After a very long time having problems recovering from my chemo and still far from where I want to be, I will try to make up for a personal frustration. Working on this site every day, I come across so many interesting things written about medical and care ICT and very often on the compunetics part of it. And there are many moments that I realise I would like to dive deeper into the material but the restrictions of my conditions do not help.
So I decided, that I will start making regular comments on what I come across. Articles that I think are worth reading. And my criteria will be the contents, not the author(s).
And let me start this first of hopefully a long series, with an example of the beauty of science, the Map of Science:
It was published in an article “Clickstream Data Yields High-Resolution Maps of Science” (Johan Bollen, Herbert Van de Sompel, Aric Hagberg, Luis Bettencourt, Ryan Chute, Marko A. Rodriguez, Lyudmila Balakireva; PLoS ONE 4(3): e4803. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0004803).
Not only this map shows what “fun” you can have with research. The other day, Neil Seeman and Carlos Rizo published an article on what can be done in research on social networks: “DSM-Twitter: Are We Happy Or Sad Right Now?“. (Longwoods Essays)
Today I noticed a couple of things. First an article by MedInformaticsMD (blog name of S. Silverstein) in Health Care Renewal, “Health IT Reality vs. the Bernard Madoff Version“.
“Health IT can indeed improve healthcare quality, reduce costs and achieve other benefits claimed of it, but only if it’s done well. There is tremendous underlying social and technical complexity underlying those two words “done well”, and unfortunately in 2009 most health IT is simply not done well. Yet the technology is actually worshipped in what I see as a Bernard Madoff syndrome, an irrational exuberance in IT for reasons not entirely clear to me considering the existing objective evidence.”
A couple of weeks ago he has written a series about the problems with the usability of EMRs. It would be interesting to find out if the problems he signalises are general or typical American. In other words, any European reaction?
Bill Crounse made an interesting remark in his article “Doc in the box now out of the box“:
“It may turn out that the kiosk is a perfect way to scale healthcare services in both developed and underdeveloped settings. Imagine a group of healthcare kiosks in every grocery store, pharmacy, post office, or other places people gather.”
I have mentioned earlier that it would be nice if we were to have more medical and care IT news from all over the world. Therefore I was very happy to put this video on telemedicine in Brazil on the site.
To finish today’s observations, a very interesting remark I noticed yesterday:
“Health record banks, similar to the financial variety, store information about patients gotten from existing institutions in individual accounts. Access to those accounts is controlled by the patients; physicians and other medical professionals who want to see those records can only gain access if the patients give their permission.”
Washington state launches pilot projects for health record bank, Brian Robinson, Government Health IT
I hope to soon write a separate entry on consent.
Lodewijk Bos
