PDCA in a Zen Perspective

The gamekeeper of the never (events) land

My job is maintaining the most negative database in New Zealand storing what (sometimes almost) went wrong and what did not (occasionally positively) go as patients expected in healthcare, to learn from them and improve quality and safety of care.

In recent dialog with other HL7 New Zealand executives, I called myself the gamekeeper of the never (events) land. The quarries under my administration are captured in tertiary care facilities and kept for shooting out systemic problems.

We would need to greatly extend the scope and range of this never (events) land as regional and national shared care initiatives are being rolled out. But there is a catch.

When patients, family members and other people within the community are taking more active roles in healthcare, it would be unlikely that they are naturally more motivated than health professionals to share unwanted results.

Thus we have got to build user friendly information systems and the culture of non-blaming discourse for collecting bad lucks to turn them into good practices which would be utilised by everyone in the community.

This is a quite a challenge.

All peoples of the world

We recognise that all peoples of the world have the right to live in peace, free from fear and want. - The Constitution of Japan - Preface

#SocialDeterminantsOfHealth #HealthEquity

One step at a time

Yes, I am back with so many things to share. But just one step at time as trees take years to grow tall.

Virtual Insanity

A few months ago, I was looking for some physical MIDI control device to use with iOS music creation/software synthesiser Apps on my iPad Mini. 

I had continued the search despite I wrote I had given up. Eventually I had end up with this iOS App, TB MIDI Stuff which does the quite opposite from what I had been looking for originally. It turns iPad/iPad Mini into a fully programmable versatile MIDI controller.

I have completed a couple of virtual controllers and my favourite is the one shown above. It is designed as a controller for Roland SYSTEM-1 Software Synthesiser. Of course, it can be controlled on a Mac's screen but mouse/track pad operations are not so intuitive as touch screen interface on iOS devices.

Here's the beauty of virtualisation. You still have some sense of touch without limitation of physical devices. Actually it really feel like operating on a physical gadget but the flexibility and potentials are  limitless.

I hope we could create similar experiences in Electronic Health Records.

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity

According to Cambridge Dictionaries Online

Liberty: the ​freedom to ​live as you ​wish or go where you ​want

Equality: the ​right of different ​groups of ​people to have a ​similar ​social ​position and ​receive the same ​treatment

Fraternity: a ​feeling of ​friendship and ​support

I think that they are values we all can share.

Let's get physical (or not)

Today's music production has become quite virtual. Not to speak of digitally sampled synthesisers and music workstations, there are virtual analog synthesisers, virtual acoustic instruments, virtual effecters and amplifiers and even virtual idol singers. However, sometimes we would miss physical touch.

My favourites have been Korg's nanoSERIES 2 trio, which look rather like some GUI objects just popped out of the computer screen than serious musical tools. They are handy and versatile with flexibility of choosing any combinations as you wish. The problem is that they are designed to function only one of them at a time when using with an iPad/iPad Mini.

I had looked around for the options which provide combined functionalities as a single device ideally with more decent feeling of playing musical instruments. There had been some attractive candidates but they all fell short in terms of portability.

Finally I found that most of the time a simple bus-powered USB hub does the job at least with two nanoSERIES 2 devices if you can tolerate the occasional "drawing too much power" error message and suspension. Also, inconvenience with only one or even no physical device does not do so much damage to the joy of being able to play iOS music apps anywhere.

Moderation is virtue.