Adam Bosworth’s Weblog

I haven’t posted for a very long time because I’ve been busy turning a startup into a going concern and, frankly, occasionally what I’d like to say might annoy clients. However enough is enough.

Yesterday was one of the most shameful days I can recall in our nation in my 57 years. Despite the pleas of the bereaved parents from Sandy Hook 46 Senators chose not to make background checks mandatory on gun sales. Background checks!! It is like saying that it would be wrong to even try to keep these terrible weapons of destruction out of the hands of bad people. Have they no decency? Have they no children of their own? Do they truly think they are worthy of representing this great country when they cannot even agree to try and keep guns out of the hands of the wrong people?

I am ashamed of the Republicans who once were a great party and stood for competition and freedom, but also stood for building a great world for our children to  grow up in. Now they support the polluters who destroy the environment our children will inherit, the armed crazies who threaten the life and serenity of our children as they grow up, the health of our children fed increasingly terrible foods (read Salt, Sugar, Fat), and in general the welfare of those who are our future and deserve our help and protection as they grow up. But most of all, I simply cannot imagine how the people who represent this great country could look those parents of Sandy Hook in the eye and then vote to allow these weapons and to prevent background checks.

They are beneath our contempt for their total lack of decency, once an American hallmark, and frankly, if you support the NRA or these Senators in this vote so are you.

This is a direct quote. James May, chief executive of the Air Transport Association, the industry’s largest trade group, said Monday that its members would comply with the new rule “even though we believe it will lead to unintended consequences — more canceled flights and greater passenger inconvenience.” He added that “the requirement of having planes return to the gates within a three-hour window or face significant fines is inconsistent with our goal of completing as many flights as possible. In  other words the Air Transport Association representing the airlines doesn’t care about us being stuck on the ground in a plane for more than 3 hours if they can fly more planes. They might as well tell us that they don’t care about us at all. Hello. We pay your bills. We are your customers.

It is always amazing to hear such organizations admit that the comfort and service to the customer is simply not a goal.

Alexandra Drane started a wonderful movement called Engage with Grace over a year ago and she asked me to join a Thanksgiving rally supporting this movement. I’m happy and proud to do so. As I wrote in one of my most contentious posts, once my mother was diagnosed as being terminal after a valiant 4 year battle with Ovarian cancer, the system totally failed us. Support turned to indifference. Every attempt was made to have my mother end her days in the hospital rather than spending her last 2 months at home. It was only because of my connections and resources that she was even able to end her days with dignity surrounded by those who loved her. Indeed just days before the end, she was able to be taken in a wheelchair to the library she had presided over for over 40 years at Saint Ann’s School and see it officially renamed to the Anne Bosworth library and hear the tributes of all who have known her and learned from her. All this would have been denied if the current “health system” had had its way. It is this indifference to the needs of those at this stage of life that the movement is dedicated to combating and I enthusiastically endorse it. Engage with Grace has 5 basic questions everyone should know.

We are supposed to ask more lighthearted questions on this Thanksgiving weekend, but I’ve been unable to get WordPress to accept this questionnaire and I think it is a sign. We need to change the system profoundly to take human needs into account first. We need a system that works to meet these needs, not to try every possible futile procedure leaving those poor souls to suffer their last weeks or days in pain and indignity against their will. This is a serious business for those of us who have lived through this, seen the suffering first hand. We give thanks for many things this weekend but we look forward to the day when we can give thanks for a caring health care system.

To learn more please go to http://www.engagewithgrace.org.

Keas has launched.  Keas is a place consumers come to when they want to take charge of their health or that of someone they love. They come to get the personalized advice and content that they need to understand their health and to know what they need to do and to be reminded/helped to do it. Keas delivers this personalized advice via Keas Care Plans. Think of each Care Plan as a set of great health experts giving you personalized interpretation and advice about your health and what you need to do based on your health data, your goals, and your progress to date. Not just once, but on an ongoing basis. But we at Keas don’t write these Care Plans in general. Great experts in health, whether in pediatric Asthma or dealing with H1N1 or with Diabetes do so.  You don’t need to be a programmer or have an IT department to build Keas Care Plans, but you do need to have great health experts,  great content people and usually (at least for your first one) help from what we have come to call Keas Producers.

We at Keas have been overwhelmed with astonishing potential partners in the health field who want to build great Keas Care Plans. We are humbled and gratified, but we are also urgently in need of someone to lead this effort for us. What sort of person do we need? We need someone with passion for the customer who will work with every partner to ensure that their care plans are engaging,  personalized, helpful and responsive and hire/manage the Keas producers we need to help the partners in this effort. We need someone who will be able to understand the health issues involved, but also the consumer passion and who can help our partners not just to deliver content personalized to the need, but video, twitter, great links, living discussions, polls, and everything else required to actually help the users of their Keas Care Plan to get the most out of it.

So, in short you need to be a leader, tireless,willing to get your fingernails dirty and lead by doing, passionate, unafraid of risk (this is a start up!), excited and knowledgeable about health, great at working with partners, with good business sense, experienced in building and leading teams that partner with others, and with an understanding of how the web is changing from a text world to an interactive and video world. If this is you and you want to help our partners produce the 100’s of care plans they now want to build, then let us know please at careers@keas.com.

John Halamka put up a thoughtful piece today which I for one heartily endorse. I’ve worked with John off and on since starting Google Health and we have really traversed down this road together.

Warning. This is a rare nerdy technical post more for. It is about Healthcare XML standards.

I’ve was kindly asked to testify at a meeting in DC this week about standards at an hour when I’m normally not awake. But despite a deep aversion to not getting enough sleep, I was up and on the phone. What made me do such a thing? Well, the discussion was about what actually will work in terms of making health data liquid. What standards should be used for the integration of such data?

Somewhat to my surprise and usually to my pain, I’ve been involved in several successful standards. One was used to exchange data between databases and consumer applications like spreadsheets and Access. It was called ODBC and worked surprisingly well after some initial hiccups. Another was the standard for what today is called AJAX, namely building complex interactive web pages like gmail’s. Perhaps most importantly there was XML. These are the successes. There were also some failures. One that stands in my memory is one called OLE DB which was an attempt to supplant/replace ODBC. One that comes close to being a failure was/is the XML Schema specification. From all these efforts, there were a few lessons learned and it is these that I shared with DC this Thursday. What are they?

1. Keep the standard as simple and stupid as possible. The odds of failure are at least the square of the degrees of complexity of the standard. It may also be the square of the size of the committee writing the standard. Successful standards are generally simple and focused and easy to read. In the health care world, this means just focus first on that data which can be encoded unambiguously such as demographics, test results, medicines. Don’t focus on all types of health data for all types of health. Don’t focus on how to know if your partner should have access to what (see points 2,3, and 4 below).
2. The data being exchanged should be human readable and easy to understand. Standards are adopted by engineers building code to implement them. They can only build if they can easily understand the standard (see above) and easily test it. This is why, in the last 15 years, text standards like HTTP, HTML, XML, and so on have won. The developers can open any edit editor, look at the data being sent/received, and see if it looks right. When Tim Berners Lee first did this on the internet, most of the “serious” networking people out there thought using text for HTTP was crazy. But it worked incredibly well. Obviously this worked well for XML too. This has implications. It isn’t enough to just say XML. The average engineer (who has to implement these standards) should be able to eyeball the format and understand it. When you see XML grammars that only a computer can understand, they tend not to get widespread adoption. There are several so-called XML grammars that layer an abstract knowledge model on top of XML like RDF and in my experience, they are much harder to read/understand and they don’t get used much.  In my opinion Hl7 suffers from this.
3. Standards work best when they are focused. Don’t build an 18 wheeler to drive a city block. Standards often fail because committees with very different complex goals come together without actual working implementations to sanity check both the complexity (see point 1 above) and the intelligibility (see point 2 above). Part of the genius of the web was that Tim Berners-Lee correctly separated the protocol (HTTP) from the stuff the browser should display (HTML). It is like separating an envelope from the letter inside. It is basic. And necessary. Standards which include levels or layers all jammed into one big thing tend to fail because the poor engineers have to understand everything when all they need to understand is one thing. So they boycott it. In health care, this means don’t include in one standard how to encode health data and how to decide who gets it and how to manage security. If all I, as an engineer, want is to put together a list of medicines about a patient and send that to someone who needs it, then that’s all I should have to do. The resulting XML should look like a list of medicines to the me. Then, if it doesn’t work, I can get on the phone with my opposite number and usually figure out in 5 minutes what’s wrong. Also I can usually author this in a day or two because I don’t have to read/learn/understand a spec like a telephone book. I don’t have to have to understand the “abstract data model”. The heart of the initial XML spec was tiny. Intentionally so. I heard someone say indignantly about the push to simplify Health IT standards that we should be “raising the bar on standards” not lowering them. This is like arguing that we should insist that kids learn to drive an airplane to walk to the next door neighbor’s house. All successful standards are as simple as possible, not as hard as possible.
4. Standards should have precise encodings. ODBC was precise about data types. Basic XML is a tiny standard except for the precise encodings about the characters of the text, Unicode. That is most of the spec, properly so, because it ensures that the encodings are precise. In health care this means that the standard should be precise about the encodings for medicines, test results, demographics, and conditions and make sure that the encodings can be used legally and without royalties by all parties. The government could play a role here by requiring NPI’s for all doctor related activities, SNOMED CT for all conditions, LOINC for all labs, and some encoding for all medicines (be it NDC, rxNorm, or FDB) and guaranteeing that use of these encodings is free for all use.
5. Always have real implementations that are actually being used as part of design of any standard. It is hard to know whether something actually works or can be engineered in a practical sense until you actually do it. ODBC for example was built by many of us actually building it as we went along. In the health care world, a lot of us have built and used CCR as we go, learning what works and what doesn’t very practically and that has made it a good easy to use standard for bundling health data. And the real implementations should be supportable by a single engineer in a few weeks.
6. Put in hysteresis for the unexpected. This is something that the net formats do particularly well. If there is something in HTTP that the receiver doesn’t understand it ignores it. It doesn’t break. If there is something in HTML that the browser doesn’t understand, it ignores it. It doesn’t break. See Postel’s law.  Assume the unexpected. False precision is the graveyard of successful standards. XML Schema did very badly in this regard. Again, CCR does fairly well here.
7. Make the spec itself free, public on the web, and include lots of simple examples on the web site. Engineers are just humans. They learn best by example and if the standard adheres to the points above, then the examples will be clear and obvious. Usually you can tell if a standard is going to work if you go to a web site by the group and there is a clear definition and there are clear examples of the standard that anyone can understand. When you go to the HL7 site the generality and abstraction and complexity are totally daunting to the average joe. It certainly confuses me. And make no mistakes. Engineers are average joes with tight time deadlines. They are mostly not PhD’s.

Let’s be honest, a lot of standards are written for purposes other than promoting interoperability. Some exist to protect legacy advantages or to create an opportunity to profit from proprietary intellectual property. Others seem to take on a life of their own and seem to exist solely to justify the continued existence of the standards body itself or to create an opportunity for the authors to collect on juicy consultant fees explaining how the standard is meant to work to the poor saps who have to implement it. I think we can agree that,  whatever they are, those are usually not good standards. Health data interoperability is far too important an issue to let fall victim to such an approach.

We have been truly blessed here at Keas. We have amazing partners in Quest Diagnostics, Healthwise, CVS MinuteClinic, Dr. Alan Greene and the DiabetesMine/Joslyn team of Amy Tenderich and Dr. Rich Jackson. We have a great team within Keas. And we received some extraordinarily supportive news reporting about Keas during the last week including The New York Times and Fox Business as we opened up a public beta for everybody. We are truly grateful.

For those of you who missed this news, Keas now has an open, free public beta at www.keas.com.

What is Keas? Keas brings you the best medical minds to deliver personalized help so that you can start to take charge of your health. These health experts build personalized expertise into a Keas Care Plan, based on the very same questions and feedback that occurs in person, during an office visit. In other words, these Care Plans look at or ask for your data just as health experts would. Given that data, Keas Care Plans can help you understand your health by charting the results that matter, indicating whether you are where you should be (in the green), have some risks (in the yellow), or clearly need serious attention (in the red). And because they are developed by health professionals who understand the nuances of health issues, Care Plans deliver “to-dos” for you to see at a glance what steps to take to get in the green and stay in the green.

We also announced a wonderful strategic alliance with Quest Diagnostics. If your doctor orders a blood test to be taken at a Quest Diagnostics Patient Service Center, when the results come in Quest and your doctor will help get your data into Keas. In addition, as part of the strategic alliance, Quest Diagnostics has worked with Keas to help interpret your data, based on your personal health status, as falling in the red, the yellow, or the green. It is another layer of expertise that offers you the best advice for taking charge of your health.

Thanks to the news coverage and our partnership with Quest Diagnostics, we are now getting large numbers of users each day. And that brings us yet another layer of expertise – you, the user.  As we develop communities based on individual Care Plans, your knowledge and wisdom will be invaluable to those who share your specific health concerns, and we’ll provide the tools for peer-to-peer support. In addition, we at Keas need your smart observations: we can only make our services great and truly useful with your help. We want to know from you what Keas Care Plans you need that we haven’t built. We want to know which Care Plans can be better and how. We want to know which “to-dos” need to be improved and expanded, and your preferred modes and frequency of messaging. We want to know what Keas should be doing for you that it isn’t already doing in order to provide the best personalized help from the best medical minds. So please keep your feedback coming.

Our commitment to you is that we will learn and work hard and steadily to fix the things that need fixing and add the things that need adding. Working together over the next few months, we can make Keas the tool you need to understand your health and take charge of it, with help from the best health experts and from each other. It is an exciting time.

If you are a health expert and want to join us in building Care Plans for your patients, please email us here.