Expand Your Mind: Using Innovation
by Miki Saxon
So much of Twitter use in the US is banal, but the rest of the world is finding serious use for those 134 characters, like fighting crime. An administrative chief in a Kenyan village does just that using it to find stolen cows or sheep and even thwart a home invasion.
When the administrative chief of this western Kenyan village received an urgent 4 a.m. call that thieves were invading a school teacher’s home, he sent a message on Twitter. Within minutes residents in this village of stone houses gathered outside the home, and the thugs fled.
It’s fortunate that I’m extremely healthy, because I’m not a lover of the medical world. Individuals do great things, but I don’t trust the profession as a whole and those feelings have been reinforced by the secrecy surrounding the connections between doctors and pharmaceutical companies, but that’s about to change.
Under the new standards, if a company has just one product covered by Medicare or Medicaid, it will have to disclose all its payments to doctors other than its own employees. The federal government will post the payment data on a Web site where it will be available to the public.
Household vinegar has long been the go-to ingredient for a host of household cleaners and solutions to everyday problems (just ask Heloise). Now humble, cheap vinegar is saving lives (not in the US, of course).
…a remarkably simple, brief and inexpensive procedure, one with the potential to do for poor countries what the Pap smear did for rich ones: end cervical cancer’s reign as the No. 1 cancer killer of women. The magic ingredient? Household vinegar.
Crowdsourcing is making waves in many areas, from funding startups to improving government processes to jump-starting medical innovation. Who knew?
“Offering a $100,000 prize has yielded ideas in six months that would have taken four to five years to develop at ten times the cost,” said Sanofi’s Dennis Urbaniak, VP US diabetes.
If you read nothing else today I hope you read this final link and consider registering. After all, can’t hurt and could save a life.
Q: What do you get when you combine a driving entrepreneur with a mission and an algorithm?
A: The National Kidney Register and the longest domino set of transplant surgeries to date; 64 to be exact!
Chain 124, as it was labeled by the nonprofit National Kidney Registry, required lockstep coordination over four months among 17 hospitals in 11 states. It was born of innovations in computer matching, surgical technique and organ shipping, as well as the determination of a Long Island businessman named Garet Hil, who was inspired by his own daughter’s illness to supercharge the notion of “paying it forward.”
Flickr image credit: pedroelcarvalho
