A Follow Up On Tribology: A Model To Understand Human Interactions?

About a month ago, I posted an article here about a little known and little-applied field of engineering called tribology – the study of interacting surfaces in relative motion. It’s a subject that I studied in college, and I thought it would be interesting to write about it. If you missed that post, you can see it here.

Little did I know that my colleagues here at Ximedica would soon run with the topic – but not in a way that I could have imagined at the time. Spurred by a comment posted on the article, one of the research team members approached me with the idea of applying the fundamental equations of tribology not just to surface interactions, but to human interactions.

Specifically, could we apply tribology to the human interactions that lead up to and take place in an operating room?

Medical Simulation Center Provides Context Without Chaos

Context is everything when doing front-end, qualitative research for product development. It’s one thing to ask open-ended, probing questions about the task under consideration, but it’s another to ask those questions in a setting that allows an interviewee to interact with his or her environment as he or she answers. In someone’s “natural” environment, you will get much deeper recall, demonstration and insight than you typically will in a focus group facility. But, when you are interested in doing this type of work with health care clinicians, being able to do a deep extended interview in a clinical environment can be the stuff of dreams – due to the hectic and sometimes chaotic nature of clinical healthcare settings. Imagine trying to interview an emergency room nurse about a particular device that she regularly uses – in the middle of the emergency room.

Multidisciplinary Approaches to Multidimensional Problems

Last month I had the opportunity to attend the Institute for Health Care Improvement’s National Quality Forum in Orlando. I listened to world-renowned economist, Uwe Reinhardt, discuss the highly reticulated social, cultural, political, and economic inequities that help determine global and individual health. His talk followed that of Marshall Ganz, who drew on his experience both as a grassroots community organizer and as a public policy expert, to explain how clinicians might collectivize our individual quality improvement initiatives into a social movement. While it is not unheard of for economists and policy experts to weigh in on health care issues, the scope of their talks reached well beyond their respective disciplines, venturing into the realms of anthropology, philosophy and even ancient history.

Accelerating New Product Development Programs Like A Formula One Driver

Ask any fan of F1 racing—or, if you can find one, someone who has ever driven a Ferrari to its performance limits—what makes these cars go so fast, and you are likely to get the same answer: the brakes. To the uninitiated, this might seem counter intuitive at first, but it readily makes sense. Nobody would push these 700 horsepower monsters towards corners at blurring speed without the confidence in their ability to slow down rapidly at the last moment. As product developers, we can draw valuable lessons from this simple fact as we seek ever faster means to take concepts from the lab to the commercial market successfully.

Visualizing the inter-relationships between per capita healthcare costs, access, and life expectancy.

This graphic by National Geographic provides a thought-provoking look at various countries' per capita health care spending, average annual visits to a doctor, and average life expectancy.

Enough said.