Digital Exhaust #174

Maximum viable product, Question & Manswer, and a virus with a brand

33c exists because people subscribe. If you’re into what's here, sign up yourself, and bring your friends along. Here are a few things I found this week.

Medical selfies

Eric Topol on

Ground Truths

shared his experiences with phone-based ultrasound. His post segues into a discussion of point of care ultrasound and where this category is headed.

Topol curates one of the best Twitter feeds in medicine. If you want to understand the future of healthcare, pay attention to him.

Maximum viable product

If you hate feature bloat (when apps get over accessorized with nonsense features) you’ll love this play on minimum viable product from Clive Thompson via Daring Fireball:

"What if more developers developed a sense for the “maximum” number of things a product should do — and stopped there?

"What if more software firms decided, “Hey! We’ve reached the absolute perfect set of features. We’re done. This product is awesome. No need to keep on shoving in stuff nobody wants.”

Maybe Google is serious about health

Its looking that way. They are looking to cash in on their AI for health care markets. This week they announced a partnership with iCAD, a leader in cancer detection. ICAD will incorporate Google's mammography technology into clinical practices. In 2020 Google researchers published a paper in Nature that showed its AI system outperformed a group of radiologists in identifying signs of breast cancer.

Google says it is also working with the UK’s NHS to see if an AI-driven double reads will “allow radiologists to focus on high-priority cases while improving consistency and quality of screening.”

+ Of course, the opportunity cost of all this healthcare dabbling may be miserable search results.

Nurses for the win

Gallup -- For the 20th straight year, nurses lead Gallup's annual ranking of professions for honesty and ethics, eclipsing medical doctors in second place by 14 points -- 81% vs. 67%.

Does a virus have a brand?

To minimize the stigmatizing effect of its original 1958 name, The WHO rebranded monkeypox to mpox. But I suspect now everyone’s going to ask what mpox stands for.

Sunshine as a disinfectant

In the early 20th century, sanitoriums emerged as a hybrid between a hospital and a resort. They were built to maximize a patients’ exposure to sunlight and clean air. Great photoessay from Wellcome.

Fellowship match results

From Dr. Bryan Carmody, the percentage of pediatric and internal medicine specialty programs that filled in this week’s NRMP fellowship match.

As we work to fill 130 physician positions for our Austin hospital, these stats reflect the reality of the available workforce in pediatric health.

"Let's open the floor for Question & Manswer"

You’ve heard of manels (panels with only men), now there’s question and manswer, as reported by the prestigious journal, Nature. Apparently, science shows that men like to hog the mike. I can neither confirm nor deny this.

Singing cells

Over Thanksgiving I finished Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human, by Sid Mukherjee — amazing read. While exposing the process of medical advancement, he puts cell biology into historical context in a way that no one else can. Read it if you're a medical history geek. Or if you like a really delicious sentence.

STAT News caught up with Mukherjee here. This is probably the best way to tell if you should commit to the 400 pages.

+ Loosely related: The unflappable L.M. Sacasas unpacks the power of reading on

The Convivial Society

society.

Digital Exhaust

• First there was moral injury, now there's administrative harm. We need to stop this at some point.

• What should happen to a paper published by Theranos?

• This mini USB endoscope makes a cool gift. Almost what I use when I scope a neonate. But mine costs thousands.

• Palm Pilot apps from the 1990’s that you can play on your computer.

• This Atlantic piece is interesting: Expiration Dates are Useless. I had no idea.

• Doc fired when the security AI identifies his romantic EHR snooping.