Szollosi Healthcare Innovation Program (SHIP)
Your health is complicated enough, the road to your cure should not be.
 
There are amazing advances in science and healthcare every day.  However, it is still the final delivery of that care which determines whether or not the intervention was truly successful.  In fact, any amount of medical knowledge and skill will become limited if:
 
Patients and physicians cannot easily communicate with each other when they need to do so
Multiple physicians do not work collaboratively when the situation demands it
Medical data is not easily available to the right people at the right time and in the right format
It has been estimated that 60 to 70 percent of adverse events in healthcare occur due to poor communication, whether between physicians and patients or amongst physicians themselves.   These types of problems would not be tolerated in other industries.  In fact, successful companies, from real estate and investment banking to telecommunications and video games, invest heavily in the development of innovative ways to ensure they can consistently perform their missions better, faster and cheaper.  We believe it is time for healthcare to start doing the same.
 
With this in mind, the Szollosi Healthcare Innovation Program aims to focus on improving the process of healthcare delivery so that patients, physicians and allied providers can more easily take advantage of all that today’s advanced medical systems can offer.  We believe this is especially important for those with complex medical needs, who have to deal with multiple providers overseeing a dizzying array of diagnostic and treatment options.
 
For this program to succeed, we will start by focusing our mission on a few areas of interest which demonstrate how innovative thinking and technologies can make a difference in healthcare.  By studying and solving problems in these initial areas, we will ideally build the organization and culture for future successes in an expanding number of projects.
 
With an overlying theme of dealing with complex and critical medical issues, we are initially focusing on the following two areas of interest:

Information Sharing
We need to do a better job of quickly and easily sharing medical information between all interested parties in a healthcare setting – including the patient and all the physicians and providers involved in their care. This is especially important for complex patients who have multiple care providers and are more likely to have critical issues which need to be addressed urgently. Two key parts of information sharing are as follows:
Patient-Physician Communication: Imagine a system that allows patients to send and receive data in whichever format works best for them, and for physicians to do the same. For example, a patient could have a personalized web site to both keep track of their medical data as well as facilitate communication with each of their physicians. This could enhance efficiency, patient education and quality of care.
Physician-Physician Collaboration:  Healthcare desperately needs a system in which multiple physicians could easily communicate with each other about a specific patient and which would allow all the care providres to see what the others are doing and thinking. For example, a web site dedicated to a single patient could display key pieces of patient data while also allowing physicians to securely communicate amongst themselves or post their thoughts and plans for the others to see.

Information Visualization
Currently, we view medical data via interfaces that resemble “Word” documents and “Excel” spreadsheets.  But while we are comfortable with these decades old interfaces, today’s physicians and patients are being overwhelmed with the increasingly large and complex data sets with which they have to deal - where a single patient may have thousands of data points (e.g. lab values, vital signs, radiology tests, medications, etc…) spread across a large expand of time.

What if we could create a fast and intuitive interface to this data which would allow physicians to quickly see what they need to address;  Or allow patients to better understand their own medical situation? For this type of project, we could take advantage of advanced theories and technologies from outside healthcare, including information intensive businesses like hedge funds and gaming.  We might also utilize hardware innovations such as the Microsoft Surface Table and the Apple iPhone. Ideally, the result of this improved information visualization would be better decision support, efficiency and information sharing.