February 22, 2012

Who hasn’t wanted to chuck his or her cell phone, laptop, or tablet at least once a day? The idea of being continually tethered to technology can be crushing, but this interconnectedness will also be our salvation. At least that’s what one Wunderkind thinks.

“This may be hallucinatory optimism, but it gets to the point where the more connected we are, the smaller the world becomes and we think of ourselves as more empathetic, less as citizens of a particular state or city, but citizens of the world,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told several thousand attendees at the HIMSS12 Health IT conference in Las Vegas.

He spoke of the transformation that antiretrovirals can bring to AIDS patients in Africa that has been called “The Lazarus Effect,” powered by the social media efforts of RED and the Global Fund.

Patrice Wendling/Elsevier Global Medical News Twitter co-founder Biz Stone speaks to doctors and other attendees at HIMSS12.

He spoke of the potential for personal devices and technology to transform that truly American belief that ones body may be his own, but responsibility for its health lies in the hands of another.

With interconnectedness, diabetes patients and their physicians will be able to simultaneously track glucose levels via cloud sharing. Obese patients could link their scale to the Internet or wear a snappy personal device like the FitBit to track real-time activity stats, both of which Stone employed recently in shedding some 30 pounds.

When an attendee asked about the gap that inevitably occurs when new technology is out of reach by some in need, Stone replied that new technologies must be created in an atmosphere that “degrades gracefully” to the lowest common denominator.

“I think when you create technology of a global nature, you have to consider emerging nations where people aren’t all carrying around fancy $100 iPhones,” he said. “One of the reasons we made Twitter 140 characters was so it could fit within the international [messaging] limit of 160 characters or less, so it would work on any phone, not just a fancy phone.”

(Oh, so that’s why.)

Stone's keynote address also was peppered with childhood reminiscences and several well-worn aphorisms for would-be entrepreneurs that were dutifully tweeted and re-tweeted by attendees: “Creativity is a renewable resource” and “When you do business with somebody else, make sure it’s fair on both sides.”

Stone is by no means a polished public speaker, but he is on solid ground in his stated belief that advances like Twitter are not a triumph of technology, but of change.

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