A 9yr Old On Responsible Spending and the Build vs. Buy Decision
February 10th, 2009 by KevinThe following is my best attempt at transcribing from memory a conversation I had earlier today with my 9yr old daughter; my inspiration for improving the tools needed by patients, caregivers and their medical teams for keeping her healthy while we race for a cure to type 1 diabetes:
Dad: “Have you ever heard of Microsoft?”
Daughter: “Sure. They built our computer.”
Dad: “Do you know who Google is?”
Daughter: “Yeah. They invented the Internet.”
Dad: “Both Microsoft and Google are working to accelerate research towards a cure for diabetes.”
Daughter: “That’s awesome, Dad.”
Dad: “Instead of using what Microsoft and Google already put together, ‘ABCD’ decided to pay a small company to build the same thing. What do think about that?”
Daughter: “Why don’t they just work with Microsoft and Google? Oh, they probably know the people that work for that company. That money should be used to help find the cure, Dad.”
It’s a sad day when your 9 yr old daughter knows when things aren’t right and yet the people you are counting on to make every dollar count for accelerating a cure to your daughter’s disease don’t see it. Even if there is a good reason to bypass existing and more powerful alternatives, those decisions aren’t being made in the open and the people donating the money don’t have the slightest access as to why.
How about transparency in the world of non-profits or do we just not expect the same level of fiduciary responsibility that Obama is asking for from his administration?
Given the state of free and existing communities like Ning (as well as Facebook, MySpace, etc…) and patient registries like TrialX (a description of their patient registry and trial matching service with Microsoft & Google) there had better be a damn good reason why people we entrust with our money (non-profits and the government) spend our money developing web-based services from scratch vs. taking advantage of commercially available and highly cost effective alternatives.
Last 5 posts by Kevin
- What's in a name? - March 7th, 2010
- Steve Ponder MD, CDE - Headliner Extraordinaire - January 22nd, 2010
- Fallen Hero Now a Competitor? - January 20th, 2010
- Man Made Barriers to a Man Made Solution - January 16th, 2010
- Healthy Families of South Texas - Launch Day - December 31st, 2009
February 12th, 2009 at 7:56 am
That is so true and how sad for your daughter to be able to understand the age old problems with long-standing bureaucratic research organizations whose primary mission in life eventually becomes a focus to sustain itself rather than the mission.
The other thing that seems lost in this approach is the ability to go back in time and look at what was happening in detail before anyone was diagnosed. That’s where I see the big value in TrialX working with potentially massive databases from Google and Microsoft Health Vault - with autoimmune disease onset you want to see what led up to the diagnosis rather than just look at post diagnosis data.
March 24th, 2009 at 8:23 am
wooooooooooo