E-Medical Records Get A Mobile, Open-Sourced Overhaul By White House Health Design Challenge Winners
Reporter: Larry H. Bernstein, MD, FCAP
Designer Fund and the White House’s Health Design Challenge
Larry H. Bernstein, MD, FCAP
The winners of Designer Fund and the White House’s Health Design Challenge have created beautiful, comprehensible, mobile versions. Soon, a combination of the best of the submissions will be open-sourced and implemented as the record format for the Veterans Affair Administration and its 6 million patients.
The challenge was launched in November by the White House and a new community of philanthropic angel investors called Designer Fund. Directed by five-year Facebook designer Ben Blumenfeld and 500 Startups founding team member Enrique Allen, Designer Fund aims to advise and back designer-led startups with a positive social impact.
The Health Design Challenge to redesign the electronic medical record (EMR) was a huge success, pulling in
- 230 submissions
- compared to 80 submissions in a previous White House health challenge.
Blumenfeld says that “from a quantity standpoint it was amazing, but from a quality standpoint too. People thought through all sorts of ways for the electronic medical record
- to expand and live on mobile, and
- have preventative care in there too.”
The overall winner solved many of the biggest problems with the existing EMR. Those include
- medication plans that are tough to understand,
- unintuitive formatting,
- impersonal statistics, and
- the general feel of a decades-old print-out.
It will be the basis of the open-sourced final version of the downloadable medical record that other healthcare providers could adopt.
Nightingale creates an obvious hierarchy for all your health info, and uses styling to make it easy to read.
Patients are shown their statistics on a scale from “concerning” to “doing well” instead of as raw numbers
Rather than only showing your latest lab results, Nightingale puts them in context of your past tests to show how you’re trending. That’s critical, because
- if your latest results says your cholesterol is too high but
- the trend shows it’s coming down quickly,
- you’re actually taking the right steps and shouldn’t make drastic changes.
Graphical timetables in Nightingale make it obvious when to take which medications. Nightingale is
- accessible from mobile so
- you can always check your dosage schedule,
- which will help people make sure they take the meds on schedule.
- set email and phone alerts to remind you it’s pill-popping time.
Mobile was a big theme among the top submissions.
Studio TACK, which took second place,
- laid out ailments on a body map that could be viewed on your phone.
Josh Hemley’s M.ed won best medication design by creating a browsable deck of mobile medicine cards.
The challenge’s winners will split $50,000 in cash. Beyond that, Blumenfeld says healthcare companies he’s talked to are calling the winner’s showcase
- “the perfect place to recruit from.”
But hopefully the winners see the real prize is helping 6 million VA patients and more truly understand their health
Related articles
- What if your electronic medical record looked like it was created by a graphic desginer? (medcitynews.com)
- The Future of Medical Records: Visualized (scienceroll.com)
- How can Electronic Medical Records Transform the Modern Practice? (medcitynews.com)
- CORAnet Solutions, Inc. Provides Electronic Medical Records at Your Fingertips (virtual-strategy.com)
- The Future of Medical Records (theatlantic.com)
- Breakthroughs with Martin Sheen Premiering New Report on How Electronic Medical Records are Revolutionizing Medicine (prweb.com)
- The future of Electronic Medical Records [Infographic] (en.community.dell.com)
- Open Source and the Power of Community (whitehouse.gov)
- E-Medical Records Get A Mobile, Open-Sourced Overhaul (techcrunch.com)
PUT IT IN CONTEXT OF CANCER CELL MOVEMENT
The contraction of skeletal muscle is triggered by nerve impulses, which stimulate the release of Ca2+ from the sarcoplasmic reticuluma specialized network of internal membranes, similar to the endoplasmic reticulum, that stores high concentrations of Ca2+ ions. The release of Ca2+ from the sarcoplasmic reticulum increases the concentration of Ca2+ in the cytosol from approximately 10-7 to 10-5 M. The increased Ca2+ concentration signals muscle contraction via the action of two accessory proteins bound to the actin filaments: tropomyosin and troponin (Figure 11.25). Tropomyosin is a fibrous protein that binds lengthwise along the groove of actin filaments. In striated muscle, each tropomyosin molecule is bound to troponin, which is a complex of three polypeptides: troponin C (Ca2+-binding), troponin I (inhibitory), and troponin T (tropomyosin-binding). When the concentration of Ca2+ is low, the complex of the troponins with tropomyosin blocks the interaction of actin and myosin, so the muscle does not contract. At high concentrations, Ca2+ binding to troponin C shifts the position of the complex, relieving this inhibition and allowing contraction to proceed.
Figure 11.25
Association of tropomyosin and troponins with actin filaments. (A) Tropomyosin binds lengthwise along actin filaments and, in striated muscle, is associated with a complex of three troponins: troponin I (TnI), troponin C (TnC), and troponin T (TnT). In (more ) Contractile Assemblies of Actin and Myosin in Nonmuscle Cells
Contractile assemblies of actin and myosin, resembling small-scale versions of muscle fibers, are present also in nonmuscle cells. As in muscle, the actin filaments in these contractile assemblies are interdigitated with bipolar filaments of myosin II, consisting of 15 to 20 myosin II molecules, which produce contraction by sliding the actin filaments relative to one another (Figure 11.26). The actin filaments in contractile bundles in nonmuscle cells are also associated with tropomyosin, which facilitates their interaction with myosin II, probably by competing with filamin for binding sites on actin.
Figure 11.26
Contractile assemblies in nonmuscle cells. Bipolar filaments of myosin II produce contraction by sliding actin filaments in opposite directions. Two examples of contractile assemblies in nonmuscle cells, stress fibers and adhesion belts, were discussed earlier with respect to attachment of the actin cytoskeleton to regions of cell-substrate and cell-cell contacts (see Figures 11.13 and 11.14). The contraction of stress fibers produces tension across the cell, allowing the cell to pull on a substrate (e.g., the extracellular matrix) to which it is anchored. The contraction of adhesion belts alters the shape of epithelial cell sheets: a process that is particularly important during embryonic development, when sheets of epithelial cells fold into structures such as tubes.
The most dramatic example of actin-myosin contraction in nonmuscle cells, however, is provided by cytokinesisthe division of a cell into two following mitosis (Figure 11.27). Toward the end of mitosis in animal cells, a contractile ring consisting of actin filaments and myosin II assembles just underneath the plasma membrane. Its contraction pulls the plasma membrane progressively inward, constricting the center of the cell and pinching it in two. Interestingly, the thickness of the contractile ring remains constant as it contracts, implying that actin filaments disassemble as contraction proceeds. The ring then disperses completely following cell division.
Figure 11.27
Cytokinesis. Following completion of mitosis (nuclear division), a contractile ring consisting of actin filaments and myosin II divides the cell in two.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK9961/
This is good. I don’t recall seeing it in the original comment. I am very aware of the actin myosin troponin connection in heart and in skeletal muscle, and I did know about the nonmuscle work. I won’t deal with it now, and I have been working with Aviral now online for 2 hours.
I have had a considerable background from way back in atomic orbital theory, physical chemistry, organic chemistry, and the equilibrium necessary for cations and anions. Despite the calcium role in contraction, I would not discount hypomagnesemia in having a disease role because of the intracellular-extracellular connection. The description you pasted reminds me also of a lecture given a few years ago by the Nobel Laureate that year on the mechanism of cell division.