Random Considerations - 5/1/18

Observations, Books or Articles worth a Thought or Two…

A Buzz To Remember – The brewing controversy over the response of Facebook to a number of issues but primarily related to its position on the use of personal information by the more than 2 billion users is not an incident but a growing cacophony.  It wasn’t helped this past week by a piece in Buzz Feed on the role of Vice President Andrew Bosworth – a provocative Vice President for consumer hardware – when it was revealed that in an internal post back in 2016 he wrote the following:  “The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *de facto* good. It is perhaps the only area where the metrics do tell the true story as far as we are concerned…That isn’t something we are doing for ourselves. Or for our stock price (ha!). It is literally just what we do. We connect people. Period.” You must read the whole article to get a sense of the issue and how the use of data and information by Facebook has not only created wealth but also now consternation among many on their team. 

Change Happens When You’re Not Looking – I feel like I’ve been hiding under a rock or something.  This past week, I attended the American Telemedicine Association conference – one of my favorite annual treks.  This year the meeting was held in Chicago at McCormick Place but the important point is that the other ongoing event at the same venue was America’s Beauty Show!  Yes, America’s Beauty Show.  It was a lesson in “change” or, “what happens when you’re not paying attention”.  I have never seen so much blue (I mean really blue), green, pink, red, yellow, fuchsia and other assorted colors of hair!!  Not only that, but many of the people (mostly women – not a statement, just an observation) were wearing jeans with frayed fronts and/or holes – something we would have patched over in the 1960s with an upside down flag or something.  I felt like what was normal had been turned upside down.  Shouldn’t colored hair be natural and subdued rather than bold, if not outrageous, and iridescent?

Now………..imagine how the medical and health care community feels when we tell them that a lot of their thinking will be replaced by artificial intelligence, that robots are coming which can actually interact with people, that the way to increased productivity is through the use of remote care management monitoring devices and on and on.  Imagine you grew up when the Beatles and Rolling Stones were popular and now there is some weird kind of music you can’t figure out.  That’s called “change” and, it happens.  If you think you’ve seen a lot of change in health care over the last decade think blue (I mean really blue), green, pink, red, yellow, fuchsia and other assorted colors as the metaphor for what’s happening.  It will help you to understand how much change is coming.  And, it won’t take five decades…