Vipassana

Posted by Sally on March 20, 2008 under Blog | Be the First to Comment

Occasionally I post about something that doesn't really relate to health and technology but if I like something then I figure, why not share it. If you don't like it, you don't have to read it!

I am home early today and was doing a little bit of channel surfing when I happened upon a really interesting documentary. It is called Doing Time, Doing Vipassana. What struck me about this documentary was the underlying message of changing things within yourself.

Even though I have worked in health care for such a relatively short period (6 years) of time, I have realized quickly that you can't force people to change their habits or lifestyle. The desire for change really does have to come from within and I think as health professionals, one of the most challenging roles is encouraging people to make those positive steps to better health.

I guess it's the old adage, you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink. This is true for health care as it is for pretty much everything in life.

So this documentary called "Doing Time, Doing Vipassana" is is an award winning, 50 minute documentary about the introduction of a 10-day Meditation program in a violently corrupt Tihar prison in New Delhi.
After the ten-day course in Vipassana, violent criminals were said to have been miraculously and drastically transformed.

Like I said in the beginning, I realize this video is not related to health care but I really enjoyed it and hope you do as well.

They are YouTube videos so are approximately 10 minutes a piece and 5 in total.

Avatar to Help Doctors Visualize Patient Records and Improve Care

Posted by Sally on March 5, 2008 under Blog | Be the First to Comment

CeBIT 2008 is on at the moment and IBM have been showing off their Anatomic and Symbolic Mapper Engine (ASME).

The technology uses an avatar -- a 3D representation of the human body -- to allow doctors to visualize patient medical records in an entirely new way. Called the Anatomic and Symbolic Mapper Engine (ASME), this innovative visualization method allows a doctor to click with the computer mouse on a particular part of the avatar "body" to trigger a search of medical records to retrieve relevant information.

"It's like Google Earth for the body," said IBM Researcher Andre Elisseeff, who leads the healthcare projects at IBM's Zurich lab. "In hopes of speeding the move toward electronic healthcare records, we've tried to make information easily accessible for healthcare providers by combining medical data with visual representation, making it as simple as possible to interact with data that can improve patient care."

Source: http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/22375.wss

One thing that needs to improve before this technology could be utilized effectively will be the EHR. Once that is working as required, this technology could be a really exciting advancement in patient information management.