Why not create two sets of identical-looking Faraday cages, one metal and the other non-conducting plastic. Randomly hand them out to experimenters and let them figure out which is which after the results are in.
Science is pretty good at detecting problems that kill you instantly. In this case, it would be a correlation between BPA exposure while pregnant and breast cancer your children get forty years later. It's difficult to make studies that prove this firmly.
1 And the fifth angel blew his trumpet, and I saw a star fallen from heaven to earth, and he was given the key of the shaft of the bottomless pit; 2 he opened the shaft of the bottomless pit, and from the shaft rose smoke like the smoke of a great furnace, and the sun and the air were darkened with the smoke from the shaft.
Personally I was reminded of the dwarves digging too deep and unleashing a Balrog upon Middle Earth. Have we learned nothing from Tolkien?
I work in the healthcare industry, though admittedly just on the web side of things. There's been a lot of talk getting our current EMR to the place where we're getting the maximum amount of healthcare dollars. Our healthcare organization is at a pretty good place, far ahead of most organizations. At the same time, we're being asked to do so much with reduced staff due to minimal hiring. I'm not sure we'll really be able to manage it all. There are also a number of non-technical issues, such as getting all the doctors ready for electronic order entry. Cultural issues often drive technology decisions.
That being said, I think it's a good idea to move people towards using EMRs in healthcare. They're expensive, difficult to maintain, but can produce much improved healthcare. As we often say, the main challenge facing healthcare these days is getting the right information to the right people at the right time. Doing that electronically is the only approach that makes sense.
I've never seen the 8% number before. What's interesting to me is that viruses that have their entire lifecycle in the neurons somehow infect germ-line cells.
We're local admins of the application servers, and a couple of us have domain admin rights. We generally haven't run into problems with this, as we have a strict policy of making fun of anyone who screws up badly. It involves Photoshop and is generally a memorable way to resolve the situation.
Human beings are well adapted to most common bacteria, adjusting immune responses to a ancient equalibrium created by evolution. The problem is that we haven't had time to adapt to antibacterial soap, everything we eat carefully sanitized, and constant cleanliness.
I'm increasingly convinced that a healthy diet reflects eating habits established tens of thousands of years ago.
Evolutionary Prototyping
on
Becoming Agile
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
My preferred approach these days is what I think is technically called Evolutionary Prototyping. Basically you start with some rough requirements, make something to show people, get more refined requirements, and repeat. At some point when the product is useful, you go live, but in reality you're never done and just the time between deployments gets longer.
This approach is horrible for things that have to work perfectly the first time (e.g. rockets to Mars), but for web development seems to be a decent approach. It's also hard to estimate how long something will take, as the requirements aren't known up front. Still, it's what I've been using for years. I don't think I knew what it was called until our organization brought in a consultant to talk about this stuff.
After all, we're pretty bright and realize that everything we make or do will eventually be destroyed and lost. Still, we persist despite that reality. Careers end, marriages break up, and eventually health fails.
On second thought, maybe I should just go play video games for awhile.
Fortunately it's been many years since I last went through the breakup blues, but I ended up coming up with a list of things that seemed to help.
Indulge. I typically start by throwing my normal rules out the window and use short-term strategies to make myself happier. Buy something. Eat cheesecake. Don't get in the habit of doing so, but it helps the first few days.
Maintain your health. This means eating for me, as I usually stop when depressed. It also means exercise in moderation, sleep, and so on.
Socialize. I always make sure I'm around someone, friends and family, as it's too easy to be depressed when alone.
Meet someone new. This is obviously the eventual end goal, but there's nothing like another romance to ease the hurt of the last one. Don't rush into the next, though, as you may end up jumping from one failed relationship to the next.
I don't know how many times I've had "that SSN discussion" within our organization. Just the other day someone working with our HR department asked if our team really needed the SSN. I just laughed out loud and dropped a few high level names that were involved with these discussions over ten years ago.
SSN is a great identifier, as nearly everyone we deal with has one. It's a horrible password, though, and any organization that uses it as such should be held liable for any of the consequences that causes.
I'm responsible for tying in a wide variety of systems together and often SSN is the only common link. We actually do generate an internal ID for people, but no one knows what it is and it can theoretically change if an error occurs, unlike SSN which is far more reliable.
I have no idea why my son is so excited about this particular game, but every month or so he keeps asking if it's out yet. We saw some of the demos and evidently it stuck with him. I think he likes the idea of being able to change the world.
I ended up getting quite a few job offers after my Neverwinter Nights modules became successful. It was flattering, but the reality is that my current job as a developer in the healthcare industry is way too good. I've managed to keep it in a recession while the gaming industry has become far more cutthroat.
Ironically we're doing an implementation of a "new" HR system and a big chunk of it was written in Cobol. We have one guy past retirement age who knows it, but otherwise the bulk of our developers just know those fancy new languages.
Some of those older languages have a surprising amount of life left in them, out in the real world.
NASA is a big user of SharePoint, strangely enough. My coworkers run into their folks at conferences from time to time.
I personally am ambivalent about SharePoint. Its roots are in document management, so it seems to do that relatively well. The publishing features are fairly nice as well. I don't think it's the best system for making web sites, but it may some day get there. Currently it feels like a 2.0 product (the magic rule is to never buy anything from Microsoft before 3.0).
There are gotchas. SharePoint is tightly coupled with your clients. If everyone accessing the documents are using the latest version of Office, you'll be okay. If not, you'll run into problems. You may also need to throw a lot of hardware into SharePoint, as storing files inside of SQL has some built-in inefficiencies.
Still, some of our users seem to love SharePoint, so it might be a good option for you.
I've had my own site since last millenium, primarily as a way to journal my family's life for myself and people in my extended family. It's been a great communication tool to keep up with everyone, and a huge time saver when it comes to sending individual e-mails to everyone.
It's also been a great historical record of when things happened. I'm embarrassed to say that I've checked my blog more than once to make sure I remembered my daughter's birthday right.
It was also a great way for everyone to stay in touch on 9/11. Two of my family were flying that day, and it was a central place where everyone could post their flight delays and locations.
As someone who works in healthcare, I've discovered that providing good care is entirely about information. If we don't know someone's drug allergies, medical history, and can't effectively communicate between departments, patient safety is impacted. Turning away patients may actually save lives if a hospital is unable to provide communication and medical background for a patient.
When I'm unable to get to the network for some reason, I feel extra stupid as a developer. I can't search for code examples on Google, migrate code to staging servers, and so on. Healthcare is similar, with providers not being as effective as if they had their full EMR at their fingertips.
Turning away patients results in loss of income, so they're basically losing money in order to improve the safety of their patients.
Weird. I work in IT in HealthCare and I haven't heard of EPIC before. Moving to browser-based systems is becoming more common, though most EMRs still have terminal-based technology behind the scenes.
One of the challenges of EMRs is that there are so many of them and each have different strengths and weaknesses. Our current EMR is primarily designed for the hospital setting and the clinic add-on isn't as great.
Billing is one of those things that seems a necessary evil to many healthcare providers. It's an annoying distraction to caring for a patient, but it's how insurance companies reimburse you, so it must be done. Barring a complete overhaul of the heathcare system, I think you'll see billing as a big part of every EMR.
Put on some scrubs, don a white lab coat, and walk around with a clip board and see how long it takes for someone to notice you at a big hospital. Answer: they won't.
We had a reporter try to do this after a school shooting. They were caught and I'm not sure if charges were filed.
Everyone wears badge photos at our hospital and if you wandered into a patient area without one and no one recognized you, security would likely be called.
You make a good point that simply making charts digital is not enough. A good system detects errors, supports reporting after-the fact, and allows for good auditing. Our healthcare system has had an EMR for nearly a decade, and I've had a chance to see the growing pains and thrills over that time. Here are a few benefits that come to mind.
Auditing. I help an audit team look at who's pulling up whose records. With paper, this would be nearly impossible, but with electronic records it's quite easy to see that user X is pulling up the medical records of their ex-wife or the visiting famous person. Though this has been hard for some, I think it's made our organization much more respectful of a patient's privacy.
Moves. We moved our hospital recently and I got to write the system that tracked each patient as they went through the various staging areas to their new bed across town. Our EMR made this like tracking packages in FedEx and it worked great.
Widespread Communication. On a more practical note, this is the big one. It used to be very difficult to move charts and images around town or even to other cities. Now people anywhere in the sprawling healthcare system can see the latest on your medical condition.
Reporting. We have a massive data warehouse that lets us see the effect of our various health improvement efforts and gives us the ability to more accurately report quality data (e.g. are we giving asprin to everyone who comes in with chest pain?). Evidence based medicine is big in our organization, and it requires good data to support it.
Fixing Errors Before They Happen.
This is the most challenging one, and I think we're still in our infancy. I helped make a lab cross-reference system whose purpose is to make sure nurses know what lab a doctor really ordered. If they ordered something vaguely cryptic, they can key in the lab name and it will give them the different names in different electronic systems, in addition to hand-entered names that some doctors use.
EMRs alone aren't going to improve healthcare greatly, but they open up a lot of other options that most certainly will.
I recently put together a Mindstorm NTX based robot that's controlled from a web page. It's been lots of fun, and it even has its own blog (which I'm specifically not posting so hordes of Slashdot users don't try to drive it around terrorizing my daughter).
My son and I joked about making it do something useful and buying a URL called "cleanmyroom.com" where total strangers will go around cleaning up your room. In this case, I'd go for "mowmylawn.com". It's like Tom Sawyer charging money to whitewash a fence.
Fetal stem cells have a nasty habit of becoming tumors.
I'm on my second kid and already I'm losing my hair and feel tired all the time. Unfortunately every time I ask my wife for some adult stem cell action, she turns me down.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not create two sets of identical-looking Faraday cages, one metal and the other non-conducting plastic. Randomly hand them out to experimenters and let them figure out which is which after the results are in.
Science is pretty good at detecting problems that kill you instantly. In this case, it would be a correlation between BPA exposure while pregnant and breast cancer your children get forty years later. It's difficult to make studies that prove this firmly.
For the majority of consumers, the biggest thing you can do with a tablet form factor is to drop the price.
1 And the fifth angel blew his trumpet, and I saw a star fallen from heaven to earth, and he was given the key of the shaft of the bottomless pit; 2 he opened the shaft of the bottomless pit, and from the shaft rose smoke like the smoke of a great furnace, and the sun and the air were darkened with the smoke from the shaft.
Personally I was reminded of the dwarves digging too deep and unleashing a Balrog upon Middle Earth. Have we learned nothing from Tolkien?
I work in the healthcare industry, though admittedly just on the web side of things. There's been a lot of talk getting our current EMR to the place where we're getting the maximum amount of healthcare dollars. Our healthcare organization is at a pretty good place, far ahead of most organizations. At the same time, we're being asked to do so much with reduced staff due to minimal hiring. I'm not sure we'll really be able to manage it all. There are also a number of non-technical issues, such as getting all the doctors ready for electronic order entry. Cultural issues often drive technology decisions.
That being said, I think it's a good idea to move people towards using EMRs in healthcare. They're expensive, difficult to maintain, but can produce much improved healthcare. As we often say, the main challenge facing healthcare these days is getting the right information to the right people at the right time. Doing that electronically is the only approach that makes sense.
I've never seen the 8% number before. What's interesting to me is that viruses that have their entire lifecycle in the neurons somehow infect germ-line cells.
We're local admins of the application servers, and a couple of us have domain admin rights. We generally haven't run into problems with this, as we have a strict policy of making fun of anyone who screws up badly. It involves Photoshop and is generally a memorable way to resolve the situation.
Human beings are well adapted to most common bacteria, adjusting immune responses to a ancient equalibrium created by evolution. The problem is that we haven't had time to adapt to antibacterial soap, everything we eat carefully sanitized, and constant cleanliness.
I'm increasingly convinced that a healthy diet reflects eating habits established tens of thousands of years ago.
My preferred approach these days is what I think is technically called Evolutionary Prototyping. Basically you start with some rough requirements, make something to show people, get more refined requirements, and repeat. At some point when the product is useful, you go live, but in reality you're never done and just the time between deployments gets longer.
This approach is horrible for things that have to work perfectly the first time (e.g. rockets to Mars), but for web development seems to be a decent approach. It's also hard to estimate how long something will take, as the requirements aren't known up front. Still, it's what I've been using for years. I don't think I knew what it was called until our organization brought in a consultant to talk about this stuff.
After all, we're pretty bright and realize that everything we make or do will eventually be destroyed and lost. Still, we persist despite that reality. Careers end, marriages break up, and eventually health fails.
On second thought, maybe I should just go play video games for awhile.
I don't know how many times I've had "that SSN discussion" within our organization. Just the other day someone working with our HR department asked if our team really needed the SSN. I just laughed out loud and dropped a few high level names that were involved with these discussions over ten years ago.
SSN is a great identifier, as nearly everyone we deal with has one. It's a horrible password, though, and any organization that uses it as such should be held liable for any of the consequences that causes.
I'm responsible for tying in a wide variety of systems together and often SSN is the only common link. We actually do generate an internal ID for people, but no one knows what it is and it can theoretically change if an error occurs, unlike SSN which is far more reliable.
I have no idea why my son is so excited about this particular game, but every month or so he keeps asking if it's out yet. We saw some of the demos and evidently it stuck with him. I think he likes the idea of being able to change the world.
I ended up getting quite a few job offers after my Neverwinter Nights modules became successful. It was flattering, but the reality is that my current job as a developer in the healthcare industry is way too good. I've managed to keep it in a recession while the gaming industry has become far more cutthroat.
I still love making games, but purely as a hobby.
Ironically we're doing an implementation of a "new" HR system and a big chunk of it was written in Cobol. We have one guy past retirement age who knows it, but otherwise the bulk of our developers just know those fancy new languages.
Some of those older languages have a surprising amount of life left in them, out in the real world.
NASA is a big user of SharePoint, strangely enough. My coworkers run into their folks at conferences from time to time.
I personally am ambivalent about SharePoint. Its roots are in document management, so it seems to do that relatively well. The publishing features are fairly nice as well. I don't think it's the best system for making web sites, but it may some day get there. Currently it feels like a 2.0 product (the magic rule is to never buy anything from Microsoft before 3.0).
There are gotchas. SharePoint is tightly coupled with your clients. If everyone accessing the documents are using the latest version of Office, you'll be okay. If not, you'll run into problems. You may also need to throw a lot of hardware into SharePoint, as storing files inside of SQL has some built-in inefficiencies.
Still, some of our users seem to love SharePoint, so it might be a good option for you.
I've had my own site since last millenium, primarily as a way to journal my family's life for myself and people in my extended family. It's been a great communication tool to keep up with everyone, and a huge time saver when it comes to sending individual e-mails to everyone.
It's also been a great historical record of when things happened. I'm embarrassed to say that I've checked my blog more than once to make sure I remembered my daughter's birthday right.
It was also a great way for everyone to stay in touch on 9/11. Two of my family were flying that day, and it was a central place where everyone could post their flight delays and locations.
As someone who works in healthcare, I've discovered that providing good care is entirely about information. If we don't know someone's drug allergies, medical history, and can't effectively communicate between departments, patient safety is impacted. Turning away patients may actually save lives if a hospital is unable to provide communication and medical background for a patient.
When I'm unable to get to the network for some reason, I feel extra stupid as a developer. I can't search for code examples on Google, migrate code to staging servers, and so on. Healthcare is similar, with providers not being as effective as if they had their full EMR at their fingertips.
Turning away patients results in loss of income, so they're basically losing money in order to improve the safety of their patients.
This one seemed to work pretty well at finding my wife, anyway.
It appears SUVs will continue to have pretty horrible gas mileage.
Weird. I work in IT in HealthCare and I haven't heard of EPIC before. Moving to browser-based systems is becoming more common, though most EMRs still have terminal-based technology behind the scenes.
One of the challenges of EMRs is that there are so many of them and each have different strengths and weaknesses. Our current EMR is primarily designed for the hospital setting and the clinic add-on isn't as great.
Billing is one of those things that seems a necessary evil to many healthcare providers. It's an annoying distraction to caring for a patient, but it's how insurance companies reimburse you, so it must be done. Barring a complete overhaul of the heathcare system, I think you'll see billing as a big part of every EMR.
Put on some scrubs, don a white lab coat, and walk around with a clip board and see how long it takes for someone to notice you at a big hospital. Answer: they won't.
We had a reporter try to do this after a school shooting. They were caught and I'm not sure if charges were filed.
Everyone wears badge photos at our hospital and if you wandered into a patient area without one and no one recognized you, security would likely be called.
You make a good point that simply making charts digital is not enough. A good system detects errors, supports reporting after-the fact, and allows for good auditing. Our healthcare system has had an EMR for nearly a decade, and I've had a chance to see the growing pains and thrills over that time. Here are a few benefits that come to mind.
Auditing. I help an audit team look at who's pulling up whose records. With paper, this would be nearly impossible, but with electronic records it's quite easy to see that user X is pulling up the medical records of their ex-wife or the visiting famous person. Though this has been hard for some, I think it's made our organization much more respectful of a patient's privacy.
Moves. We moved our hospital recently and I got to write the system that tracked each patient as they went through the various staging areas to their new bed across town. Our EMR made this like tracking packages in FedEx and it worked great.
Widespread Communication. On a more practical note, this is the big one. It used to be very difficult to move charts and images around town or even to other cities. Now people anywhere in the sprawling healthcare system can see the latest on your medical condition.
Reporting. We have a massive data warehouse that lets us see the effect of our various health improvement efforts and gives us the ability to more accurately report quality data (e.g. are we giving asprin to everyone who comes in with chest pain?). Evidence based medicine is big in our organization, and it requires good data to support it.
Fixing Errors Before They Happen. This is the most challenging one, and I think we're still in our infancy. I helped make a lab cross-reference system whose purpose is to make sure nurses know what lab a doctor really ordered. If they ordered something vaguely cryptic, they can key in the lab name and it will give them the different names in different electronic systems, in addition to hand-entered names that some doctors use.
EMRs alone aren't going to improve healthcare greatly, but they open up a lot of other options that most certainly will.
I recently put together a Mindstorm NTX based robot that's controlled from a web page. It's been lots of fun, and it even has its own blog (which I'm specifically not posting so hordes of Slashdot users don't try to drive it around terrorizing my daughter).
My son and I joked about making it do something useful and buying a URL called "cleanmyroom.com" where total strangers will go around cleaning up your room. In this case, I'd go for "mowmylawn.com". It's like Tom Sawyer charging money to whitewash a fence.
Fetal stem cells have a nasty habit of becoming tumors.
I'm on my second kid and already I'm losing my hair and feel tired all the time. Unfortunately every time I ask my wife for some adult stem cell action, she turns me down.