I have been asked to give a lecture at the University of Houston Law school about PHRs and HIPAA. I originally hooked up with the law program there because they publish interesting things on the collision of Open Source and Healthcare IT law, an issue that I care about. Now I am being invited to […]
Computer Science should be required for Medical School
Hi, Currently, in Texas, one is required to take Physics I and II and Calculus I (or equivalent stats class) to apply for Medical School. That is not all, of course, but they are requirements. So far, I have never meet a Medical Doctor who needed to use calculus. In fact the only ones that […]
We need a conference
So I am going to run a conference. I figured this was about as bad a time as I could pick, since no one has any travel budget, and people are getting laid off left and right! However, I have been wanting to do this for long enough that I have decided to something about […]
DSS frees vxVistA, changes the VistA game
According this press release on LinuxMedNews DSS will be releasing vxVistA under the EPL in association with the Open Health Tools group. This is huge news. DSS has been a proprietary VistA company for years. They have a tremendous amount of respect in the VistA community for technical competence and they have been slowly building […]
The Tridgell Effect
If you follow Linux Kernel Development, you may have heard of git. Git is a de-centralized source code management system that is famous for its speed. Git was originally developed specifically for the Linux project by Linux founder Linus Torvalds. But other projects have begun using it. X.org, Ruby on Rails, and WINE are all […]
What does it mean to have a hospital EHR?
People talk about EHR, and EMR as though these things always mean the same things. Generally what qualifies as an EHR varies greatly. When you say the word “car” do you include trucks? trucks with 18 wheels? tanks? airplanes when they are on the ground? boats with wheels? The frustrating thing about both the word […]
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 […]
My wife attends the University of Houston. Normally, I reserve this space for discussing Health IT matters, but in this case I must make an exception. UH is one of the most frustrating institutions I know of. I believe, that UH has one of the most ineffective Information Infrastructures I have ever seen. So I […]
Google Flu Trends and Privacy
Google.org, which is the philanthropic arm of Google, has released Google Flu Trends to great fanfare and criticism. Google Flu tracks searches for flu symptoms on Googles search service. So if I type “achy headache” into Google, it might count the search as evidence that I, or someone I was caring for, had the flu. […]
Should CCHIT survive?
The incomparable Joseph Conn has an article up about the potential fate of CCHIT under the Obama administration. I do not believe that it should be refunded under its current form. For several reasons. First, CCHIT favours proprietary EHR business models vs FOSS EHR business models. CCHIT favours kitchen sink EHRs vs. niche EHR models. […]