How about this: in Harvard Business Review, two leaders at Johns Hopkins suggested that hospitals could learn something about buying equipment from -- drum roll, please -- the airline industry. You don't often find many people defending airlines these days, much less holding them up as good examples of anything (except, perhaps, about what not to do, what with overbooking, cramped leg space, plenty of add-on fees, and, of course, dragging paying passengers off planes). That their recommendations make sense probably says more, though, about how poorly health care often does things than how well airlines do...
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Without Real Interoperability, Are Providers Paying Too Much for EHRs?
By Irv Lichtenwald | June 27, 2017
Would you pay top dollar for anything—a car, phone, television, whatever—that promises truly transformational technology at some unspecified future date? I doubt you would. We generally buy products for what they offer now, not what the company says they will eventually do (vaporware, as IT calls it). And yet, so many hospitals pay multi-billions of dollars for healthcare IT systems that promise to integrate patient care … eventually. Why? Some argue the primary reason is a false market that was created by federal government incentives and boundless faith.
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Health Care Goes to the Mall
By Kim Bellard | June 27, 2017
It's either auspicious or ironic: decades after other retail industries, health care is coming to the mall. These are not, generally, good days for the malls. We've all seen strip malls that were never finished or that have simply fallen on hard times, but in recent years those stalwarts of American shopping -- enclosed malls -- are sharing that fate. Credit Suisse says that 20-25% of the 1,100 U.S. malls will close over the next five years. Analysts talk about "zombie" malls, whose anchor tenants -- like Sears, JC Penny, or Macys -- have pulled out, creating an exodus of other tenants. The malls themselves still stand, but their largely deserted storefronts and scarce shoppers mean they're dead but they don't know it...
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How Containers and DevOps Transformed Duke University's IT Department
By Chris Collins | June 27, 2017
It's difficult, even in retrospect, to know which came first for us: containers or a shift towards DevOps culture. At Duke University's Office of Information Technology (OIT), we began looking at containers as a way to achieve higher density from the virtualized infrastructure used to host websites. Virtual machine (VM) sprawl had started to become a problem. We favored separating each client's website onto its own VM for both segregation and organization, but steady growth meant we were managing more servers than we could handle. As we looked for ways to lower management overhead and make better use of resources, Docker hit the news, and we began to experiment with containerization for our web applications...
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Are Open Source Clinical Decision Support (CDS) Services Subject to HIPAA Regulations?
By Noam H. Arzt, Ph.D. | June 26, 2017
Clinical Decision Support (CDS) services such as HLN’s Immunization Calculation Engine (ICE) are modular, loosely-coupled components of larger systems accessed via web services in a service-oriented architecture (SOA). Under HIPAA, services provided to Covered Entities (CE) which involve protected health information (PHI) as defined in the statute are subject to the regulation. But are CDS services such as ICE subject to this regulation?
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Good Ideas From Unexpected Places: Thinking Creatively for Healthcare Innovation
By Kim Bellard | June 20, 2017
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Fidgeting May (or May Not) Be Good For You
By Kim Bellard | June 13, 2017
I swore I wasn't going to write about fidget spinners. Just a toy, just be the latest fad -- the Rubik's cube of this generation, or perhaps the Pokémon Go of this year -- with no broader implications, for health care or anything else. Yet here I am, writing about them after all. If you know any children, you already know what a fidget spinner is. You may even have one yourself. They seem to be everywhere lately, even in the hands of President Trump's youngest son as he exited Marine One recently. What that says about us is not quite clear...
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4 Open Source Drone Projects
By Jason Baker | June 6, 2017
Over the past few years, interest in both civilian and commercial use of drones has continued to grow rapidly, and drone hardware sits at the top of many people's holiday wish lists. Even just within the civilian side of things, the list of unmanned aerial devices that fit the moniker of drone seems to be constantly expanding. These days, the term seems to encompass everything from what is essentially a cheap, multi-bladed toy helicopter, all the way up to custom-built soaring machines with incredibly adept artificial intelligence capabilities...
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The Robots Are Coming...to Healthcare!
By Kim Bellard | June 6, 2017
Ready or not, there are robots in your future. And some of them will be for health care. There has been growing concern that the rise of robots, along with artificial intelligence (AI), will create huge impacts on jobs. Within the last few months both McKinsey and PwC have issued white papers on the topic. The former found that nearly half of jobs have the potential to be automated (although most not totally), while the latter expects 38% of U.S. jobs at at high risk of automation within 20 years. Health care is not high on most lists of sectors whose jobs are soonest to be heavily impacted by robots, but it is on the list -- and it will happen...
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How the University of Hawai'i Is Solving Today's Higher Ed Problems
By Don Watkins | June 3, 2017
Openness invites greater participation and it takes advantage of the shared energy of collaborators. The strength of openly created educational resources comes paradoxically from the vulnerability of the shared experience of that creation process. One of the leaders in Open Educational Resources (OER) is Billy Meinke, educational technologist at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. The University's open creation model uses Pressbooks, which Billy tells me more about in this interview...
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A Guide to Bootstrapping Your Open Source Project with GitHub
By Ben Nuttall | June 2, 2017
There's much more to managing a project with git beyond just committing code and working with branches. GitHub-Driven Development is a process that will help you organize and manage the progression of a project on GitHub, although much of this could be applied to other systems, such as GitLab, as well. This concept isn't only for developers; it can be used for project managers or anyone involved in the development of a project—it could even be applied to non-code projects...
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