Libel, like copyright, is one of the central legal frameworks for governing online activities. It sets the bounds for what can and cannot be said about people in the new media area. Like copyright law, libel law is a legal framework designed in a pre-digital era, that is somewhat strained in this new digital media […]
Category: Values
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 […]
Practical collaborative document writing for patient communities
Hi, I have a lot of experience with collaborative document writing, and now, in my role with Cautious Patient Foundation, I have been providing technical help to several patient communities. I helped write the security standards for the NWHIN Direct project and I am currently working with the e-patient/QS community to create a document detailing […]
Unethical Blue Button Contest
This contest is deeply problematic. The blue button initiative was a good initiative because it allowed greater access. It made that possible by ensuring that access to patient data did not have to wait for the VA/DOD/Whatever to create a download that conformed to the still-forming XML standards that make true interoperability possible. But now […]
Contract to create VistA shepherd goes to newbie
I just learned, (from a modern healthcare article, of course) that the contract has been awarded to Tiag. At first blush, this news was not concerning. I am only peripherally involved in the VistA community, and there are lots of solid VistA-related contracting companies that I do not know of. It was a little surprising […]
Health Foo Camp
I am happy to announce that I have been invited to the first ever Health Foo Camp. There is not even a web-page for this yet, but it has been previously announced on the RWJF blog FOO stands for Friends of O’Reilly. It is an invitation event that puts some of the top geeks and […]
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 […]
Facebook Places powers the first social election game
Today, Farrin Anne ‘Crane’ Gustafson, the manager of the social media strategy for the Clayton Trotter (my father) congressional campaign became the first person in history to use Facebook Places to check-in to a new kind of application: a social election game. She earned the “At the Voting” badge by checking-in using Facebook Places as she […]
Prior Art for the BillingNetwork Patent Troll
I am saddened that the supreme court decided not to address the software patent problem with Bilski. They had an opportunity to abolish or at least reign-in software patents, which are an inherently bad idea. Instead they undid what little progress had been made in the Bilski precedent. I think others have already more eloquently […]
You might be a cyborg….
People often do not get why I am so convinced that only GPL Software should be used in Medicine. I can understand why. Without understanding the nature of Healthcare, people assume that I am being religious about the issue. This is the furthest thing from the truth. It has been a while since I have […]