Research Group Projects and Descriptions

Despite amazing advances in medicines and medical technology over the past 50 years, health care is in crisis. Costs are skyrocketing, health outcomes are uneven, and the patient experience is unacceptable. The reason: the historical inequality between medical experts and health-care professionals (particularly doctors) and patients. This inequality was based on information asymmetry: only experts could access medical information and use it to conduct medical research, make diagnoses and develop treatments. The Internet has all but destroyed the information asymmetry, but the inequality remains. At New Media Medicine, we believe that people, working together in creative new ways, can succeed where the medical establishment has failed. As a society, we have dramatically underestimated the power of ordinary people to transform the system, to take care of their own health, to help develop therapies and to help solve massive public health problems. It’s time for a powershift in health care. New Media Medicine is pioneering new media technologies that will enable radical new collaborations between doctors, patients and communities, to catalyze a revolution in human health. Our work is based on three principles: (1) Patients are the most underutilized resource in health care, (2) The revolution must take place in our everyday lives, not in the doctor’s office or the lab, (3) Information transparency, not just information access, is the solution As the power shifts to people, health care will focus on keeping people well, instead of focusing on medicine and machines, politics and paperwork, or the billion-dollar molecule that becomes the next blockbuster drug.

The doctor-patient relationship is deteriorating. CollaboRhythm implements new paradigms in doctor-patient interaction to improve health outcomes and the patient experience. It uses ubiquitous connectivity, collaborative decision-making, and compelling interfaces to educate patients, improve treatment adherence, and deliver care seamlessly at any point in time or space. The foundation is a speech- and touch-controlled hub for the office where doctor and patient make shared decisions and where patients are encouraged to actively engage with their data. Patients also own their data: everything they see in the doctor’s office is available at home, when they visit another doctor, change jobs, or move across the world. Patients can contribute data that are important to their health and lifestyles—information that today is invisible to the doctor. By making patients active, informed participants in their own care, we believe we can reduce health-care costs, increase quality, and improve health outcomes.

The choices we make about diet, environment, medications, or alternative therapies constitute a massive collection of "everyday experiments." These data are largely unrecorded and underutilized by the traditional research establishment. Collective Discovery aims to leverage the intuition and insight of patient communities to capture and mine information about everyday experiences. Moving the community discourse from anecdotes to data will lead to better decision-making, stronger self-advocacy, identification of novel therapies, and inspiration of better hypotheses in traditional research, accelerating the search for new drugs and treatments. The unique characteristic of our Collective Discovery model is the use of knowledge representation and natural language processing to mediate communal hypothesis generation and to compensate for methodological errors and self-reporting bias. This model is being deployed in a real-world context as part of a partnership with the LAM Treatment Alliance and the greater LAM community.

Currently only 50% of patients with chronic disease take their medications. The problem is not simple forgetfulness. It is a complex combination of lack of understanding, poor self-reflection, limited social support, and almost non-existent communication between provider and patient. Forget It? is a system to support medication adherence that presupposes that patients engaged in tight, collaborative communication with their providers through interactive interfaces would think it preposterous not to take their medications. Technically, it is an awareness system that employs ubiquitous connectivity on the patient side through cell phones, televisions, and other interactive devices and a multi-modal collaborative workstation on the provider side.

HealthMap is a multilingual, real-time disease outbreak tracking and visualization system. Launched in fall 2006, the Web site collects over 300 reports per day in English, Spanish, French, Russian, and Chinese, from both general news media and public health sources around the world. Updated hourly, the system filters these reports to determine relevance, disease, location, and duplication clustering by means of a series of custom-designed, automated, text-processing algorithms. Relevant reports are then aggregated and displayed on a freely available dashboard where users can tailor the view according to date, disease, location, and source. HealthMap provides an overview of real-time information on emerging infectious diseases, and has particular interest for public health officials and international travelers.

Increasing understanding of how to categorize patient symptoms for efficient diagnosis has led to structured patient interviews and diagnostic flowcharts that can provide diagnostic accuracy and save valuable physician time. But the rigidity of predefined questions and controlled vocabulary for answers can leave patients feeling over-constrained, as if the doctor (or computer system) is not really attending to them. I’m Listening is a system for automatically conducting patient pre-visit interviews. It does not replace a human doctor, but can be used before an office visit to prepare the patient, deliver educational materials or triage care, and preorder appropriate tests, making better use of both doctor and patient time. It uses an on-screen avatar and natural language processing to (partially) understand the patient's response. Key is a common-sense reasoning system that lets patients express themselves in unconstrained natural language, even using metaphor, and that maps the language to medically relevant categories.

LAMsight is a practical experiment in creating new models for collaboration between researchers, clinicians, and patients. We are working with a rare-disease advocacy organization to identify and implement collaboration modes that help accelerate research on the rare disease LAM (Lymphangioleiomyomatosis), a multi-system, fatal disease that typically strikes women in their child-bearing years.

Five billion of the world's six some billion people live in developing countries, where many have no access to basic medical treatments and preventive care. Moca, or "Mobile Care," is cell-phone-based telemedicine system specifically for use in developing countries. The system allows semi-skilled community health workers to go into the field carrying a smartphone, collect diagnostic information, transmit it to a central medical records system for expert review, and receive real-time decision support. The project is build on open platforms: the Android smartphone platform and the OpenMRS medical record system. OpenMRS is designed for use in developing countries and is deployed in a dozen countries. Members of the Moca team traveled to the Philippines in March to explore a pilot deployment in Capiz; we are also developing partnerships with other organizations around the world.