Jan 12

Fresh coffee & Opportunities

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Uploaded on October 23, 2006 by Hamed Saber

Well it’s been quiet externally for jbsh the last couple of months but there’s been plenty going on. This post is a cross-post from Open Coffee Bristol where we welcomed in the New Year this morning.

Well 2010 kicked off in the UK with snow, ice, sub-zero temperatures and general chaos as public services ground to a halt.

But not Open Coffee and the entrepreneurs of Bristol.

Fortified by the best coffee that the Boston Tea Party on Park Street has to offer we gathered on their first floor to catch up after the break and discuss the future. By the end Steve Cayzer (HP Labs, LinkedIn), Rupert Russell (Carmen Data, LinkedIn), Helen Davies (For Effect, website), Sam Machin (Orange, personal website), Nigel Legg (Katugas Social Media, website) and Andy (who surname I’ve unforgivable forgotten, sorry).

Conversation covered the various tax implications of company car ownership, developing new brand images for the new year (and the difficulty finding a good printers these days), online marketing for small tourism companies and the challenge of getting good geo-location data, and that was just at my end of the tables!

The general opinion was that while the weather and economic climate might be a bit inclement (or just down right awful) there was business to be done and opportunities to be exploited. Business cards were swapped and a couple of new collaborations initiated.

So the New Year is off to a great start and looks to get better.

Look forward to seeing you at the next Open Coffee Bristol on Tues, 26 Jan from 8.30am in The Boston Teaparty on Park St.

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Jan 08

Brrism – Social Media in Bristol

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Always a good evening, the next Brrism looks to be a real barnstormer (6.30pm on Wednesday 20 Jan in the Pervasive Media Studio, Bristol).

There promises to be some great presentations on social media tools (Colin Rainsforth, twitter) and the fine line between time management & time wasting (Lee Cottier, twitter) but I’m guessing the hot topic will be the Digital Economy Bill.

Paul Smith (Labour Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Bristol West) is leading the discussion. The bill is about to enter the Committee Stage in the House of Lords, so there’s no guarantee that it’ll be law before the election, but this is a critically important bill for the UK and Bristol’s digital economy so come along and can make a positive contribution.

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Nov 11

Clinical Assessment Tools need to be user friendly

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Doctor-Patient contact time is vitally important for diagnosis and treatment.  To aid doctors thousands of ‘tools’ have been developed for use in various fields of medical practice.  But as new technology (including physical assessment and validated questionnaires) is introduced assessment tools become redundent and others are introduced. However technological advances tend to be expensive and time consuming to train medical staff to use.  It is also the case that they often require additional physical space, time to administer and a level of health of the patient.

CigarettesThe aim of Dr Rupert Jones and collegues (including me) was to derive a multi-component assessment index for use with patients with COPD to gain a measure of severity. The index was intended to include items that are clinically important, applicable to all grades of disease severity and all healthcare settings, and simple and clear to use.

Traditionally, the forced expiratory volume in one second (FEV1) has been the main measure of COPD severity for clinicians and still has a prominent place in international guidelines. While patients are mainly concerned with symptoms, exacerbations and functional capacity, airflow obstruction is important to clinicians in order to measure the lung damage and determine treatment. A composite measure could account for various dimensions of the disease, and take into account both the patient’s and the physician’s perspectives.

One highly regarded composite measure is the BODE index which was originally designed to predict mortality in COPD. However, the BODE index involves a Six Minute Walking Test (6MWT) which limits its use in routine clinical settings as it takes time, supervision, and space. Another validated prognostic index, the COPD Prognostic Index is also cumbersome to use in routine clinical settings as it includes seven items, one of which is a health status questionnaire.

Therefore we have derived and validated a composite index of severity in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which has recently been accepted for publication by the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.  We hope the index will be widley adopted by the medical profession.

If you are unsure of its relevance or usfulness to your practice, below is the abstract associated with the journal article.

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Rationale: COPD is increasingly recognized as a multi-component disease with systemic consequences and effects on quality of life. Single measures such as lung function provide a limited reflection of how the disease affects patients. Composite measures have the potential to account for many of the facets of COPD.

Objective: To derive and validate a multi-component assessment tool of COPD severity which is applicable to all patients and healthcare settings.

Methods/ Measurements: The index was derived using data from 375 COPD patients in primary care. Regression analysis led to a model explaining 48% of the variance in health status as measured by the Clinical COPD questionnaire with four components: dyspnea (D), airflow obstruction (O), smoking status (S) and exacerbation frequency (E). The DOSE index was validated in cross-sectional and longitudinal samples in different healthcare settings in Holland, Japan, and the United Kingdom.

Main results: The DOSE index correlated with health status in all datasets. A high DOSE index score (> = 4) was associated with a greater risk of hospital admission (odds ratio 8.3 (4.1 – 17) or respiratory failure 7.8 (3.4 – 18.3). The index predicted exacerbations in the subsequent year (p ≤ 0.014).

Conclusions: The DOSE index is a simple valid tool for assessing the severity of COPD. The index is related to a range of clinically important outcomes such as healthcare consumption and predicts future events.

Oct 25

New Perspectives – Is the Leaning Tower of Pisa always inclined?

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Recently I posted about an area of research I am interested in and mentioned that we were going to Pisa to present the results at the European Health Psychology Society Annual Conference.

I jokingly asked if Psychology could help the leaning tower and we concluded that the research I was offering up for scrutiny probably wouldn’t.

However the “Inclined Tower“, as a Swiss friend calls it, offers up an obvious, and visual, comparison with some of the benefits from attending conferences.

Its actually quite unusual to learn astounding new facts at academic conferences. Most of the formats involved are just too short and the programme too crowded to allow for a long and detailed examination of new research (that’s what Journal papers are really for). In Pisa there were nearly 1,300 separate pieces of research being presented, either in 15 min oral presentations, posters, symposia, or round table discussions. And all this over 4 days [programme in pdf format].

While you may not spend a lot of of time learning new material, you are forced to look at things from new angles and applying your thoughts and feelings in new ways.  In other words from a ‘New Perspective’!

You’re exposed to the work of people with very different, though equally valid, research philosophies.You can see how they tackled similar questions but from different perspectives (sometimes wildly different).

Studies in psychology provide and require multiple perspectives to be applied in order to understanding people as individuals and as individuals in a community. Research findings and implications about the mind and mental processes as well as studies of the development and behaviour, maintenance and change of socially significant behaviour are all of importance in understand and explaining (at least in part) the world we live in and how we situate ourselves within it.

p.s. John here, I sat in on some of the presentations and there were a couple of very interesting points. Traditionally the shift change in hospitals has been seen as a vulnerability and has resulted in a culture of long shifts. Some research indicated that safety might actually be improved with more shift changes, since they were more often catching problems than causing them. It was the act of explaining what was going on to someone new, a fresh pair of eyes, that caught these oversights. Equally, they sometimes gave people the impetus to make a decision. For a start up company that’s charging along eyes on the prize, taking time out occasionally to explain that bigger picture to an impartial observer, is a huge benefit.

It was also notable the lack of technology awareness in health care messages and communications. Not just the use of social media but viral gaming, mobile data capture & evaluation, and general webbiness. As I tweeted from the conference (I was in the minority having a mobile data device with me), online avatars working from fixed scripts do not make for very convincing ‘companions’. There is a lot this community could learn from places like the Pervasive Media Studio here in Bristol and the ecosystem around them.

For a technical civil engineering description of the tower and various attempts to ‘straighten’ it check out this page. :)

Oct 11

Social Media – Recommend something

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Uploaded on March 17, 2009 by gilderic

Uploaded on March 17, 2009 by gilderic

Recommend: to present as worthy of confidence, acceptance, use, etc.; commend; mention favorably

This is possibly the hardest stage and the one that most often introduces cognitive dissonance. You spend the time establishing rapport, building your understanding, demonstrating your understanding and expertise, at some point you need to recommend a solution. Obviously you want to recommend your solution, your most expensive solution (to push your ROI), or your cheapest solution (to hook them in)?

No, you want to recommend the best solution for whoever you’re talking to.

Of course if all you do is recommend others you’ll quickly go out of business, unless that is your business paid for by someone else. And here we get to a really interesting business proposition that’s been around for some time but is potentially seeing a resurgence in the business of social media business.

Commission based sales and affiliate marketing (where the sales channel takes a cut of the final transaction value) are nothing new. However, this is still a traditional sales pitch, even Google ads will present you the ad that’s paid the most for the keyword you’ve typed in even if you would actually be better off with another (cheaper) solution.

‘Proper’ social media allows you to recommend other people and yet still maintain a link with the customer for the next time, and through the joy of networks to all their connections. So when they tweet what a great consultant/business/product you’ve got, all their connections find out.

There still isn’t a decent mechanism for measuring social value. Tara Hunt‘s Wuffie Factor is an attempt but I’m not aware of it being used much in practice. LinkedIn recommendations are a bit too back-slappy and mutually appreciative which sort of devalues them.

The hardest reports I filled out were the ones where I’d been talking to a company and suggested they get in touch with another University for their £’00k research project. Of course it goes down better if that solution is from the company employing you, but its remarkable how many successful introductions to new clients came from people I’d recommended go elsewhere.

Uploaded on July 9, 2009 by Reinante El Pintor de Fuego

Uploaded on July 9, 2009 by Reinante El Pintor de Fuego

Close: to arrange the final details of; to complete or settle

If the recommendation is accepted, and it usually was, then closing is just the fine tuning of the agreement, sorting out purchase / invoice details, price, delivery, etc.

A word of warning though, just because you’ve build up this great rapport with a client, don’t begin work without a signed contract. If there is to be an exchange of money then you need at least something that sets out in writing the proposed transaction.

Having invested all this time and effort in securing a sale, keep it going, but don’t assume anything. Don’t assume that now they’ve finally made a purchase they’ll go away and leave you in peace, making monthly subscription installments; or that now they’ve bought your stuff you can pester them about every upgrade and option on the list.

I would recommend consistency above all. If you’ve provided a very light touch information stream and simple options leading up to the sale, don’t suddenly start sending bi-weekly email newsletters. Likewise, if you’ve been chatting on twitter, sending notifiers through your Facebook fan page, and so forth, don’t suddenly ignore them to chase the next client/customer.

So five posts ago I asked what was social media good for? It can be good for business, it can be good for your business, but like any tool of business, you need to spend a bit of time thinking through your strategy and implementing it to find new customers and establish rapport, lurk-a-lot (and talk with them a lot) to understand them and their needs, demonstrate you’ve been listening and really understanding, and then make some recommendations on their best course of action, eventually closing a deal with a new customer.

And if I’ve managed to build up some rapport with you, you think I might understand your needs, and have demonstrated that I understand social media, I’d recommend you drop me an email and we’ll take it from there! :)