Moving from the quantified self to the quantified community...

We are seeing an explosion of smart, inexpensive technologies that can be used to track activities and support the move to the quantified self. That is very interesting to me, but what is more interesting is making this social.  Research into why people keep exercising consistently shows that stress relief and social connection are critical.

There is an increasing number of smart phone apps like Strava that not only allow you to track your exercise but also allow the sharing and comparing of that data with friends. Whenever my schedule allows, I prefer to ride with the local biking club -- but for the times individual rides between I can use the compare features to see how I rank on the tougher hills of my ride.

So what about taking the social aspect of group exercise to the next level? I had the good fortune to meet the founders of the Healthy Communities Institute who are supporting connected communities. I call this the quantified community ... so instead of just measuring yourself, your community tracks public health  by establishing real-time data dashboards that leverage easy to understand green/yellow/red widgets. As a founder of a health information exchange (HIE), I find this approach really intriguing.

Before you say "my community is not that progressive" watch what Owensboro, Kentucky did to support public health as they established community health dashboard.

What is your community doing to improve health and well-being?

Building medication management that is safe for our loved ones...

During the past 2 decades I have been part of many projects focused on improving patient care. Working on quality, reliability, and safety in health care is what gets me up in the morning. I am proud of our health care system, but in so many ways it is not what had hoped for in medical school in the 1980s.

During this post, I am focusing on medication safety as critical feature of a highly reliable health care system.

While visiting with my dad and mom after a recent hospitalization, it occurred to me that my parents (both in their 80s) rarely (if ever) take their 8 to 10 medications as directed. It is just too hard to coordinate one's life around a schedule of taking this many medication 1-3 times per day. So, if having them take the medications perfectly is not an option -- what can we do in the short term to help? A great blog post from Dr. Robert Wachter captures the experiences of being a physician with parents in his own hospital -- there is nothing more informative for a systems thinker.

We are tackling problems like medication management as our innovation group collaborates with Community Care of North Carolina  (CCNC). CCNC has helped to develop and grow the most robust patient centered medical home network in the US.

We have deployed an approach that we locally call "Community Medication Management" -- as the title suggests we have aggregated and are curating medication lists from multiple sources. This aggregation of "separate medication lists" from hospitals, primary care providers, pharmacy benefit management systems allows identification of care gaps.

I will be sharing specific examples of how this is working in our community in coming weeks. But for now, I am pleased to say we have a method to make medication management easier for folks like my parents and their caregivers.


Todd Rowland MD
Experienced (And Learning) Health Care Professional