Dr. Joseph L. Belsky

On May 8^th I attended the Joseph L. Belsky, MD Research Day, an annual event named after Dr. Joseph L. Belsky who founded the event in 1986 at Danbury Hospital, and continues to inspire. 

Dr. Ramin Ahmadi, director of graduate medical education and research (and a member of my doctoral dissertation committee) kicked off the day, which was attended by hospital physicans, department heads, and resident medical students.

The keynote speaker was Dr. Ramiro Garzon who talked about microRNA expression and function in normal hematopoeisis and leukemia. If that speech title sounds complex, I can assure you it is nothing compared to the brilliant presentation about how microRNA is changing the face of cancer. I had never heard of microRNA and immediately started Googling away on my iPad. After reading the FAQ at microrna.org, I realized how much I do not know. In fact, I have read some books about DNA and genomics, and the more I read, the more I find out that I do not know. Someday, I will find the right book and begin to understand this important topic.

I have not attended a Research Day before, and in looking at the list of  Prior Research Day Keynote speakers, I see what I missed. Dr. Ahmadi and his outstanding staff, led by Dr. Joann Petrini, put together a great Research Day Program focused on research studies performed by Danbury Hospital medical researchers.The residents developed large posters that were hung around the learning center. See the topics and abstracts (view the first two pages here and the last page of abstracts here). You can see a complete summary of the day at the link below. It was a great day of learning for all.

• Summary of Joseph L. Belsky, MD Research Day

It is a privilege to be able to participate and contribute to various boards.  Board service is a way to learn new things, meet interesting people, and gain new perspectives. That has certainly been the case since I joined the board of OCLC in 2009. Fifteen years ago some pundits — myself not included — were saying that libraries were history — as in toast — they were not long for the emerging digital world. Been to a local or college library lately? They are full of people and many libraries are expanding their facilities. Library use has doubled over the past decade. What happened to the digital “vision”? It turns out that the digital and physical modes can get along together quite well.

The crown jewel of OCLC is WorldCat – the world’s most comprehensive database of resources held in libraries, connecting millions of users to library collections and services of thousands of libraries around the globe. WorldCat, the most comprehensive online database of resources available through libraries around the world, has reached a major milestone with the addition of its 2 billionth holding. On Saturday, May 4, at 2:58 a.m., the University of Alberta Libraries, in Edmonton, added an e-book to WorldCat — Evaluation of the City of Lakes Family Health Team Patient Portal Pilot Project: Final Report — the 2 billionth holding in WorldCat. 

WorldCat was created in 1971 so that libraries could share cataloging information from a central database, increasing workflow efficiency and the ability to locate and loan materials. It took OCLC  almost 34 years to add 1 billion holdings in WorldCat, but has taken just seven years and eight months to add the next billion holdings. The holdings in WorldCat span six millennia of recorded knowledge, from about 4800 B.C. to the present, and encompasses records for books, serials, sound recordings, musical scores, maps, visual materials, mixed materials and computer files.

Academic and cultural researchers value WorldCat as much for its depth and distinctiveness as its size. Libraries often hold unique and significant materials, including maps, music, artifacts, theses and other research materials that can be found nowhere else. In a world where general reference, entertainment and news content becomes widely available online, WorldCat helps libraries describe and promote local and specific knowledge far beyond the boundaries of any single institution.  For example, many genealogists value WorldCat as a central source for unique family and local history records. Because WorldCat represents items from more than 170 countries and 470 languages, scholars use the database to locate and borrow items around the world. More than 40 national libraries contribute to WorldCat, including recent additions from Japan, Spain, Israel and China, and over 60 percent of the records in WorldCat are for materials in non-English languages.

WorldCat information is syndicated through relationships with partners such as Google, Goodreads and EasyBib. When searching these and other popular online services, information seekers can connect to local libraries through WorldCat links and data services. WorldCat grows steadily. Library members add seven records to the WorldCat database every seven seconds. Take a minute and visit worldcat.org and enter the title of your favoirte book to see the breadth and depth of this great resource. Or if you want to witness the next milestone, visit “Watch WorldCat Grow“. As I type this, WorldCat is at 2,001,695,395 holdings.”

On May 7^th, the Danbury Area Computer Society will hold it’s monthly meeting, and it will be my honor to give a talk there about The Future of the Healthcare and the Internet. This will be the twenty-first year in a row that I have shared my thoughts with this fine group. The meeting will be open to the public and will take place in the auditorium at Danbury Hospital at 8PM. Following are some examples of the things I will be talking about on May 7^th.

I’m looking forward to discussing these topics and more on May 7. As always, I will learn a lot from the Q&A session. The talk is at 8 PM. No RSVP is required. 

• Visionary John Patrick to discuss importance of faster information in medical world

It is hard to imagine that the World Wide Web has been there for us for twenty years as of this week. See the original text-only web page of The World Wide Web project. Tim Berners-Lee had great insight and we all owe him our gratitude for creating something that has changed the world for the better. There are bad things on the web, but the good things far surpass them. The web is all about grass roots initiatives and there continue to be new web startups every day. I am highly optimistic that the web will make a huge impact in healthcare over the months and years ahead. Combined with mobile, cloud computing, big data, and analytics, the web will enable patients to take much more responsibility for their health and enable healthcare providers to facilitate sharing of healthcare data on behalf of patients. I gave a speech in Boston in March about this (link to the video).  I plan to write much more about healthcare and the Internet but, for now, I want to thank Tim and his colleagues for making the web available to all of us.

On April 25, I will be speaking at the Constantine S. Macricostas Lecture Series at Western Connecticut State University.  The event will be in the state-of-the-art, 122,000-square-foot science building on the Danbury campus at 181 West Street (see directions to the campus). My topic will be about healthcare in the Internet age. The dawn of the Internet age has changed healthcare forever – diagnoses can happen faster, quality and patient safety can be improved, information is more readily searchable, our healthcare providers can more effectively collaborate on our behalf, and our health records are available with the click of a mouse or a tap on our personal digital device. Despite the progress, we haven’t seen anything yet! Internet technology will be having a much larger role in healthcare. Following are some examples of the things I will be talking about on April 25 (see invitation below) at WesConn and at the Danbury Area Computer Society (DACS) on May 7. The DACS event will be at the Danbury Hospital auditorium. Both events are open to the public and no rsvp is required. If you are interested in the topic but cannot attend either event, you will find a video of a similar lecture in March here.

I’m looking forward to discussing these topics and more on April 25. As always, I will learn a lot from the Q&A session. The event will start with a reception at 6 p.m. in the Science Building atrium and then continue at 7 p.m. in Room 125. No RSVP is required. 

A fellow student in the healthcare doctoral class I am currently taking — Community Health and Epidemiology — posted some thoughts and research about flu vaccinations. His post reminded me of my 2 years, six months, and 22 days in the U.S. Army from 1969 to 1971 during which time I received many vaccinations. (I keep a record of all immunizations in my HealthVault database.) There are many studies on the effectiveness of influenza vaccine, whether various categories of people should have the vaccination, and issues about whether healthcare providers should be required to be vaccinated. The purpose of this post is not about those issues but rather about the development and production of the vaccine. Flu vaccine is a wonderful thing that has saved many lives, but the process of making it using billions of chicken eggs is quite slow and archaic. In a video interview with Dr. Eric Topol, Dr. Craig Venter talks about an innovative new approach to the development of vaccines (E. Topol & Venter, 2013). Venter said that the current process for developing the H1N1 vaccine took many months and the supply was barely adequate to cover healthcare workers. He said that if the H1N1 virus had been as deadly and widespread as some had forecasted that we would have had a very bad situation. Venter describes in the video how vaccines can be developed using synthetic DNA. An email containing data about the DNA of the virus to be protected against can be analyzed and a vaccine recipe for production can be available within 12 hours. Venter says the FDA approval is imminent. As new viruses such as H7N9 and H3N2 emerge, with others predicted to arise, the new approach could become extremely important (E. J. Topol, 2012).

References

Topol, E., & Venter, C. (2013). Venter and Topol on the true revolution in medicine. Medscape Today. Retrieved from http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/780324

Topol, E. J. (2012). The creative destruction of medicine : How the digital revolution will create better health care. New York: Basic Books.

The Hammock Dunes Bicycle Club members call themselves “Folks on Spokes”. The Sunday morning weather in Palm Coast, Florida was perfect and eight of us enjoyed a 30-mile ride. We always stop for breakfast–75% or so of the way through the ride–and have a good time socializing. We talk about technology, healthcare, politics, bicycling, and other topics. This time breakfast was at the Oceanside Beach Bar & Grill. They have nice outdoor seating and the service and food are excellent. Shortly after sitting down, a young man stopped by the table to say that he had been trying to talk his father into taking up riding and he asked if he could take our picture to provide some marketing material for his mission. He probably described us as “Old folks on spokes”.

One of our spokespersons said that we were all 80 years old and that we normally ride 35 miles per day. Slight exaggeration on both counts! As we got talking about age, everybody volunteered their number and I was pleased to learn that I will no longer be chided for being the youngest of the group. It turns out that one member will turn 68 in November, three months after me. The more relevant part about ages is that the leader of the group is 75, the oldest, and I find it hard to keep up with him.  

A friend and I took a follow-up 20-mile ride the next morning. I felt wiped out from the Sunday ride, but somehow found the energy to endure the ride, although completely expended. While riding on a boardwalk on the Lehigh trail in Palm Coast, we saw a large alligator who must have been expended also. Another rider said she had been watching for an hour and the alligator had not moved a muscle. See alligator picture.

It has been 31 months since my decision in August 2010 to begin a doctoral journey. I have now completed 80% of the academic coursework and have learned a lot from 20 courses — most of them 8 weeks in duration — and writing 75 papers. I am currently studying Population Health and Epidemiology.  After that concludes in May, there will be four more courses: Evaluation of Healthcare Programs, Contemporary Leadership Issues, and a Doctoral Seminar. The doctor of health administration program includes three “residencies”. These take place in one of several locations and involve an intensive week of study with faculty and students from your cohort. I chose Atlanta for my residencies and I have completed all three. The third residency, which ended in November, was 100% focused on the development of a research proposal that ultimately becomes the first three chapters of the doctoral dissertation. 

I have been an Internet advocate for 21 years. My basic tenet has been that the Internet provides “power to the people” and one of the many areas in which this is true is education. Whether it is computer assisted instruction, e-learning, distance learning, or the latest craze of massive open online courses (MOOCs), the concept is the same—to enable people anywhere in the world to learn what they want to learn, when they want to learn it, and use whatever device they want to learn it on. While evangelizing the power of the on-line environment, I also embrace the validity and need for meeting in person. There is no substitute for what occurred in the third doctoral seminar Atlanta. Webcams and various forms of virtual reality can enhance an on-line experience, but no virtual capability can replicate the emotion behind the learning shared by students in the class. We all shared a passion for the Scholar-Practitioner-Leader model, and we challenged each other’s proposals, which was a huge benefit to all of us.

The largest challenge standing between the doctoral students and graduation is the dissertation.  The goal that every learner shares is to develop a research proposal, get it approved, complete the research, and complete the doctoral dissertation. Some say that at least half of doctoral learners never complete their dissertation because of the incredible detail required to get a topic developed and approved for research. A typical dissertation is 200-300 pages in length. Some consider the process more than challenging – a friend of mine told me he completed all of his coursework and received an ABD degree – all but dissertation. A visit to Amazon can reveal many books on how to “survive” a dissertation. I still remember the meeting with the academic review committee when I had to defend my masters thesis forty years ago. It seemed challenging at the time, but I can now say that it was minor compared to what lies ahead for the doctoral dissertation.

On April 25, I will be speaking at the Constantine S. Macricostas Lecture Series at Western Connecticut State University.  The event will be in the state-of-the-art, 122,000-square-foot science building on the Danbury campus at 181 West Street (see directions to the campus). My topic will be about healthcare in the Internet age. The dawn of the Internet age has changed healthcare forever – diagnoses can happen faster, quality and patient safety can be improved, information is more readily searchable, our healthcare providers can more effectively collaborate on our behalf, and our health records are available with the click of a mouse or a tap on our personal digital device. Despite the progress, we haven’t seen anything yet! Internet technology will be having a much larger role in healthcare. Following are some examples of the things I will be talking about on April 25.

I’m looking forward to discussing these topics and more on April 25. As always, I will learn a lot from the Q&A session. The event will start with a reception at 6 p.m. in the Science Building atrium and then continue at 7 p.m. in Room 125. No RSVP is required. 

• Visionary John Patrick to discuss importance of faster information in medical world

I had the privilege of participating in the Markley Data Center Summit in Boston last month. The topic of my keynote presentation was The Future of Healthcare and the Internet. I wrote a guest post about the topic which is posted on the Markley Cloud Services Blog. The post is an overview of what I see ahead in the field of healthcare. I am generally optimistic about healthcare, but there are many healthcare challenges in the United States. The cost of care is not the only challenge, but certainly a big one.  For example, see 21 graphs that show America’s health-care prices are ludicrous from the Washington Post.

The Markley event was well attended despite a cold and snowy day. There were 300-400 attendees.  After lunch I participated on a panel along with several information technology experts, including my son Aaron. You can see a video of the panel discussion here.