Leading Forward

“Over the past couple of weeks I’ve given you a step-by-step guide on how to build your personal leadership brand, a statement that articulates: who you want to be, what you want to be known for, wh…”
Via Stefano Principato

By their nature, hospitals are fast-paced environments that can induce some stress in the people who work there. Often, the roles taken on by people saving others' lives are somewhat thankless.

 

For this reason, Penn Medicine's Center for Digital Health created "High Five," a web-based recognition system that enables staff members to easily use social media-style memes and humor to compliment each other on anything from the routine to the extraordinary.

 

The Center for Digital Health -- which studies how things like the internet and other digital technology affect our health -- began exploring whether a web-based platform would be feasible in health care in 2016.

 

The designers believed that making it easy for staff to quickly send out a nice message in a way that is now second instinct to many would increase positive interactions and potentially serve as a tool to combat burnout.

 

"Keeping it fun and light was us trying to build on what folks already do naturally on social media and via texting," Lee explained. "Humor and levity can organically incentivize folks to connect and support each other. So we thought it made sense to capitalize off of that natural inclination when we were trying to build an opt-in recognition system."

 

High Five, named for the congratulatory gesture, is usable across multiple devices and easily accessible through a webpage that clinicians could reach as if they were working on electronic health records. Each person can search for and select a colleague from the health system, then pick from a variety of memes or GIFs containing positive phrases that were congratulatory or humorous. 

 

The images draw from pop culture or are health-themed and some are the same as memes used commonly on social media. In addition to the images, each message could also be personalized by an accompanying text written by the user. A reply function was also added shortly after launch.

 

High Five has expanded since it was launched in 2016 into several different areas at Penn Medicine such as other emergency departments, Women's Health, Pharmacy, and an intensive care nursery, among others.

 

Users now hail from all 20 academic departments within Penn Medicine, and 32 percent of hospital employees have exchanged 28,808 communications expressing courteous interpersonal behaviors, ranging from appreciation and recognition to specific feedback.

 

A new study published in NEJM Catalyst Innovations in Care Delivery led by Kathleen Lee, MD, an assistant professor of Clinical Emergency Medicine and director of Clinical Implementation in the Center, showed that this system was adopted by the vast majority of those within the Department of Emergency Medicine at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania (HUP) -- the first department it was fully integrated into.

 

"The status quo expectation in many settings in medicine is perfection without recognition, Medical errors can result in harsh consequences, while successes are not often not recognized to the same extent. This imbalance is thought to be a key contributor to clinician burnout," said Lee, who led the research with David Do, MD, an assistant professor of Clinical Neurology, and Ian Oppenheim, MD, a fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, who helped to launch "High Five" while he was a resident at Penn Medicine.

 

Moving forward, the team involved with High Five hopes to expand it across the health system completely, especially with the installment of display monitors.

 

"We want to continue to partner with departments and groups to help further harness the workplace civility and positivity that High Five enables," Lee said.

 

Read More: https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-12/uops-pmu121019.php

 

Via Plus91

Artificial intelligence may have been invented in the West, but you can see its future taking shape on the other side of the world.

Via Farid Mheir

The other day at work, my colleague, HubSpot Marketing Director Ryan Bonnici, sent around a link on Slack -- to a website called “Will Robots Take My Job?”

We were thrilled to learn marketing managers had only a 1.4% chance of our jobs being automated or replaced by robots and artificial intelligence. And although I breathed a sigh of relief that writing has only a 3.8% chance of being automated, it made me think about job roles that weren’t so lucky.

If you think job disruption by AI is limited to the assembly lines, think again: AI is doing a better job than humans at some aspects of sales and marketing, too....

Via Jeff Domansky

Former MIT dean Christine Ortiz is building a radical nonprofit research institution focused on the intersection of technology and humanity, to increase college access for underprivileged students.

Via Nik Peachey

Educators today are in agreement: They need an AI strategy. But many institutions don’t know how to implement one—or where to start.

Via Inovação Educacional, juandoming

Via Ana Cristina Pratas, juandoming

German power producers are poised to pay customers to use electricity this weekend.  Wind generation is forecast to climb to a record on Sunday, creating more output than needed and driving electricity prices below zero, broker data compiled by Bloomberg show. It would be the first time this year that the average price for a whole day is negative, not just for specific hours.
Via Levin Chin

This is simply a must have for anyone into learning: the Handbook of Learning Analytics  by Charles Lang, George Siemens, Alyssa Wis

Via juandoming

As if solar-powered homes, and cars, and gigawatt factories along with his Space X ventures weren’t enough already, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has another outlandish plan for humanity – a wizard-hat you might say, for our brains. Tesla and Space X are already redefining humanity’s future, but Neuralink, a platform that would use futurist technology to augment our brains could alter our world even more.

Via THE OFFICIAL ANDREASCY

What will happen as we enter the era of human augmentation, artificial intelligence and government-by-algorithm? James Barrat, author of Our Final Invention, said: “Coexisting safely and ethically with intelligent machines is the central challenge of the twenty-first century.”

 

A lot of folks are earnestly exploring the topic. “Will scientists soon be able to create supercomputers that can read a newspaper with understanding, or write a news story, or create novels, or even formulate laws?” asks J. Storrs Hall in Beyond AI: Creating the Conscience of the Machine (2007). “And if machine intelligence advances beyond human intelligence, will we need to start talking about a computer’s intentions?”

 

Sharing this concern, SpaceX/Tesla entrepreneur Elon Musk has joined with Y Combinator founder Sam Altman to establish OpenAI, an endeavor that aims to keep artificial intelligence research — and its products — accountable by maximizing transparency and openness.

 

Among the most-worried is Swiss author Gerd Leonhard, whose new book Technology Vs. Humanity: The Coming Clash Between Man and Machine, coins an interesting term, “androrithm,” to contrast with the algorithms that are implemented in every digital calculating engine or computer. Some foresee algorithms ruling the world with the inexorable automaticity of reflex, and Leonhard asks: “Will we live in a world where data and algorithms triumph over androrithms… i.e., all that stuff that makes us human?”

 

Artificial intelligence. Cognitive computing. The Singularity. Digital obesity. Printed food. The Internet of Things. The death of privacy. The end of work-as-we-know-it, and radical longevity: The imminent clash between technology and humanity is already rushing towards us. What moral values are you prepared to stand up for—before being human alters its meaning forever? Before it’s too late, we must stop and ask the big questions: How do we embrace technology without becoming it? When it happens — gradually, then suddenly — the machine era will create the greatest watershed in human life on Earth. 

Via Dr. Stefan Gruenwald