stimulant

I wrote about an idea for a decentralized health care system a while ago, and all the people to whom I’ve pitched it think it’s a good, interesting idea. And it’s needed:

Most American physicians are overworked, which contributes to the widespread burnout within the medical profession. Care-giving and goal-oriented professions, such as medicine have prolonged exposure to critical decision making, trauma and patient complaints as well as overwhelming stressors such as excessive workload, increasing overhead, and night and weekend work.

Centralizing the expertise and material needs for medical care is a bad model. It’s not only given rise to high prices, but overloads a system that could be naturally robust. The top-down bureaucracy inflates prices, degrades care, and has no reason to exist. Even worse,

As a concrete way to take steps toward playing around with this idea, I’m working on making my own x-ray machine. The hope is that I could make and design one cheaply, make the designs available, and figure out a low-cost workflow for production. Then maybe try to get a few, free clinics to test them out. Most excitingly, this will give me a concrete context to start working on a potential software framework to accommodate the implications of a distributed health care system.

The idea of distributed health care has built into it a different approach to managing information, as well. Currently, information is again centralized, residing with the patient’s primary care provider. What if instead, this information were kept in a central, third-party, secure database? And what if the patient could carry around a copy of their own medical history and information? What if when you used a public x-ray machine, the results were uploaded, tagged, and available for analysis and consultation immediately?

I’m excited to play around with these ideas. Initially, I thought I was going to need to blow my tube after reading this account. But then, completely by chance, I was reading the Eyebeam blog and found that:

The EEM functions using a rescued vintage TV as an X-Ray emitter to irradiate waste and sterlize it.

Heading over to Wikipedia, it turns out that

The outer glass allows the light generated by the phosphor out of the monitor, but (for color tubes) it must block dangerous X-rays generated by high energy electrons impacting the inside of the CRT face. For this reason, the glass is leaded. Color tubes require significantly higher anode voltages than monochrome tubes (as high as 32,000 volts in large tubes), partly to compensate for the blockage of some electrons by the aperture mask or grille; the amount of X-rays produced increases with voltage

So now, I guess I’ll just try hooking up a TV CRT tube to high voltages, removing the leaded glass, and exposing something. It’s funny. I don’t quite believe yet that I’ll get to the point of writing the software and giving it to a free clinic. But I find it hard to work on things that I can’t connect to a very generative, powerful potential for change.