Exceptional Experiences at Community Health Network

Community Health Network was a presenting sponsor for the inaugural Race Around the Reservoir Geist Half Marathon and 5K, which occurred on May 17.

Dan Hodgkins, vice president of health promotion and community benefit called the event “an incredible success.” In all 4,500 people participated in the event—the most ever for an inaugural race in the state of Indiana.

One of the largest successes was the involvement of children. Last year, Community along with The Lawrence Township Foundation started the Kids Up and Running program in the Lawrence schools. The goal was to combat sedentary lifestyles and get children and their families moving. More than 1,200 students raced in the half marathon and for more than half, it was their first organized race. “I think we had more success than anyone ever thought about,” Hodgkins says.

All proceeds raised from the race will go to support the Up and Running program as well as other similar programs in the Metropolitan School District of Lawrence Township and Hamilton Southeastern School District.

“This is a great example of how our Community Health Network contributions “pay it forward” to the broader community,” Hodgkins says.

Community programs awarded for addressing childhood obesity
The U.S. Surgeon General, Steven K. Galson, M.D., has singled out two model programs in Indiana to be awarded for successfully addressing the issues of childhood obesity. A news conference was held Wednesday, May 28, at Douglass Park in order to present the awards to Lawrence Township Foundation’s “My Community Gets Healthy” program and Indianapolis Public Schools Howe Academy’s “Fit4life” program.

Both of these programs have been supported by Community Health Network. “I am very proud of the work my department staff has provided to make both of these programs a reality, especially Karen Shirey, Lutrell Lauderdale, Todd Williams and Marcia Plant Jackson and others,” Hodgkins says.

The Surgeon General asked some of the student runners from the Geist Half Marathon, including a student at MSD Lawrence, who came in 14th out of the entire field of 4,500 runners, to be present at the awards ceremony and press conference. He was able to compete in the race with the support of the school clinic staff including, Denise Schnell, family nurse practitioner at Brook Park.

I am responding to a comment posted on my last entry:

“Didn’t you just argue against your own point? The constant communication is already happening, and will continue to happen, the filtering has nothing to do with Web 3.0, or Web 2.0, or anything. I am in constant communication with everyone i know, via email, blogs, SMS, etc., and filter out simply by not checking, and only allowing certain communication methods to reach me when I choose them to. I’m not clear what your not buying.”

I decided to respond with another post.

First of all, no one today is in the constant level of communication with user generated content that is described in the book.

Second, I disagree that filtering is not part of Web 3.0 (or whatever you want to call it).  Web 3.0 is also sometimes referred to the Semantic Web which means that web documents will be more structured and machine readable.  I believe this will be part of the evolution of web technologies and will ultimately create a vast world wide library of information.

Consequently, information retrieval algorithms will be more refined and filtering will be part of this refinement or users will not be able to find what they need when there are trillions and trillions of web documents.  I have observed friends and colleagues with information overload issues in e-mail and other communications.  I have experienced it myself and have set up rules in Outlook to filter e-mails into categories, generally consisting of ones to ignore, ones that are urgent and ones that don’t need immediate attention.

This information will consist of friends, family, etc. and businesses, marketers and other organizations vying for your attention, just like there are issues with e-mail spam today.  The spam will come in many different forms in the future and will use these new social networking/user generated content technologies.

This need for filtering will just grow in the future as the expanse of information exponentially increases.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and make a prediction of the future of the Internet.

I recently skimmed through a book called “Groundswell“, written by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff.  The last chapter was an extrapolation of the current state of social software that they call the groundswell.

The future that they believe will be here within five years is one where everyone is in constant communication through blogs, ratings/commenting systems, social networking software and instant messaging.  You will get notifications from friends, work, entertainment, etc. all the time.

I’m not buying it.

With all the self publishing occurring, the amount of information on the Internet is growing exponentially and as a result of this trend, users will feel information overload.  This has been discussed since the 90’s when there were fewer web pages.

The Web 2.0 trend is a bubble that’s going to burst and be shrunk by users filtering out all the stuff that they don’t want to see or sort through manually.  Just like e-mail spam filters, there will be self-generated filters on the information you search for on the Internet.

Search profiles stored in a search engine that automatically filter your information through a point of view, a set of criteria, your past viewing history or comparing your profile to results others have searched for and viewed (Wisdom of the Crowds).

Even following a single prolific blogger can be hard because everyone is very busy trying to cram more and more into a day.  Internet filters that filter through blog posts and other information will be coming soon.  And it will be delivered to the user like RSS feeds work today.

Information retrieval improvements and information filtering will be the next new big thing on the Internet, Web 3.0 if you will.  And boxes instead of rounded corners.

“We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives.” –Criswell

I bought my wife a 1 gigabyte iPod Shuffle a year and a half ago.  I have a fourth generation 20 gigabyte iPod that I constantly add and remove music on and take time to select what music/artist/album I want to hear.  I also have created a vast network of playlists that coordinate to load the iPod with music.

Recently, I used the iPod Shuffle when mowing.  I loaded it up with a playlist and listened to it with the songs playing randomly.  It felt so nice to just listen to whatever came up.  It was like freedom. Freedom from deciding what music I was in the mood for.

This experience made me think of a book I’d read about, ‘The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less” by Barry Schwartz.  The choice of deciding what to listen to can sometimes be paralyzing because I have so many choices.  Using the iPod Shuffle takes away the overwhelming choices that Schwartz discusses in his book.

I think this applies to health care also.  There are overwhelming treatment options for conditions and making the best decision can be difficult especially because it is a critical choice.  In the health care world, many (most?) patient rely on their family practice physician to guide them.  I know I do.  That physician helps the patients by narrowing their choices in selecting treatments by recommending the best options.  Just like the iPod Shuffle does about music selection.

Google Health is live and looking good. I’ll be playing around with it for a bit.

One of my favorite opening paragraphs, forget that, favorite quotes is from William Gibson’s “Johnny Mnemonic”:

I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pairs of tennis socks, not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for: If they think you’re crude, go technical; if they think you’re technical, go crude. I’m a very technical boy. So I decided to get as crude as possible. These days, though, you have to be pretty technical before you can even aspire to crudeness. I’d had to turn both those twelve-gauge shells from brass stock, on the lathe, and then load then myself; I’d had to dig up an old microfiche with instructions for hand- loading cartridges; I’d had to build a lever-action press to seat the primers -all very tricky. But I knew they’d work.

In VB.NET one of the most common ways I like to go low-tek is to use HTML items instead of .NET controls. Why use a .NET link to go to a page when a regular old HTML 4.01 one will work?

Why use a complicated hi-tek solution when a low-tek one will work? Try to go as low-tek as you can. Just like the quote says, they won’t expect it.

Recently I was in a content workshop we held to share with other member of our department that are responsible for marketing and communications.  We were briefly explaining what RSS was and I said essentially that the most important thing about RSS is that a user does not need to visit your website to read your content, listen to your audio or view your video.  For people who don’t use it and are accustomed to controlling the design and layout of content, this is extremely important to understand.

I gave the example of news organizations who will subscribe to RSS feeds from all the new release pages (if there is a feed) and this would allow the press to keep up with the organization’s announcements without visiting several websites every day, which they are unlikely to do.  RSS pulls any updated content to them so that all they need to do is open their RSS reader.

This idea leads to the second most important thing about RSS:  The user is in control of the content they receive and are able to pull from sources, instead of the typical push marketing that is done with TV, radio, print and billboards.