriving at a motor vehicle accident is able to live stream to the emergency department the status of the patients and the associated trauma suffered to a patient. The ER is then able to assemble and prepare for a patient’s emergency treatment.
- A surgeon live streams to residents and students a live surgery–so that they can see what work goes into a medical procedure first hand.
- A visiting nurse seeing a patient in their own home video records and captures images of the patient’s wound, for which they are caring for, and sends them back to the physician.
- A resident’s physical exam of a patient is streamed back to an attending physician, who can critique their work and make recommendations on questions to ask in real time. This could especially be useful when a resident consultant evaluates a patient while their attending is at home overnight.
- A cardiologist in a cath lab overlays the fluoroscopy as they perform a femoral catheterization for a patient with a recent myocardial infarct.
- A nurse scans the medication they are about to give the patient and confirms the correct drug and right patient by overlaying their patient profile with the person in front of them–possibly stopping a medical error.
- A student brings up their notes and lab reports as they present their patient case to their attending, with data available in real time.
- An oncologist can overlay the MRI scan over a patient, and show them and the family where the cancer exists.
- The electronic health record at the hospital is available to caregivers, able to be updated on major changes in the patients they oversee. For instance, the recent cultures from a septic patients wound comes back positive for MRSA and the physician changes their broad spectrum antibiotics to appropriate therapy based upon sensitivities.
- A pharmacist is able to scan medications and verify the proper drugs after comparing the drug with images available in the database, ensuring the right drug is dispensed.
- A physical therapist can see past sessions with a patient from previous recordings, overlaying their current range of motion, identifying changes as well as progression.
- Any healthcare professional could walk up to a patient’s bed and instantly see all their vitals such as pulse, BP, O2 Sats, etc.
Brave New War
Here’s my over-simplification of John Robb’s thesis in Brave New War: A few, dedicated “Global Guerrillas” can defeat the army of a nation state by disrupting critical systems. I thought he made a pretty good case. Not sure about his timing, however. The book, written in 2007, suggests a dire sceneria for 2016:
“Security will become a function of where you live and whom you work for, much as health care is allocated already. Wealthy individuals and multinational corporations will be the first to bail out of our collective system, opting instead to hire private military companies, such as Blackwater and Triple Canopy, to protect their homes and facilities and to establish a protective perimeter around daily life. Parallel transportation networks—evolving out of the time-share aircraft companies such as Warren Buffett’s Netjets—will cater to this group, leapfrogging its members from one secure, well-appointed lily pad to the next. Members of the middle class will follow, taking matters into their own hands by forming suburban collectives to share the costs of security—as they do now with education—and shore up delivery of critical services. These “armored suburbs” will deploy and maintain backup generators and communications links; they will be patrolled civilian police auxiliaries that have received corporate training and boast their own state-of-the-art emergency response systems. As for those without the means to build their own defense, they will have to make do with the remains of the national system. They will gravitate to the cities, where they will be subject to ubiquitous surveillance and marginal or nonexistent services. For the poor, there will be no other refuge.”
I kept looking for “the good news” but this was the best he offered:
“The strikes of the future will be strategic, pinpointing the systems we rely on, and they will leave entire sections of the country without energy and communications for protracted periods. But the frustration and economic pain that result will have a curious side effect: they will spur development of an entirely new, decentralized security system, one that devolves power and responsibility to a mix of local governments, private companies, and individuals.”
Brave New War was only a couple hundred pages and well worth the read for those that share my sneaking suspicion a) our governments don’t tell us the truth, and b) we are not winning The War on Terror because it can’t be won.
The Science of Aging
Scott Adams: Robot Personalities
“My solution is that all robots must be raised for their first few years in Minnesota, where everyone is kind and generous. I assume there are other spots around the world in which the culture evolved to be unusually friendly. Part of the value of your future robot is where it was imprinted with its base personality. Someday the Minnesota Series of robots will fetch top dollar.”