Kit presented the Vaiditron Sandbox at AMIA and it was as impressive as you would hope for and expect of Kit. He was the only one in the Demo session to actually perform a live demo that included typing scripts and running them, and I got many comments about his courage. He had the Sandbox both initiate a telehealth call to his Airbnb and answer the call. Frank, a wooden figure on the other end of the telehealth call, said hi to the audience with a note clasped in his blunt hands. There were about 100 people in the audience, and several people came to the front afterwards to ask questions, including individual researchers who could see its use in their work and representatives from companies like Wolters Kluwer. For me, it made the Sandbox much more concrete and impressive at the same time. Kit, Victor, and Kara will be leading several tours of the Validitron SimLab this week for high profile companies and potential partners, and they will be leveraging the materials Kit meticulously put together for this demo.
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One person in the audience was Devin Mann from NYU Langone Health. One great thing about a conference is access to people from around the world with short notice. I found a paper by Devin about a Digital Design Lab they published about in 2019. It is now called Future Practice, and you will see its goals are very similar to those of the Validitron. I saw him tweet that he was at AMIA, sent him a personal message, met with him the next night, and invited him to the demo the following morning. He asked an excellent question about why we need the capability of the Sandbox beyond wireframe prototyping, which is often the endpoint of Future Practice before a prototype gets sent to the health system IT team for development and potential implementation. One reason I could see is that we don't have the experienced FHIR teams in our health services who we can hand off our prototypes to, and the Sandbox gives us a platform to work closely with them in the future to learn together how to integrate the innovations into the existing IT structure. Looking forward to further discussions about the importance of the Sandbox.
In my discussion with Devin, I learned a few interesting things:
He is also the main author of the Digital Health Equity Framework Kara and Mahima used in the workshop a few months ago
They use a framework by Deloitte that I can't yet find in selecting which projects to work on. The y axis is the difficulty and the x axis is the availability of talent and resources to complete the project. Their team works in the upper right corner of high difficulty and low availability, because that is where they can add most value to the existing health IT teams
They are just about to launch a virtual waiting room app to improve patient experience that is based on a lot of focus groups and interviews about what patients want. Not published yet. Hasan and Kit are also working on a virtual waiting room app that leverages the Sandbox.
As you can see, we have a lot to learn from Devin and his team and will invite him to speak at the March symposium on integrating digital innovation into healthcare.
Here are a few pictures from Washington, DC, which was gorgeous and unseasonably warm this year. I had so much fun seeing colleagues, spending more time with Kit and Daniel (sometimes you need the travel to make time), and watching my son Alec present on his PhD research project. But it's also great to be home and I'm looking forward to seeing you all in the coming weeks!
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