The Heart of Service

On Friday I attended, for the first time, the Fall seminar of Transform HF. The Transform Heart Failure Strategic Initiative is an organization of working scientists, engineers, PhD applicants, IT specialists, Doctors and heart failure patients to further options for treatment of this growing disease in Canada. Not too sure what to expect, I was overwhelmed with the information that was being presented. I use that term in a positive way, it was an avalanche of information, all of which is fascinating, much of which I had a keen interest in as I had hypothesized and attempted to build some of the presented solutions 10-25 years ago.

I sometime wonder about the intellectual gifts I was given. I have never really been able to put them to good use for either myself or others. Curious how through the years I see answers to questions not yet asked, or questions that can’t exist because the science has not reach the point to know it could be. Other times I have come up with solutions that are just to soon.

Decades ago I was an IT specialist in the office equipment industry looking for a hook to greatly increase the sales of one of our product lines into the hospital environment. This was 2000-2001ish and my company had won the contract to install copiers into the downtown Toronto hospitals. We had also won the contract for 4 of the production print rooms in these hospital groups as well, displacing Xerox and their heavy iron in the process. Xerox certainly was not happy with our success. Hewlett Packard owned the local print space within these hospitals and worked diligently to ensure the fate of Xerox did not befall them.

My job was to keep the print shop folks happy, and build a bridge to installing print controllers on our huge fleet of copiers. The hook I came up with was to build a process to store and retrieve the huge amounts of data available that was created everyday in information form. Not yet considered data as this was the cumulative information on all the filled out forms from each days work. The forms were all created in the print shops and so we had a base structure of the file and its info. All I had to do was build a workflow for a scanning solution and a data repository for the resulting information.

Not to bore you, gentle readers, with the specifics, but the idea of an on demand info portal for the health provider and the patient was a bit ahead of its time. I made a second attempt a few years later with a different solution to achieve the same ends, but once again it was too soon in the game for this to be taken as a practical process for the health community.

The issue t the time was moving from the analogue forms to a digital repository which today has been overcome by the move to computer data entry at all levels of healthcare. From rolling nursing stations to your family doctors never being without their laptops. Information is readily available, but what is a problem is the overwhelming nature of it.

One of the presentations was about trying to corral all the data available so it can be used by the AI programmers to find better solution faster. I spoke to the women how presented their program and we compared challenges we both are attempting to overcome. Interesting how todays technology still has many of the same builtin challenges of the past.

A second program presented was the that of the work on expanding the value of Apple Watches in detecting changes in Vo2 during exertion which is a primary predictor of worsening heart failure. I told the PhD candidate about my work trying to integrate several wearables into a solution for affected snowbirds so they may receive reduced cost insurance. Or be able to get out of country insurance at all.

I spoke to my ideas of these types of programs being predictive. And I asked whether their could be a predictive component to what the team was trying to achieve. With heart failure there is an ever increasing downward curve of function. This parabolic curve is punctuated with big spikes of reduced function followed by recovery but typically with reduced performance then at the start of the spike. For me that raises two questions, what is the cause of the downward spike, and in using these wearables can we predict onset thereby reducing or eliminating these events.

Could mitigation even by a small amount then more flatten the curve of degradation thus adding time to the patients expected life.Too late for me in this but for others just starting this journey or future patients this could be a huge win.

Now to inject a little maudlin self reflection. Who knows what my life could have been if I had found the way to live I have today 45 years ago. For many years I have wondered what is my purpose understanding the under utilization of my intelectual gifts. Possibly I am not as bright I think I am, none-the-less I keep getting these ideas way before their time. And will it ever be possible to advance things to the benefit of others.

I do believe in a guiding force for the universe, call it what you will. And while there is always some doubt as expresed above, I sincerely think there is something I have yet to accomplish that I am destined for. Maybe that’s just ego, certainly that’s possible. Maybe it’s delusion so that I can continue to move forward. And maybe it’s truth. Maybe this is better explored in a separate post.

Ultimately what’s my role? To be of service. It matters not whether that service is to my fellows in recovery or those like me with transplant needs. All service is good service because in the end that work also helps me. Helping others so we may ourselves be helped truly is the heart of service.