Abravanel grew up in Lausanne, Switz., and gave up the prospect of medicine to study music.
The New York team, headed by Dr. Farzad Mostashari, an assistant commissioner in the city's health department, started by bringing in decision-support experts in medicine to study how doctors work, so the technology would be easier to use.
Another interesting technique utilizing specific isotopic properties is NMR, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, today commonly used in medicine to study anomalies in human tissues.
At the age of 55 the trim Nebraska native has veered sharply from the practice of medicine to study how to make health care work better as a business.
It has been predominantly used in the field of medicine to study disease-related point mutations in the human genome.
The ethnographic methodology was adapted from a video ethnography technique previously used in medicine to study patient consults [ 17], and from observational ethnographic techniques used to collect data in the intensive care ward [ 18] and emergency department [ 12].
