I enjoy a good brainteaser, one that you really have to concentrate on and with enough revelations built in that make the end result a satisfying accomplishment. Here are some of my favorites. I made the answer text white so that you can’t see it unless you highlight (click and drag) over it.
Question: If you place 3 points randomly on the perimeter of a circle, what is the probability that all 3 lie on the same semi-circle?
Testing design assumptions with users is a critical ingredient in user-centered design. In Symcat’s early stages (ca 2012), we thought, for better or worse, that we would identify some eligible test users through Craigslist NYC. We were surprised by just how many people were willing to participate and collected some pretty interesting data in the process. I just stumbled upon it and I suspect much of it is still relevant, so I thought I would share. Get ready for some graphs.
I should begin by acknowledging the authors’ important contribution to elucidating the gap between what symptom checkers may hope to provide and the existing state of the art. Semigren et al adopt a pragmatic approach both by identifying which symptom checkers patients may reasonably find and assessing them in the most intuitive way imaginable: making them take the standardized patient tests we all take in medical school.
OK, so there are a lot of doctors: PhDs, JDs, DDS. For the sake of argument, I’m talking about MDs here. Let me start by explaining night float.
Night float is an interesting rotation during residency when most people who are working during the day leave their hospital and their patient’s care in your hands. It is alternately some of the quietest times during residency as patients drift off to sleep and some of the most hectic as in when a surge of patients finally arrive from their ambulance- or helicopter-assisted journey across the state. Night float, or “the night shift” arose out of a recognition that sleepy interns having worked 30-hours straight sometimes do not make the best decisions or confuse their lefts and their rights.
Written with my friend and co-founder of Symcat, David.
We are residents and a software developers. Before starting residency, we spent time as software developers in the startup community. We were witness to tremendous enthusiasm directed at solving problems and engaging people in their health. The number of startups trying to disrupt healthcare using data and technology has grown dramatically and every day established healthcare companies appear eager to feed this frenzy through App and Design Competitions.
Continue reading The Non-Physician’s Guide to Hacking the Health Care System on THCB.
I was absent-mindedly playing with my iPhone today and took special notice of a feature I have rarely used before. If you swipe all the way to the left on the home screen, you will get a search bar to search all of your iPhone. This includes contacts, iMessages, and apps. I’ve never needed to use this before–a testament to the iPhone’s ease of use. Just prior to this, I was working on some patient notes using my hospital’s electronic medical record (EMR). In contrast, each task I performed required a highly-regimented, multi-click process to accomplish.
Criticizing EMR interfaces is a well-loved pastime among clinicians. Here, however, I am going to take an oblique approach and reflect instead on what has made good interfaces (all outside of medicine, it turns out) recognized as such.
Continue reading Killer Features of the Next Generation EMR on the THCB.
Startups are hard. There’s no book. Or are there too many books? If you’re like me, you wind up feeling like you need to learn everything for yourself. That you have to “touch the stove” to know it’s hot.
It can be time consuming to learn Everything There is to Know, so instead we gravitate towards principle, heuristics, or rules of thumb. A set of heuristics are based on specific numbers–Magic Numbers. They can be used as signposts to guide decision-making where uncertainty otherwise prevails.
Several Magic Numbers frequently come up for me: 2, 3, 5, 7, 10, and 10,000. Why are they so magical? I’ll tell you.
Continue reading Magic Numbers for Startups on the Symcat blog.
Last week I included my answers to several questions I was asked as part of an interview for The Doctor’s Channel about entrepreneurship as a medical student. You can read that post at Starting a company as a medical student: Part 1.
This week I will finish the 2-part series with answers to the questions:
Continue reading Starting a Company as a Medical Student: Part 2 on the Symcat blog.
We were recently asked by The Doctor’s Channel to share some of our thoughts about being an entrepreneur while in medical school and how that came about. It’s not easy to take the plunge into starting a business with so much medical training already behind you and so much to go.
Here our some of my answers the the questions we are typically asked about starting Symcat while in medical school. Since there are a lot, I’m splitting it up into a two-part series. This week I will be answering
Continue reading Starting a Company as a Medical Student: Part 1 on the Symcat blog.
I am frequently asked about the “A-ha” moment that led to the creation of Symcat. This is frustrating because I usually have to make something up about an apple falling on my head or a dream about a snake. People generally think of ideas as spontaneous, as not existing one moment and existing the next. But Symcat has taught me that they are wrong.
About 5 years ago, I started a notebook of random ideas for products and technologies I wanted to develop further. My (rather uninspired) titles included “Website for creating prediction markets,” “computer simulation of viral news spread,” and “HUD built for smartphone.” Original, right? They were the idea du jour brought on by whatever I happened to be reading or thinking of at the moment. They were definitely not bolts of insight that immediately and obviously led to the creation of a company.
Continue reading The Myth of the “A-ha” Moment on the Symcat blog.
Craig Monsen 