Archive for the ‘Conferences’ Category

Personal Health Records Meet Limited Needs of People with Chronic Conditions – Research Study

Wednesday, October 20th, 2010

Personal Health Record (PHR) usage remains low, despite conventional wisdom that it could improve the health outcomes of patients with chronic conditions. Evantage Consulting created an internal project to understand the factors that are contributing to the low use of PHRs and evaluate if a caregivers involvement could help drive its use and improve the health outcomes of people with chronic conditions.

Based on the qualitative study conducted with 20 chronically ill patients and/or their caregivers, we found that the caregiver’s involvement in managing a patient’s PHR could drive its use. However the current PHRs meet limited needs of patients with chronic conditions. To drive PHR use and improve health outcomes, patients and caregivers need simpler and more effective PHRs that can fit in their everyday life. The study was conducted in the months of August-September, 2010. All the people interviewed were using one of the available PHRs (Google Health, Microsoft health Vault, a provider-sponsored PHR, or payer-sponsored PHR).

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Fred is speaking at SXSW 2010!

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

Are you going to SXSW? If you are then check out “The Right Way to Wireframe!” This is a two-part talk in which myself and three other user experience designers tackled the same business problem using different tools.

In the UX world, we don’t get to see each other’s work very much; this talk changes that. It shows how, no matter what tool you use, the important part is the thought process you go through to arrive at your solution. Here are the links to the two workshops:

The Right Way to Wireframe – Part 1

The Right Way to Wireframe – Part 2

Also, I’m running a little social & technological experiment… I’m sharing all the notes I take at SXSW with the whole world via Evernote. Of course I’ll take notes at panels, but the really interesting part of SXSW is the discussions on the side. Those’ll show up in my notes too. Here’s the URL if you want to follow along!

http://www.evernote.com/pub/fred_beecher/sxsw2010notes

The environment at SXSW is… well, I’ll be kind and say, “fluid.” If you want to see what I may or may not be attending, check out my schedule on Sitby.Us.

http://www.sitby.us/schedule/fred_beecher/

2010 Conferences

Monday, January 18th, 2010

It’s a new year. Time to start thinking about what conferences to attend in 2010. The following is a list of conferences we at Evantage are likely to attend (or have attended in the past) due to their content and location. This is not a comprehensive list. There are some conferences such as IDEA that I would recommend but they do not currently have information listed about a 2010 conference. Likewise, the Usability Professional Association annual conference is another one I would typically recommend, but due to its location in Munich, Germany this year, it doesn’t appear feasible (unless you have the travel budget). (more…)

A look at Healthcare Systems and Web 2.0

Friday, May 22nd, 2009

Recently I attended the Health 2.0 conference and was impressed by the drive and the passion displayed by everyone to transform the Healthcare industry. This included entrepreneurs, policy makers, patient advocates, physicians, corporate and research organizations. The conference discussions highlighted the changing role of patients and physicians and showcased the different ways in which Web 2.0 tools had been used to help bring this change. It was a good platform to get a sneak preview into the future of the digital landscape of Healthcare and evaluate some of our strategies for getting there.

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Reflections on the 2009 IA Summit

Tuesday, March 24th, 2009

Two days of workshops, three days of intensive talks and my brain is swimming with all the things I’ve learned and interesting discussions I’ve had. This is my humble attempt to gather my thoughts and put them down in blog form.

First, I’m going to say that if given the choice of only attending one conference a year, I would still choose this conference. It’s one of the more inexpensive conferences to attend and as Karl Fast said during 5 minute madness, it is designed by us for us. We only have two selected speakers and the rest are submissions sent in the by the community. It’s a great space to see what is happening in the user experience realm. On an individual basis, we spend the year solving problems and creating great user interfaces for our clients, on this occasion we get to compare those experiences and learn about some great new technique that will improve how we do our jobs.

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