Big data is healthcare’s biggest threat – and also its likely savior

Gigaom

Healthcare CIOs must feel ill some days. They are under pressure by boards of directors and governments to keep costs down, while the medical establishment and government simultaneously foist more requirements to collect, store and analyze ever-increasing volumes of data. It’s a headache that no amount of aspirin will fix.

Ironically, it may turn out that the CIOs’ latter problem can be a cure for the former. That is – given the right technology – insights gleaned from data soon will be the key to holding down healthcare expenditures while still improving patient care overall.

Healthcare under the knife (and the gun)

Our current medical predicament is happening at a time when governments everywhere are hampered in how they can respond. In Europe, some nations have been forced to make major cuts to healthcare. According to the OECD Health Data 2012 report, compared with the prior year, the Irish…

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The Game Doesn’t Care: Why the Gamification of Mental Health Isn’t Working (Yet)

Psyche's Circuitry

Games that are not games. There is a serious barrier to the effective gamification of mental health. This barrier is that the games we psychologists and health professionals are coming up with are not fun. In fact, they are totally uncool, border on the condescending, and wouldn’t motivate anyone to play for more than 30 seconds. This is the case even though the bar is set quite low because these “games” address things that people really want, like boosting our intelligence and memory, reducing depression and stress, quitting smoking, … fill in the blank. I’ve been fascinated with this disconnect between Psychology’s view and real-world acceptability. This disconnect is plaguing other fields as well, such as in the development of “serious games” for education. In this larger context, I’ve been working on the development of an app that takes a scientifically proven approach to reducing stress and anxiety, and embeds…

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