I worked for about 20 years writing EMR systems of one sort or another. There are about 6000 hospitals in the US. The company I worked for had systems in at 1500 of them. That's 25% right there. Users generally seemed to consider their EMR's to be essential and to contribute significantly to doctor productivity and patient safety. For instance, an electronic prescription is easier to produce, much more legible than a handwritten one and checks automatically for allergies and drug interactions, rather than relying on the doctor's sometimes fallible memory. There are usable data interchange standards for medical information: HL7 for text, DICOM for images plus various specialty coding standards (pathology, etc). It is true that the standards are not perfect and also, not every vendor's information is 100% standards-compliant. Still, systems are relatively easy to integrate and are usually able to talk to one another without too much difficulty. More and better automation in medicine can only be a good thing, as far as I can tell. I call BS on TFA.
One time I had a dream in which I attended a meeting together with all the other facets of my psyche. The purpose of our meeting was to discuss and finalize a draft standards document for dreams. Our 2.0 Dream Standard would
simplify the metaphoric, predictive, and evocative content of dreams while retaining and enhancing their expressive and power and flexibility and facilitating improved vatic and mantic capabilities.
Microsoft is reportedly developing a proprietary standard in competition with our work. The consensus was that open standards are essential if progress is to be made in this arena. There was some discussion of an SGML-based standard. The details were somewhat unclear to me on waking, as they often are.
Slashdot Mirror
JDicom is a free, Java based DICOM library. You should be able to do pretty much anything you need to with that. Get it at http://members.chello.at/petra.kirchdorfer/jdicom/
I worked for about 20 years writing EMR systems of one sort or another. There are about 6000 hospitals in the US. The company I worked for had systems in at 1500 of them. That's 25% right there. Users generally seemed to consider their EMR's to be essential and to contribute significantly to doctor productivity and patient safety. For instance, an electronic prescription is easier to produce, much more legible than a handwritten one and checks automatically for allergies and drug interactions, rather than relying on the doctor's sometimes fallible memory. There are usable data interchange standards for medical information: HL7 for text, DICOM for images plus various specialty coding standards (pathology, etc). It is true that the standards are not perfect and also, not every vendor's information is 100% standards-compliant. Still, systems are relatively easy to integrate and are usually able to talk to one another without too much difficulty. More and better automation in medicine can only be a good thing, as far as I can tell. I call BS on TFA.
"...should be careful least he thereby becomes a monster. When you stare at the abyss, the abyss stares back at you." - uncle Fritz
I'd quit.
One time I had a dream in which I attended a meeting together with all the other facets of my psyche. The purpose of our meeting was to discuss and finalize a draft standards document for dreams. Our 2.0 Dream Standard would
simplify the metaphoric, predictive, and evocative content of dreams while retaining and enhancing their expressive and power and flexibility and facilitating improved vatic and mantic capabilities.
Microsoft is reportedly developing a proprietary standard in competition with our work. The consensus was that open standards are essential if progress is to be made in this arena. There was some discussion of an SGML-based standard. The details were somewhat unclear to me on waking, as they often are.
I don't recall how the meeting ended.
go to http://www.apple.com/foo. Interesting...