Expert Healthcare Hackers

(This is a preview of a talk that I am going to give next week at Healthcare::Refactored, with Karen Herzog) There are two definitions of the word “Hacker”. One is an original and authentic term that the geekdom uses with respect. This is a cherished label in the technical community, which might read something like: “A person adept at […]

Read More…

How to change the world over the weekend

I love hackathons. I love winning them. I love competing in them. I love winning them.  I love judging them. I also love not losing them. This weekend, I am acting as a mentor to the first Health 2.0 hackathon in Houston Texas. As far as I know (which is not that far, really) this […]

Read More…

Hacking data: showing patterns in kids health

Here is my submission for the Local Children’s Data Health 2.0 developer challenge. The challenge was to make data available through kidsdata.org come alive. Generally, the red circles correspond to the percentage of child allergy suffers who had -seen- a doctor, but had no specific plan to address their condition. The red tags, are healthcare […]

Read More…

A patient by any other name

Recently two communities have been discussing a pretty basic question. What should we call the artist formerly known as “patient”? The two communities are the e-patient community and the “patients” in the patient safety movement, specifically those that met at the last IHI meeting. But why would we want to call patients anything other than […]

Read More…

Kaiser Ontology Interview

To the novice, the term “interoperability” means that two systems can talk. To the expert, it means that they can understand each other. To much of our current data interchange is “meaning poor”. To get past that problem, we need to do lots of work with ontologies, which, loosely put, are knowledge dictionaries. Most clinicians […]

Read More…

Away from iphone and towards a better platform analogy

As many of you know, the CHIP/Indivo/Harvard guys (who I guess I should call the ITdotHealth guys) wrote an article in the NEJM saying that we needed something like the Iphone app store in Healthcare IT. I wrote a rebuttal saying that, among other platforms, the Google android platform was a better fit. Frankly, I thought […]

Read More…

Wikipedia weak on drug information

Reuters is covering the news that Wikipedia is missing critical information about medicines that it covers. Specifically the following results were found: (researchers) found few factual errors in their evaluation of Wikipedia entries on 80 drugs. But these entries were often missing important information, and The researchers compared Wikipedia to Medscape Drug Reference (MDR), a […]

Read More…