Thursday, November 29, 2012

Coming full Circle in Google+!

Had an amazing journey today and made me realize how sometimes one can learn so much if you have the right people in your circles on Googe+ (or follow the right people on Twitter).

It started early morning when I saw this post by Dirk Stanley who is a physician and a Chief Medical Information Officer.

I followed the link to his excellent blog where he describes his thoughts on EHRs and alerts.  I 1+'ed is post and went on with my day.  Later I came across this post by Marcius Herbert who is a Computer Science Educator in the UK. The post was about using SMS to persuade learners - linking to an article in the British Journal of Education Technology.  This sounded fascinating as I was aware of the use of SMS in helping patients comply with physician instructions.  




At work I was able to get the full text of the article which used an instrument called MSLQ (motivated strategies for learning questionnaires) and referenced the work of B J Fogg who has done amazing work in the field of motivation or "Behavior Design" at Stanford. The article referenced his book "Persuasive Technology; Using Computers to Change What  We Think and Do"  I perused this and learned about the term he coined, "Captology" and his principles organized under


  • Computers as Persuasive Tools
  • Computers as Persuasive Media and 
  • Computers as Persuasive Social Actors
This was fascinating stuff and I realized how this was so closely related to how we try to design Clinical Decision Support Systems and alerts in Electronic Health Records to try and change physician behavior if they are doing something inappropriate.  

My day had come a full circle!


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