part of me wonders how much of this data could be used for diagnostic analysis by looking at symptoms, vital signs, treatments and outcomes over a very large population.
My sister works in infectious disease control. She told me that pharmacies are already wired up like this and they can spot things like flu outbreaks even if people aren't seeing doctors for treatment. Example: Bio-ALIRT (third Google hit for "pharmacy data mining disease outbreaks").
If you claim to have had an absence do to any medical reason, then the school or employer should be able to query the medical system that you showed up at any medical place and got seen by any doctor.
A hand-written note is good enough here, thanks. Maybe I want to see a doctor for some private reason, but would rather just take a personal day to do it. I don't want my boss to have an API to run a nightly cron job to see if I'm getting sick and not telling him. How would you decide who gets to ping my account anyway?
There has been a lot of research into high reliability systems, and mainframe systems can remain operational with no interruptions in service for decades on end.
WTF? My wife is in private practice. We can't afford to rent space on a mainframe, let alone buy one ourselves. Or should she be forced to outsource it all? We're totally behind the idea of electronic medical records for all the Slashdot-friendly reasons, but we're fresh out of gold-plated Cadillacs to sell to fund the kind of system you're advocating.
Don't cover routine stuff, but do cover surgeries, long-term care, therapy, etc. I don't use my car insurance for oil changes </bad car analogy>
That will never work because people will claim that it discriminates against poor people who can't pay for regular checkups. Unfortunately, almost any doctor will tell you that poor people are the ones who abuse the hell out of insurance by coming in for every routine problem. Yes, it sucks to have a cold. No, your doctor can't write you a prescription for anything better than you could buy anyway. No, it's not "free so you might as well go anyway".
Frankly, I don't know how you strike a fair balance. Any suggestions?
There are plenty of abuses of this system but every time I go to a doctor I have to fill out the same information, often for multiple visits to the same doctor. My permanent address does not change once a month every month, thank you.
This will not change. The only difference is that the information will be typed into a computer instead of stuck in a folder. I guarantee that your doctor does not want to bother with this any more than you do, but either Medicare or HIPAA or a patient's insurance company or their own malpractice insurer requires each and every one of those papers to be filled out at every visit.
How many modern Doctors do you know that keep a listed phone number? How many of them would be willing to meet you at odd hours at the ER when one of your kids has a problem?
If it makes you feel better, my wife's in the phone book. The number's under my name, but we're the only family with this last name in my city. On Friday when she came home from work, one of our neighbors called to say that their kid had a hurt foot and asked if she'd take a look at it. It was snowing so she asked them to pick her up in their 4x4, and they went to her (closed) office so she could take X-rays.
Such doctors still exist, but they don't usually go out of their way to advertise (nor do they usually need to).
If this can save so much money why isn't the health care industry already doing it? Are they really that stupid or are all the promises of big savings not likely to pan out?
Electronic Medical Records (EMR) are great, but there's a significant startup cost. Next time you go to a doctor's office, look at the cabinets full of charts. Now imagine buying a system, hardware, and training. Then there's a transition period where you're entering data into the new system and the old paper-based system (unless you're 100.0% positive that the new system will be completely reliable and that you didn't buy the wrong one and need to start over). Also consider huge storage costs, not for the EMR database(s) alone, but for scans of all the extra paperwork - insurance card, signed HIPAA paperwork, fax from the family doctor, X-rays, etc. Finally, consider the enormous workload of converting old records. It's one thing to start entering new data, but what do you do with the old stuff? Do you pay someone to do thousands of hours of data entry, or do you just scan every scrap of paper in and call it good?
We've already bought an EMR system for my wife's practice, but haven't gotten far into deployment for all of the above. We want to go electronic for all the reasons you could imagine, but it's not like you can flip a switch any more than a Fortune 500 company could decide that they're going to switch from Windows to Linux one day. There's a huge amount of preparation and migration involved unless you're making a clean start.
By the way, "not wanting to make it easy for patients to switch" is not an argument against EMR, at least for my wife. If a patient wants to see another doctor, it's mainly for one of three reasons. First, we want people to get a second opinion on my wife's advice if they choose. If the other doctor agrees, then the patient feels good about their treatment plan. If the other doctor disagrees, then the patient makes an informed choice about their treatment. Either way, they've become an active participant in their care which is a good thing. Second, if they're in another town and need emergency care, we'd love to be able to fire off an encrypted email (or FTP or whatever the standard becomes) to their treating physician. Third, if they want to switch doctors permanently, an electronic transfer is far easier than making copies of their entire record (since we're legally obligated to maintain 7 years of records on our own and can't just pass along the original copies of everything).
So we're onboard with the general sentiment. If there are any "flag days" for conversion, though, this better not be Yet Another Unfunded Mandate or a lot of older practices will simply close their doors. A doctor near retirement with tens of thousands of charts won't willingly spring for an expensive system plus all the labor involved.
As it is a "fat binary" that runs on PPC as well as x86, and was around before there even were Intel Macs, I rather doubt it was based on Memtest86 at all. They just happen to share similar names.
Oops! You're right. It's actually based on memtester, a different GPLed program written by a different author than Memtest86 (and MemtestOSX). Other than that, every single point stands.
What they should have done if they were concerned about their load [which evidently they should have] was to warn their employees in blocks, perhaps 10% at a time with space between to take care of the massive response...
No. What they should have done was installed a mailing list manager, created a read-only list called "employees", and posted to it. Voila - n-thousand workers get announcements with no ability to reply to the whole list. Problem solved.
As memtest is GPL, you should be able to ask that guy for the source if you want it. I suspect he hasn't changed it significantly and is just charging for hosting, so he'd point you back to the developers' site.
That is a violation of the GPL. If you distribute GPL software that you didn't write, then you are legally obligated to provide the source.
But perhaps you can't be bothered, and would rather call people jerks who have the temerity to charge for their time/hosting costs and rail about how all software should be free.
I am utterly OK with charging for FOSS; RedHat is a great example of a good corporate citizen. However, note that RedHat gives full credit for the software they sell you and makes the source easily available without you having to ask for it.
Have you ever distributed any free software yourself?
If we e.g. take a common Boeing 737-400, with a fuel capacity of 23170 liters, a maximum range (fully loaded) of 4005 km and a seating capacity of 159 seats, it yields a fuel consumption of 0.036 liters of fuel per km per passenger, which translates to 65 passenger-miles per gallon of fuel.
The family minivan with 2 adults and 4 kids gets 150 passenger-miles per gallon of gasoline. If you'll excuse me, I'm off to have more kids so I can burn less fuel.
Also, strangely enough, I can't find a single person above 15 who likes 2000's music. Why is that?
Maybe because you hang around with a bunch of fossils who aren't aware that people are still making music? I'm 37 but like My Chemical Romance, Dropkick Murphys, The Fratellis, and some others. Sure, 99% of stuff on the local Top 40 station totally sucks, just as it always has (I'll see your "White Album" and raise you a "Purple People Eater"). That doesn't mean it's all bad.
But to time it to happen right after a new president is inaugurated?
That's the perfect time from Obama's POV. More than half of the voting population still trusts him so he can get away with saying "it's for your own good." And since this is going to happen at some point, better to piss off the remainder right after he takes office than right before the next election cycle starts.
If it takes a Porsche to motivate you through med school, then I don't want you as a doctor anyway.
I drive an Oldsmobile and my wife drives a minivan. We have mortgage-sized student loans. The myth of making huge incomes right out of residency is thoroughly busted outside a few specialties.
Seriously unless you plan on using this thing on the go there's no reason to rely on a battery. And it's not much of a system for on the go computing.
Tell that to any of the people toting around TRS-80 laptops for word processing. Seriously, can't you see this taking off among compulsive bloggers, Twitterers, or Facebookers?
Seriously, I'm a nerd so this doesn't count... but isn't the first thing you do with a new piece of hardware is throw away the CD and download the current drivers off the net?
No. Usually I throw away the CD, install the hardware, and start using it. Linux seems to have much better hardware support than Windows these days.
In all honesty, I find Windows 1.0 to be the least functional of all of Microsoft's operating systems. But the bar wasn't very high back then
I wouldn't say that. Us Amiga owners were using preemptive multitasking and virtual desktops that year, and Mac guys had a pretty nice system of their own.
No, it doesn't. It's probably broken by NAT, so a lot of cool peer-to-peer stuff is impossible without going through a broken (which makes it no longer peer-to-peer). What this means to you, Joe Sixpack, is that you can't use fun things like BitTorrent without either manually configuring your router or enabling a security-killing protocol like UPnP.
Slashdot Mirror
part of me wonders how much of this data could be used for diagnostic analysis by looking at symptoms, vital signs, treatments and outcomes over a very large population.
My sister works in infectious disease control. She told me that pharmacies are already wired up like this and they can spot things like flu outbreaks even if people aren't seeing doctors for treatment. Example: Bio-ALIRT (third Google hit for "pharmacy data mining disease outbreaks").
If you claim to have had an absence do to any medical reason, then the school or employer should be able to query the medical system that you showed up at any medical place and got seen by any doctor.
A hand-written note is good enough here, thanks. Maybe I want to see a doctor for some private reason, but would rather just take a personal day to do it. I don't want my boss to have an API to run a nightly cron job to see if I'm getting sick and not telling him. How would you decide who gets to ping my account anyway?
There has been a lot of research into high reliability systems, and mainframe systems can remain operational with no interruptions in service for decades on end.
WTF? My wife is in private practice. We can't afford to rent space on a mainframe, let alone buy one ourselves. Or should she be forced to outsource it all? We're totally behind the idea of electronic medical records for all the Slashdot-friendly reasons, but we're fresh out of gold-plated Cadillacs to sell to fund the kind of system you're advocating.
Don't cover routine stuff, but do cover surgeries, long-term care, therapy, etc. I don't use my car insurance for oil changes </bad car analogy>
That will never work because people will claim that it discriminates against poor people who can't pay for regular checkups. Unfortunately, almost any doctor will tell you that poor people are the ones who abuse the hell out of insurance by coming in for every routine problem. Yes, it sucks to have a cold. No, your doctor can't write you a prescription for anything better than you could buy anyway. No, it's not "free so you might as well go anyway".
Frankly, I don't know how you strike a fair balance. Any suggestions?
There are plenty of abuses of this system but every time I go to a doctor I have to fill out the same information, often for multiple visits to the same doctor. My permanent address does not change once a month every month, thank you.
This will not change. The only difference is that the information will be typed into a computer instead of stuck in a folder. I guarantee that your doctor does not want to bother with this any more than you do, but either Medicare or HIPAA or a patient's insurance company or their own malpractice insurer requires each and every one of those papers to be filled out at every visit.
How many modern Doctors do you know that keep a listed phone number? How many of them would be willing to meet you at odd hours at the ER when one of your kids has a problem?
If it makes you feel better, my wife's in the phone book. The number's under my name, but we're the only family with this last name in my city. On Friday when she came home from work, one of our neighbors called to say that their kid had a hurt foot and asked if she'd take a look at it. It was snowing so she asked them to pick her up in their 4x4, and they went to her (closed) office so she could take X-rays.
Such doctors still exist, but they don't usually go out of their way to advertise (nor do they usually need to).
We haven't?
Most of those 212,000 jobs would be temporary jobs converting the records from paper to digital.
And whether they're paid by the government (via taxes) or industry (via increased fees), we're on the hook for another 212,000 paychecks.
If this can save so much money why isn't the health care industry already doing it? Are they really that stupid or are all the promises of big savings not likely to pan out?
Electronic Medical Records (EMR) are great, but there's a significant startup cost. Next time you go to a doctor's office, look at the cabinets full of charts. Now imagine buying a system, hardware, and training. Then there's a transition period where you're entering data into the new system and the old paper-based system (unless you're 100.0% positive that the new system will be completely reliable and that you didn't buy the wrong one and need to start over). Also consider huge storage costs, not for the EMR database(s) alone, but for scans of all the extra paperwork - insurance card, signed HIPAA paperwork, fax from the family doctor, X-rays, etc. Finally, consider the enormous workload of converting old records. It's one thing to start entering new data, but what do you do with the old stuff? Do you pay someone to do thousands of hours of data entry, or do you just scan every scrap of paper in and call it good?
We've already bought an EMR system for my wife's practice, but haven't gotten far into deployment for all of the above. We want to go electronic for all the reasons you could imagine, but it's not like you can flip a switch any more than a Fortune 500 company could decide that they're going to switch from Windows to Linux one day. There's a huge amount of preparation and migration involved unless you're making a clean start.
By the way, "not wanting to make it easy for patients to switch" is not an argument against EMR, at least for my wife. If a patient wants to see another doctor, it's mainly for one of three reasons. First, we want people to get a second opinion on my wife's advice if they choose. If the other doctor agrees, then the patient feels good about their treatment plan. If the other doctor disagrees, then the patient makes an informed choice about their treatment. Either way, they've become an active participant in their care which is a good thing. Second, if they're in another town and need emergency care, we'd love to be able to fire off an encrypted email (or FTP or whatever the standard becomes) to their treating physician. Third, if they want to switch doctors permanently, an electronic transfer is far easier than making copies of their entire record (since we're legally obligated to maintain 7 years of records on our own and can't just pass along the original copies of everything).
So we're onboard with the general sentiment. If there are any "flag days" for conversion, though, this better not be Yet Another Unfunded Mandate or a lot of older practices will simply close their doors. A doctor near retirement with tens of thousands of charts won't willingly spring for an expensive system plus all the labor involved.
As it is a "fat binary" that runs on PPC as well as x86, and was around before there even were Intel Macs, I rather doubt it was based on Memtest86 at all. They just happen to share similar names.
Oops! You're right. It's actually based on memtester, a different GPLed program written by a different author than Memtest86 (and MemtestOSX). Other than that, every single point stands.
What they should have done if they were concerned about their load [which evidently they should have] was to warn their employees in blocks, perhaps 10% at a time with space between to take care of the massive response...
No. What they should have done was installed a mailing list manager, created a read-only list called "employees", and posted to it. Voila - n-thousand workers get announcements with no ability to reply to the whole list. Problem solved.
As memtest is GPL, you should be able to ask that guy for the source if you want it. I suspect he hasn't changed it significantly and is just charging for hosting, so he'd point you back to the developers' site.
That is a violation of the GPL. If you distribute GPL software that you didn't write, then you are legally obligated to provide the source.
But perhaps you can't be bothered, and would rather call people jerks who have the temerity to charge for their time/hosting costs and rail about how all software should be free.
I am utterly OK with charging for FOSS; RedHat is a great example of a good corporate citizen. However, note that RedHat gives full credit for the software they sell you and makes the source easily available without you having to ask for it.
Have you ever distributed any free software yourself?
Yeah.
If we e.g. take a common Boeing 737-400, with a fuel capacity of 23170 liters, a maximum range (fully loaded) of 4005 km and a seating capacity of 159 seats, it yields a fuel consumption of 0.036 liters of fuel per km per passenger, which translates to 65 passenger-miles per gallon of fuel.
The family minivan with 2 adults and 4 kids gets 150 passenger-miles per gallon of gasoline. If you'll excuse me, I'm off to have more kids so I can burn less fuel.
Nobody ever bothers meta-moderating.
I haven't had mod points in over a year. Like I'm going to get heavily invested in the moderation system when I never get to play.
Also, strangely enough, I can't find a single person above 15 who likes 2000's music. Why is that?
Maybe because you hang around with a bunch of fossils who aren't aware that people are still making music? I'm 37 but like My Chemical Romance, Dropkick Murphys, The Fratellis, and some others. Sure, 99% of stuff on the local Top 40 station totally sucks, just as it always has (I'll see your "White Album" and raise you a "Purple People Eater"). That doesn't mean it's all bad.
Palm built a brand once. Then they squandered it. They could build it again.
Oh, they still do - just perhaps not the brand they'd want. See also: "Vista".
But to time it to happen right after a new president is inaugurated?
That's the perfect time from Obama's POV. More than half of the voting population still trusts him so he can get away with saying "it's for your own good." And since this is going to happen at some point, better to piss off the remainder right after he takes office than right before the next election cycle starts.
Operations are *always* in the tens of thousands of dollars, even the simple ones.
If that were true, I'd be driving something other than a 1998 Oldsmobile. Frankly, you don't know what the hell you're talking about.
If it takes a Porsche to motivate you through med school, then I don't want you as a doctor anyway.
I drive an Oldsmobile and my wife drives a minivan. We have mortgage-sized student loans. The myth of making huge incomes right out of residency is thoroughly busted outside a few specialties.
Seriously unless you plan on using this thing on the go there's no reason to rely on a battery. And it's not much of a system for on the go computing.
Tell that to any of the people toting around TRS-80 laptops for word processing. Seriously, can't you see this taking off among compulsive bloggers, Twitterers, or Facebookers?
Seriously, I'm a nerd so this doesn't count... but isn't the first thing you do with a new piece of hardware is throw away the CD and download the current drivers off the net?
No. Usually I throw away the CD, install the hardware, and start using it. Linux seems to have much better hardware support than Windows these days.
Also, shipping all drivers will make the OS around a few TB. They actually try to include most drivers that are in popular hardware.
Ubuntu manages to fit 90% of them on a single CD.
That's like replying to "Microsoft hired 3 new programmers to work on Windows 7" with "Didn't they hire programmers to work on Vista?"
In all fairness, that's an easy mistake.
In all honesty, I find Windows 1.0 to be the least functional of all of Microsoft's operating systems. But the bar wasn't very high back then
I wouldn't say that. Us Amiga owners were using preemptive multitasking and virtual desktops that year, and Mac guys had a pretty nice system of their own.
Looking at my Internet connection: it works fine.
No, it doesn't. It's probably broken by NAT, so a lot of cool peer-to-peer stuff is impossible without going through a broken (which makes it no longer peer-to-peer). What this means to you, Joe Sixpack, is that you can't use fun things like BitTorrent without either manually configuring your router or enabling a security-killing protocol like UPnP.