Orca Health Decide - Experience the Healthcare Revolution

Digital Health Education: How Patients Consume Information

by Orca Team

How has technology changed the way patients and healthcare professionals interact with information?

An interesting infographic by Health Ed Academy visualizes the change (see below).

Some key points:

2 in 10 “healthcare extenders” use a tablet for interacting with patients
3 in 10 have a tablet
6 in 10 wish they had a tablet to interact with patients
79% (of those using apps) report that technology improves the quality of interactions with patients.

What about the growing population of people over age 65?

According to the NNLM;

71% of adults older than age 60 have difficulty using print materials
80% have difficulty using documents such as forms or charts
68% have difficulty interpreting numbers and performing calculations.

Body Data: How the Human Body Provides Usable (& Valuable) Data

by Orca Team

Infographic via NetApp

The New Medical Assistant: Studies Assess iPads in Medicine

by Lauren Soelberg Treasure

The UNE School of Rural Medicine's program to equip first-year medical students with iPads.

St. Mary’s Health Care System purchased iPads and loaned them to third-year medical clerkship students from the Georgia Health Sciences University/University of Georgia Medical Partnership (GHSU/UGA) campus and are collaborating with the University of Georgia’s College of Education on a yearlong study to see how iPads can be used in medical settings on a daily basis.

The study, which began in July of 2012, is set to conclude in June of 2013. Thus far, the study included eight faculty physician preceptors at St. Mary’s and 36 third-year medical students from GHSU/UGA.

“You can talk to your patient and educate them,” said Michelle Nuss, the campus associate dean for graduate medical education at GHSU/UGA. “The more the patient understands their disease, the more they’re going to be invested in getting better because they understand why it’s happening to them.”

Patient engagement in healthcare has been a big concern as the costs continue to skyrocket. The belief that patients taking an active role in their healthcare was a major contributing factor to the overhaul of Medicare/Medicaid reimbursement policy in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and will be put to the test as hospitals are measured on quality of care and outcomes, and paid accordingly.

Six Facts About Sleep Apnea

by Orca Guest Contributor

To learn more about symptoms or obtain diagnosis and treatment information, check out the ENT Decide app from Orca Health.

If you find you often wake up in the night with a start and don’t know why, or your partner is roused by the sound of you struggling for air, there could be many reasons. One of these might be untreated sleep apnea. Although this disease can be worrisome if left to its own devices, the good news is that there are simple, non-invasive cures for it.

Here are six quick facts about the disease that can help you understand it a little better.

1) High blood pressure may go hand in hand with this diagnosis

One in three people suffering from high blood pressure may also suffer from this nocturnal condition, so you may want to be assessed for this sleep issue.

Continue Reading …

Today’s Healthcare Consumer

by Lauren Soelberg Treasure

How do today’s healthcare consumers think and behave? Are they comfortable with the traditional healthcare delivery system, do they seek information online, are they curious and asking more questions?

It’s important to understand their attitudes so that the changes in healthcare reflect what’s best for the benefactors (the consumers) rather than the providers. Adjustments in how care is provided and paid has serious implications for the consumer, which will begin to manifest more prominently in the next several years.

Deloitte’s 2012 Survey of U.S. Health Care Consumers has identified six distinct consumer segments that navigate the system in very different ways.

See the full infographic here.

Multisensory Apps Improve Learning and Retention

by Orca Team

See, touch, hear and interact with KidsDental from Orca Health.

Learning by doing. It’s a tired excuse for academic under-performers, right? Well, more research is suggesting that learning by doing is precisely the sort of thing that helps our brains retain information.

Academic research from two scientists out of the University of California Los Angeles and Riverside, respectively, points to multisensory learning – or learning in an environment that stimulates more than one sense simultaneously, like through hands-on activity – as being the key to increasing the probability that the human brain actually retains the information being processed from a particular event.

Typical in most modern educational environments are learning materials created to stimulate only a single sense – think of your required reading (strictly visual), followed up by a class lecture (mostly auditory). Until recently, most studies of perceptual learning have also focused on the impact of unisensory materials, despite that fact that we live, interact, and learn in a multisensory environment.

The research from the aforementioned study found that people generally remember 10% of what they read, 20% of what they hear, and 30% of what they see – yet they retain 50% of what they see and hear. (Shams, Seitz, 2008).

Multisensory Learning Series: Augmented Reality

by Orca Team

Use your camera in-app to see how each condition affects your ability to see your own surroundings. Eye Decide by Orca Health.

A rather new component of multi sensory learning is a technology called augmented reality. Augmented reality can use sensory inputs like visual or auditory (or both) to access your environment and provide feedback in real time.

A recent study concluded that technology using augmented reality enhances applicative and comprehension skills while improving the efficiency of learning (Balog et al. 2012).

AR technology completes our view of real-world environments by adding fictional elements, which enhance what we see. It has the ability to supplement the real word, rather than replace it (unlike like virtual reality). The ability to understand and view conditions within your current worldview makes the process of digesting information much more real and personal. Augmented reality apps for healthcare enable patients to self-diagnose, without requiring too many unnecessary doctor visits.

The implications for using AR in telehealth are huge. For example, the use of AR in rural areas that lack quick access to a clinic with medical devices is likely to become much more common. This technology can allow for patients to receive similar care to what they would find in a clinic, at a much lower cost to inhabitants of remote areas who would otherwise have to travel long distances.

The EyeDecide app uses augmented reality to describe common eye conditions visually. Take, for example, Age-Related Macular Degeneration. By turning on the camera feature and pressing play, users can see how this condition affects their vision at the same time they see how the condition affects their eye.

EyeDecide uses iPhone/iPad camera to demonstrate how progression of several conditions affects vision. The ability to view conditions in the realm of the real world makes it possible to understand what your mother, sister, or father in law may be going through, and experience empathy for their way of life. Orca pioneered and patented this revolutionary feature, and knows the value that empathy and understanding have on our personal health stories.

Multisensory Learning Series: Interact

by Orca Team

Interact with the heart like never before, with Heart Decide by Orca Health.

One of the critical components to multisensory learning is the ability to actively engage with the information. Research suggests that actively rotating and manipulating an object significantly improves a person’s ability to understand and remember it. “We found that when participants learned object structure by actively rotating the objects, the objects were recognized faster during a subsequent recognition task than when object structure was learned through passive observation.” (James et al. 2002).

3D animations that can be manipulated by users to explore every angle enable this type of interaction. Different from physical touch, in that it is not a sensory input, but rather a mental engagement that makes room for curiosity.

The results of the research indicate a marked positive effect of the use of 3D animations on learning, recall and performance in tests. Under experimental conditions, Students in 3D groups improved 90% from the pre to post-test, compared to 50% in 2D classes (International Research Agency, 2011).

Perceptions of learning also improved significantly. The students felt strongly (84% agreed or strongly agreed) that 3D had improved their learning. Satisfaction levels among people who feel they are well-informed are generally much higher than those who feel they don’t fully understand. Patients who are able to interact with the information via several different sensory inputs are more likely to feel satisfied with the course of action they choose, and with the care they receive while doing so. A well-informed patient is better for everyone.

Multisensory Learning Series: See

by Orca Team

Visual aids have been used for some time to enhance learning, but are they enough? While visual aids significantly improve learning, they are even more powerful when paired with congruent sensory material. Congruent information implies stimuli that is both moving in the same direction (i.e. image of a bell and a ringing sound).

Many studies have the effectiveness of visual stimulants in trials and found that while helpful, the margin of improvement – though positive – is relatively small. However, research validates their effectiveness when used in parallel with other stimuli.

While both audio-visual (congruent) and vision-only test groups improved significantly with training, the degree and rate of learning for the audiovisual group far surpassed that of the visual trained group (Kim, R.S. et al. 2008).

To illustrate this point, Seitz and Shams (2008) argue that if you were trying to train someone to recognize the differences between bird species, it would be a long and arduous process to only show them pictures of different birds and expect them to memorize what they look like. Since different bird species also make different sounds, you could show the picture with an associated audio clip and it would increase their capacity to memorize the visual image better than if only an image were used.

Multisensory Learning Series: Hear

by Orca Team

Play audio to accompany condition descriptions in ENT Decide by Orca Health.

The impact of auditory signals is quite strong, but studies have found that sound is an even stronger stimulant when paired with other sensory stumuli, like visual signals.

The principle of ‘dual coding’ (Birsh, J.R. 1999) indicates that information entering the system through multiple processing channels helps circumvent the limited processing capabilities of each individual channel and, thus, greater total information can be processed when spread between multiple senses. That is, the capacity of the human brain to process information is increased when more sensory inputs are involved.

Studies testing the effectiveness of auditory learning conclude almost unanimously that multisensory training is far more efficient than unisensory training. Training with an audio-visual stimulus produces enhanced learning both within a session (i.e., fast learning) and across days. Meaning that multisensory training can reduce the number of training days, and the length of training in each day, needed to produce equivalent performance.