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A Marriage Of Data And Caregivers Gives Dr. Atul Gawande Hope For Health Care
Dr. Atul Gawande (@Atul_Gawande) has been a bard in the health care world, straddling medicine, academia and the humanities as a practicing surgeon, medical school professor, best-selling author and staff writer at the New Yorker magazine. His long-form narratives and books have helped illuminate complex systems and wicked problems to a broad audience. Read More »
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A Mature API for an Electronic Health Record: the OpenMRS Process
By some measures, OpenMRS may be the most successful of the open source EHRs, widely deployed around the world. It also has a long experience with its API, which has been developed and refined over the last several years. I talked to OpenMRS developer Wyclif Luyima recently and looked at OpenMRS’s REST API documentation to see what the API offers...
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A Medical Lab In Your Smartphone
The digital age has made what was was once obscure visible. In ways we never could before, we can quantify the world -- make it knowable to us, comprehensible to us -- by gathering data and identifying patterns and generally converting experience into information. Read More »
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A Message From CTO Todd Park On Tech Inclusion
The US Chief Technology Officer Todd Park issues a call to tech innovators to work together to ensure that all youth—particularly those from underserved and historically underrepresented communities, including women and girls—have the opportunity to study STEM subjects and participate in the technology sector. Read More »
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A Mine Of Information – The PLOS Text Mining Collection
The growth of Open Access has increased the pool of digital information that is available for Text Mining. This relatively new interdisciplinary field emerged in the 1980s and combines techniques from linguistics, computer science and statistics to build tools that can efficiently retrieve, extract and analyze information from digital text. Read More »
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A Modern-Day Stasi State
Thanks to whistleblower Edward Snowden, we now know that an army of private contractors can monitor anyone’s phone calls and e-mails. Read More »
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A Nevada Woman Dies of a Superbug Resistant to Every Available Antibiotic in the US
If it sometimes seems like the idea of antibiotic resistance, though unsettling, is more theoretical than real, please read on. Public health officials from Nevada are reporting on a case of a woman who died in Reno in September from an incurable infection. Testing showed the superbug that had spread throughout her system could fend off 26 different antibiotics. “It was tested against everything that’s available in the United States … and was not effective,” said Dr. Alexander Kallen, a medical officer in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s division of health care quality promotion...
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A New Digital Land Grab Has Begun—But Only If You Have An Arabic, Russian, Or Chinese Dictionary
“Today marks an historic moment, not only for the New gTLD Program, but for the Internet as a whole,” wrote Akram Atallah of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in a blog post last night. ICANN is a body that oversees the domain naming system that enables navigation around the web—it’s how computers know where to go when you type in qz.com.
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A New Kind of Doctor's Office Charges a Monthly Fee and Doesn't Take Insurance — and It Could Be the Future of Medicine
Dr. Bryan Hill spent his career working as a pediatrician, teaching at a university, and working at a hospital. But in March 2016, he decided he no longer wanted a boss. He took some time off, then one day he got a call asking if he'd be up for doing a house call for a woman whose son was sick. He agreed, and by the end of that visit, he realized he wanted to treat patients without dealing with any of the insurance requirements. Then he learned about a totally different way to run a doctor's office...
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A New Meaning for Connected Health (Part 1)
Those of us engaged in health care think constantly about health. But at the Connected Health symposium, one is reminded that the vast majority of people don’t think much about health at all. They’re thinking about child care, about jobs, about bills, about leisure time. Health comes into the picture only through its impacts on those things. Certainly, some people who have suffered catastrophic traumas–severe accidents, cancer, or the plethora of unfortunate genetic conditions–become obsessed about health to the same extent as health professionals. These people become e-patients and do all the things they need to do regain the precious state of being they enjoyed before their illness, often clashing with the traditional medical establishment in pursuit of health...
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A New Meaning for Connected Health at 2016 Symposium (Part 2 of 4)
Tullman’s principles of simplicity, cited in the previous section, can be applied to a wide range of health IT. For instance, AdhereTech pill bottles can notify the patient with a phone call or text message if she misses a dose. Another example of a technology that is easily integrated into everyday life is a thermometer built into a vaginal ring that a woman can insert and use without special activation. This device was mentioned by Costantini during her keynote. The device can alert a woman–and, if she wants, her partner–to when she is most fertile. Super-compact devices and fancy interfaces are not always necessary for a useful intervention.
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A New Meaning for Connected Health at 2016 Symposium (Part 3)
The previous section of this article paused during a discussion of the accuracy and uses of devices. At a panel on patient generated data, a speaker said that one factor holding back the use of patient data was the lack of sophistication in EHRs. They must be enhanced to preserve the provenance of data: whether it came from a device or from a manual record by the patient, and whether the device was consumer-grade or a well-tested medical device. Doctors invest different levels of trust in different methods of collecting data: devices can provide more objective information than other ways of asking patients for data. A participant in the panel also pointed out that devices are more reliable in the lab than under real-world conditions. Consumers must be educated about the proper use of devices, such as whether to sit down and how to hold their arms when taking their blood pressure...
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A New Meaning for Connected Health at 2016 Symposium (Part 4)
He has found that successful companies pursue gradual, incremental steps toward automated programs. It is important to start with a manual process that works (such as phoning or texting patients from the provider), then move to semi-automation and finally, if feasible, full automation. The product must also be field-tested; one cannot depend on a pilot. This advice matches what Glen Tullman, CEO of Livongo Health, said in his keynote: instead of doing a pilot, try something out in the field and change quickly if it doesn’t work...
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A New Open-Source, Dynamic Model for Projecting Physician Supply and Demand
With a grant from the Physicians Foundation, the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research (Sheps Center) is developing a dynamic, open-source, web-based tool to project physician supply and demand and estimates of shortages in the United States. Read More »
A New Resource For Agriculture
Why is open access to research and other data important? Read More »
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