In the Pioneer Portfolio, we’re all about ideas—big ones and little ones—the ones that will help solve some of the toughest problems in health and health care. We have clearly articulated our strategy for investing in innovations and innovators who have the potential to transform areas such as the health care delivery system, the patient-provider relationship, and the education of health care professionals. That strategy has yielded some significant breakthroughs, and the hope for much more to come. 

But we’re still missing a big piece of the puzzle. Why? Because right now, we only hear from the folks who have solutions to offer. That approach, by its very nature, limits the number of problems we know about. Those of us who work on the Pioneer team only see health care from the proverbial 30,000-foot vantage point. We are not on the front lines, so we don’t see firsthand the issues health care providers, patients, and families struggle with every single day.

By Patrick van der Valk, member of the Archimedes team

This blog entry was originally posted to HealthData.gov on October 29, 2012.

The Archimedes Healthcare Simulator (ARCHeS) is a Software-as-a-Service (SAAS) solution that provides health experts access to the Archimedes Model, via a web portal, to answer complex health care questions. The Archimedes Model is a full-scale computer simulation model of human physiology, diseases, behaviors, interventions and health care systems. Through advanced methods of mathematics, computing, and data systems, the Model enables users to run clinically realistic virtual trials that drive better decisions in health and economic outcomes research, comparative effectiveness research, and program and policy design and utilization.

ARCHeS (video and explanation), which launched in May 2011 under a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, allows users to run their own virtual trial by setting up populations, eligibility criteria, standard or custom interventions, and care processes. Users submit their query to the Archimedes Model through the ARCHeS Setup Tool to be queued for a simulation. The Model performs calculations to simulate each person in the population and delivers a dataset via the Archimedes Outcomes Analyzer (AOA) within 24 hours. The AOA allows users to see health and economic outcomes and explore different combinations of interventions and outcomes.

This blog entry was originally posted to the Association of American Medical College's AAMC Reporter blog.

Academic medical centers are, by definition, hubs for education, research, and patient care. They are essential to creating a health care system in which new knowledge is translated into practice for real-time treatment and quality improvement.

Academic medical centers should be centers of lifelong medical learning and knowledge sharing, where medical professionals expand their expertise and competencies throughout their careers and where best practices are disseminated to the field. They can serve as forums for ongoing mentoring and case-based training. They can host expanded practice communities, where professionals from multiple disciplines, specialties, and even locales work together to provide better care to more people.

How can design affect health and the delivery of care? Last year I and a group of Pioneer's guests interested in Project ECHO went to Mayo Clinic’s Center for Innovation Transform Symposium without knowing much about the conference's focus of design and innovation in health. I entered as a skeptic but left a believer. This year, Pioneer brought no guests but we did provide funding so that a number of students in the design, pre-medical, and medical professions could attend.

What do I mean by design? You might think that design doesn’t have a place in delivering innovative health care. Design is predicated on understanding the way people and the environment react to how solutions are packaged and presented. This is critical in the acceptance and ultimate success of health care solutions, and successful outcomes are an essential health care goal.

My recent journey to Mayo Clinic’s Transform 2012 began with a bike ride. I was up at 4:00 a.m. and drove for an hour to join hundreds of other cyclists in northern New Jersey for a 7:15 a.m. ride start. 107 miles and 7,600 feet of climbing later, I uploaded my ride stats to Strava, chatted some with colleagues, grabbed a bit of post-ride lunch, and blasted home. I made it to the Philadelphia airport just in time for my 7:00 p.m. flight. After a connection in Chicago, I arrived in Minneapolis around midnight, rented a car, and then drove 80 miles in the early morning hours across rural Minnesota, eventually arriving at my hotel in the town of Rochester.

Bright and early that morning at the meeting, feeling surprisingly bushy-tailed, I encountered a large gathering, almost like a mirage rising from the prairie, of curious, engaged people talking earnestly about how they were transforming American health care. But of course it wasn’t a mirage. It was real and impressive. Our national audacious effort to transform the health care colossus from its current state of dysfunction and inefficiency is impossibly complex and difficult. We know that. Nevertheless, my reaction to Transform 2012 was not simply because I found a large gathering focused on that health care transformation. No, the truly remarkable thing is that here was yet another of many large gatherings of engaged people working all over the United States to transform health care.