medicine

See the following -

An Argument for Standardized Reference Terminologies

As a National Institutes of Health (NIH) article explains, standardized data is ‘crucial for data exchange between health information systems, epidemiological analysis, quality and research, clinical decision support systems, administrative functions.” Terminology is an important part of medicine. In short, it is a clinicians’ extensive healthcare vocabulary, which they use to describe a patients’ conditions and health events. With the onset of EHRs, clinicians are responsible for documenting patient information in EHRs. This is now properly done with standardized reference terminologies and not home-grown ones.

A Holistic View Of Evidence-Based Medicine: Of Horse, Cart And Whip

David Katz | The Huffington Post | May 2, 2014

...The Cleveland Clinic has recently introduced the use of herbal medicines as an option for its patients, generating considerable media attention...One might argue, from the perspective of evidence based medicine, that harsh treatment is warranted for everything operating under the banner of "alternative" medicine, or any of the nomenclature alternative to "alternative" -- such as complementary, holistic, traditional, or integrative...

Read More »

A Marriage Of Data And Caregivers Gives Dr. Atul Gawande Hope For Health Care

Alex Howard | O'Reilly Radar | August 31, 2012

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 »

After Aaron, Reputation Metrics Startups Aim To Disrupt The Scientific Journal Industry

Richard Price | TechCrunch | February 3, 2013

Aaron Swartz was determined to free up access to academic articles. He perceived an injustice in which scientific research lies behind expensive paywalls despite being funded by the taxpayer. The taxpayer ends up paying twice for the same research: once to fund it and a second time to read it... Read More »

Americans' Understanding Of ACA Is 'Staggeringly Low', Harvard Professor Says

Rene Letourneau | Government Health IT | October 22, 2012

The Affordable Care Act has polarized Republicans and Democrats despite the fact that many voters cannot explain the healthcare reform legislation to any significant degree, said Robert Blendon, ScD, professor of health policy and political analysis at the Harvard School of Public Health during a speech to the Massachusetts Medical Society on Oct. 18. Read More »

Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria Are A Genuine Threat We Must All Fight

Heather Fairhead | The Guardian | January 24, 2013

Advances in medicine are in jeopardy. Doctors, governments, drug companies and patients all must change their behaviour Read More »

Bad Pharma: Account Of The Bottomless Corruption Of The Pharma Industry Is A Stirring Call To Arms

Cory Doctorow | Boing Boing | November 6, 2012

I mentioned in September that Ben "Bad Science" Goldacre had a new book out, Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients. I was sure at the time that this would be the usual excellent Goldacre fare -- lucid, thorough, and important. Now that I'm back from my own book tour, I've had a chance to read it and I'm pleased (or rather, furious -- more on this later) to report that this really is the usual, excellent Goldacre stuff. Read More »

Big Data Systems Are Making A Difference In The Fight Against Cancer

Ben Lorica | Forbes | January 17, 2014

As open source, big data tools enter the early stages of maturation, data engineers and data scientists will have many opportunities to use them to “work on stuff that matters”. Along those lines, computational biology and medicine are areas where skilled data professionals are already beginning to make an impact. [...] Read More »

Big Data's Big Potential In Health Care

John Pulley | Nextgov | October 17, 2012

Using “big data” to analyze information gathered by health IT is the key to improving medical outcomes, as well as making health care more efficient and cost-effective, say the authors of an article published online recently by the American Health Information Management Association. Read More »

Big Data's Effect On Organ Transplant Wait Lists

Eli Epstein | Mashable | July 23, 2014

...While the total number of organs transplanted seems like an impressive amount, nearly 18 people still die each day waiting for a new organ, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing, the private, non-profit organization that manages the U.S.’s organ transplant system under a contract with the federal government...

Read More »

Big Data's Promise On Stage At TEDMED

Diana Manos | Government Health IT | April 18, 2013

Big data offers big promise for the future of medicine, and at the annual TEDMED conference Tuesday in the nation's capital, speakers put forth ideas that included the use "digital traces" and "digital bread crumbs" as ways to help guage a patient's health. Read More »

Biohacking Healthcare - Part 2

Eric Valor | Forbes | September 18, 2012

One of the most valuable research tools is a model of the type of problem you are trying to solve. This allows for study of the problem mechanism and allows attempts at solving various parts of the problem without disrupting an actual patient or when such is unavailable... Read More »

Business and Medical Leaders Develop Crowdsourced Platform to Solve Complex Immunological Problems

Ravi Parikh | Medgadget | April 8, 2013

Here at Medgadget, we have previously covered efforts to crowdsource ideas for developing medical technology and innovation. For example, we have seen programs that crowdsource retinal connectome mapping and protein folding. Read More »

Cleveland Clinic Taps IBM's Watson For Med School

Julie Bird | FierceHealthIT | October 30, 2012

The Supercomputer known as Watson will help medical students at Cleveland Clinic to analyze medical problems and develop evidence-based solutions. Read More »

Creating EHRs that Doctors Don't Hate

It may be difficult to recall now, what with the ongoing Cerner deployment and recent challenges that had little to do with technology, but there was a time when the Department of Veterans Affairs was considered the gold standard for healthcare IT. VA was out front with the initial development in the 1970s of the VistA system, which would come to be widely recognized and frequently honored. Indeed, when VA was overhauled in the 1990s, VistA was the primary tool that enabled the success of new policies. Without question, much of the effectiveness and durability of VA's VistA can be attributed to the way it was developed, specifically to the collaboration between technologists and clinicians that defined the process.

Read More »