We should look to automation to relieve the current pressures on healthcare

by c 20/04/2017

Automation may address these pressures in primary care, while also reconfiguring the work of staff roles and changing the patient-doctor relationship.

by c 20/04/2017

Image by TheeErin (Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0), who writes: “Working on a national cancer research project. This is the usual volume of mail that comes in two-days time.”

In many sectors, automation is seen as a threat due to the potential for job losses. By contrast, automation is seen as an opportunity in healthcare, as a way to address pressures including staff shortages, increasing demand and workloads, reduced budget, skills shortages, and decreased consultation times. Automation may address these pressures in primary care, while also reconfiguring the work of staff roles and changing the patient-doctor relationship. In the interview below, Matt Willis discusses a project, funded by The Health Foundation, which looks at opportunities and challenges to automation in NHS England general practice services. While the main goal of the project is to classify work tasks and then calculate the probability that each task will be automated, Matt is currently conducting ethnographic fieldwork in primary care sites to understand the work practices of surgery staff and clinicians. Since the first automated pill counting machine was introduced in 1970 the role of the pharmacist has expanded to where they now perform more patient consultations, consult with primary care physicians, and require greater technical skill (including a Pharm.D degree). While this provides one clear way in which a medical profession has responded to automation, the research team is now looking at how automation will reconfigure other professions in primary care, and how it will shape its technical and digital infrastructures. We caught up with Matt Willis to explore the implications of automation in primary care. Ed.: One finding from an analysis by Frey and Osborne is that most healthcare occupations (that involve things like social intelligence, caring etc.) show a remarkably low probability for computerisation. But what sorts of things could be automated, despite that? Matt: While providing care is the most important work that happens in primary care, there are many tasks that support that care. Many of those tasks are highly structured and repetitive, ideal things we can automate. There is an incredible amount of what I call…

Books, Social Data Science, Wellbeing

Exploring the world of self-tracking: who wants our data and why?

by Gina Neff 07/04/2017

What happens when we turn our everyday experience—in particular, health and wellness-related experience—into data?

by Gina Neff 07/04/2017

Benjamin Franklin used to keep charts of his time spent and virtues lived up to. Today, we use technology to self-track: our hours slept, steps taken, calories consumed, medications administered. But what happens when we turn our everyday experience—in particular, health and wellness-related experience—into data? “Self-Tracking” (MIT Press) by Gina Neff and Dawn Nafus examines how people record, analyse, and reflect on this data—looking at the tools they use and the communities they become part of, and offering an introduction to the essential ideas and key challenges of using these technologies. In considering self-tracking as a social and cultural phenomenon, they describe not only the use of data as a kind of mirror of the self but also how this enables people to connect to, and learn from, others. They also consider what’s at stake: who wants our data and why, the practices of serious self-tracking enthusiasts, the design of commercial self-tracking technology, and how people are turning to self-tracking to fill gaps in the healthcare system. None of us can lead an entirely untracked life today, but in their book, Gina and Dawn show us how to use our data in a way that empowers and educates us. We caught up with Gina to explore the self-tracking movement: Ed.: Over one hundred million wearable sensors were shipped last year to help us gather data about our lives. Is the trend and market for personal health-monitoring devices ever-increasing, or are we seeing saturation of the device market and the things people might conceivably want to (pay to) monitor about themselves? Gina: By focusing on direct-to-consumer wearables and mobile apps for health and wellness in the US we see a lot of tech developed with very little focus on impact or efficacy. I think to some extent we’ve hit the trough in the ‘hype’ cycle, where the initial excitement over digital self-tracking is giving way to the hard and serious work…

Health, Methods, Social Data Science, Wellbeing

Facts and figures or prayers and hugs: how people with different health conditions support each other online

by admin 07/03/2016

Online support groups are one of the major ways in which the Internet has fundamentally changed how people experience health and health care.

by admin 07/03/2016

Online forums are important means of people living with health conditions to obtain both emotional and informational support from this in a similar situation. Pictured: The Alzheimer Society of B.C. unveiled three life-size ice sculptures depicting important moments in life. The ice sculptures will melt, representing the fading of life memories on the dementia journey. Image: bcgovphotos (Flickr)

Online support groups are being used increasingly by individuals who suffer from a wide range of medical conditions. OII DPhil Student Ulrike Deetjen’s recent article with John Powell, Informational and emotional elements in online support groups: a Bayesian approach to large-scale content analysis uses machine learning to examine the role of online support groups in the healthcare process. They categorise 40,000 online posts from one of the most well-used forums to show how users with different conditions receive different types of support. Online support groups are one of the major ways in which the Internet has fundamentally changed how people experience health and health care. They provide a platform for health discussions formerly restricted by time and place, enable individuals to connect with others in similar situations, and facilitate open, anonymous communication. Previous studies have identified that individuals primarily obtain two kinds of support from online support groups: informational (for example, advice on treatments, medication, symptom relief, and diet) and emotional (for example, receiving encouragement, being told they are in others’ prayers, receiving “hugs”, or being told that they are not alone). However, existing research has been limited as it has often used hand-coded qualitative approaches to contrast both forms of support, thereby only examining relatively few posts (<1,000) for one or two conditions. In contrast, our research employed a machine-learning approach suitable for uncovering patterns in “big data”. Using this method a computer (which initially has no knowledge of online support groups) is given examples of informational and emotional posts (2,000 examples in our study). It then “learns” what words are associated with each category (emotional: prayers, sorry, hugs, glad, thoughts, deal, welcome, thank, god, loved, strength, alone, support, wonderful, sending; informational: effects, started, weight, blood, eating, drink, dose, night, recently, taking, side, using, twice, meal). The computer then uses this knowledge to assess new posts, and decide whether they contain more emotional or informational support. With this approach we were able to determine the emotional or informational content of 40,000…