No, not this one (yet).

I'm sure there are many people who've seen picture emerging over the past several years that I have; as a society, we're wriggling out of the of an old skin to fully explore the potential of a new one.

It's an exciting time to be alive.

An App That Saved 10,000 Lives

While most start-ups feverishly track figures like the total number of users, Ron Gutman, the founder and chief executive of the health information start-up,HealthTap, is more interested in a different data point.

This week, the start-up heard from its 10,000th user who said the site saved her life.

“My local doctor brushed me off and told me it was anxiety without doing any tests at all,” wrote one woman who turned to HealthTap after seeing her doctor. After spending two hours on HealthTap, she was told by a doctor who contributes to the site that her condition sounded like a blocked artery. She soon saw a cardiology specialist who later inserted a coronary stent.

Since its founding in 2012, the site has logged nearly a billion questions and answers, from simple queries about headaches or the flu, to more complicated ones, like whether mechlorethamine is a cancer medication. Questions are then routed to a physician who is both an expert in that particular field of medicine, and who is determined by an algorithm to be likely to respond fast, Mr. Gutman said.

None of that would be possible without the participation of nearly 50,000 doctors who contribute their advice free. (Every page on the site has a disclaimer saying that the site “does not provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.”)

HealthTap, which is both a Web site and a mobile application, was recognized at its introduction for applying the principles of gaming — features like badges, rewards and reputation scores — to health care. Today, however, that has shifted.

If “gamification” was the hot phrase driving new app design 18 months ago, today start-ups are increasingly looking to the principles of behavioral psychology to encourage behaviors and return visits. HealthTap’s evolution shows how moving to behavioral psychology has helped it increase its number of users and the number of doctors who offer knowledge on the site at no cost.

Instead of the goofy digital awards that were featured in an earlier version of HealthTap, the site’s rewards for doctors have been now recast as decorous professional markers of accomplishment. Instead of the “Doogie Howser Award,” physicians are given more serious designations like “advocates,” “mentors” or “founding experts.”

A special dashboard on the site provides a slate of ego-boosting statistics and prompts with physicians’ reputation scores, user comments and most crucially, areas in which other doctors consider them experts.

This way, the site appeals to the value that doctors place on reputation, expertise and authority. It is also marketed to doctors as a way to find new patients.

“There’s something really powerful in the ability to create positive feedback loops,” said Mr. Gutman, who learned through his many conversations with doctors that they craved something simple after days full of appointments — they simply wanted to be thanked.

So now, after a person receives an answer from a HealthTap doctor, they are prompted by the system to thank the doctor, or the site, or both. The woman with the blocked artery, for example, was even prompted to indicate if the service saved her life — a smart touch that not only helps the site track its success, but offers incredibly powerful reason for a doctors to keep coming back and answer more questions.

(CFN) Hub World Ontario: Wynning By Adding Value

My latest from Cornwall Free News: 

The premier said reviving Ontario’s economy will be a major priority for the government, as the province works to become “a hub of innovation, industry and investment.”

My son is a big fan of the WII Lego video games.  Like many of today's video games, these ones have multiple levels you can play accessed through a "hub world".  Essentially a value-added menu, hub worlds have labeled doors that let you look at the available levels in a map-like format, maximizing your opportunity to view your opportunities and determine what option best suits your mood.

Over the evolution of games, these hub worlds have grown in complexity to the point where they've become playscapes in and of themselves; you can try different exercises to hone your skills prior to trying a level, connect pieces you've discovered out in the field to create new opportunities and harness new skills and abilities.  None of these pieces are essential to the game play, but they DO enhance the experience and better prepare players for what they'll find beyond the hub.

Video games aren't the only field where centralized coordination and value-add are manifesting themselves.  News aggregates like Ontario News Watch and National News Watch do the same thing, essentially creating a visually-communicated menu of top stories and adding value with some original content of their own.  In fields like fundraising, there are innovative companies like The Funding Portal; for innovation, you have places like MaRS or the Centre For Social Innovation. 

Coincidentally or not, there's another trend of players returning to a hub-world for added support or to gain added value; as the cost of living soars and employment opportunities shrink, there are many young (and not-so-young) adults returning to their parents' home for sustainable living or returning to school for additional training.  We don't think of homes or schools as hubs or resting places, but increasingly that's an added function they serve.

Government Services are heading in the same direction; both in terms of physical space usage and online access, the move is towards user-friendly service aggregates designed for repetitive use.  Instead of going to hospitals when an illness has happened, we have Family Health Teams, Community Health Centres and online Occupational Mental Health Tools that provide proactive support and training, reducing the likelihood of traumatic or accumulated stresses out in the field.  I'd argue that the whole point of government is to serve as a social nervous system, efficiently coordinating human and physical assets to result in the realization of our individual and aggregate maximum potential.

There's no reason that Ontario can't expand its role as a hub and become a centralized access point for innovation, industry, investment and human potential for the global village.  There's unquestionably demand for someone to play the role of stone in the soup - if we can work in a collaborative fashion and look at our opportunities not as a path, but a map, we can be hub world for the rest of the world to play in.  When it's clear we're having fun doing so, the rest of the world will want to join our party. 

The same thing applies to how we provide services to Ontarians - if we can move passed a silo-based model towards something more systems-oriented, we can provide more efficient services and reduce duplication, gaps and overlaps at the same time.  We also need to rethink how we view educational institutions - instead of nests we're meant to leave, schools should be seen as education hubs we're comfortable going back to for training top-ups.  The increasing availability of online education fits that purpose nicely.

It's all within our reach - we just need to move beyond thinking what's bare-bones necessary and start thinking about how we can add value both internally and externally.

Fortunately, I believe we have the right leadership to make that happen.

UPDATE 21/10/13: Looks like I'm not the only one who thinks this is a good idea.

UPDATE 15/1/14: Ontario Online.  A hub by any other name still gets the job done.