Research Group Projects and Descriptions

New Media Medicine is exploring radical new collaborations between doctors, patients, and communities to catalyze a revolution in human health. Trillions of dollars are invested each year to improve health worldwide, but big problems remain. Health-care delivery and drug-discovery costs continue to escalate. Health outcomes are unpredictable and uneven, and trends such as the obesity epidemic and an aging population present significant challenges. The patient experience has become fragmented, frustrating, even frightening. New, data-driven partnerships can overcome these problems. A wealth of new data is available from the dramatic "digitization of biology": personal genomics, genetic screening, electronic medical records, patient-contributed medical data, and other sources. New Media Medicine will harness this data for use by ordinary people, by creating innovations in human-computer interfaces, visualization, artificial intelligence, and social technologies. These innovations will empower patients to engage in collaborations with doctors and experts never before possible, creating powerful new sources of collective wisdom.

First-generation electronic medical record systems have been primarily doctor-centric. As a whole, they have been unsuccessful at improving health outcomes and health-care efficiency because they have been intrusive in clinical workflow and have failed to foster productive doctor-patient relationships. This project focuses on a multimodal (speech and touch) interface for doctor-patient collaboration that aims to make patient education a primary goal of medical documentation. The system will also be persistent in that the doctor and patient can work together from any location, not just when they are in the doctor’s office. The hypothesis is that exposing the doctor's thought process, actively involving the patient, and focusing on continuity of care will have a significant impact on the quality, experience, and cost of health care.

Twenty million Americans have one of over 5,000 rare diseases. The long tail formed by these rare-disease communities is ill-served by the medical establishment because of a lack of doctor and patient education, geographically dispersed populations, and limited economic incentives to research treatments. Enabling patients to take control of the information about these diseases creates a dramatic reversal in the power structure of health care. This has significant consequences for the economics of basic research, drug discovery and standards of care. We are developing a platform that allows global patient populations to self-organize their natural medical histories into community databases. This platform provides tools that enable collective discovery of potential trends, outlier cases, causal disease factors, and new applications for existing drugs within these databases. Most importantly, we build a foundation for a rational, data-driven approach to information sharing and self-advocacy that combats the misinformation rampant in many online communities.

Patients today are highly motivated to contribute to decisions concerning their health. Difficulty arises due to a wide knowledge gap between doctors and patients, and because communication channels are limited. Patients often seek online materials to improve their knowledge, but the amount of information on the Web is overwhelming. It is difficult for patients to evaluate which materials are appropriate for them and which materials are accurate. We need tools to help patients and doctors collaboratively filter information and to enable patients to voice their concerns both during and between office visits. This project focuses on the development of an autonomous conversational agent that helps patients to express and clarify medical complaints prior to visiting the doctor's office. The system will offer the opportunity to triage the urgency of a visit, to provide patient- and problem-specific educational materials, and to improve efficiency and effectiveness of patient-to-doctor communication.