Monthly Archives: June 2009

Pot, Kettle, meet Zuckerberg

Posted on June 23, 2009 by ben

Facebook is an impressive company, they’ve done and continue to do some very amazing things. And I admit I certainly didn’t see them coming 4 years ago. But okay, come on: “No one wants to live in a surveillance society,” … Continue reading →

Posted in data, privacy, web | Leave a comment

Open Licensing in Health IT

Posted on June 23, 2009 by ben

John Halamka, renowned CIO of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), is a blogger, and he just added a Creative Commons license after making the following remarks: I want my blog to be used for education, training, and research. … Continue reading →

Posted in data, health, policy | 6 Comments

Loosely Coupled Health IT

Posted on June 18, 2009 by ben

My research group, Children’s Hospital Informatics Program, just released a statement of principles in designing the next generation of Health IT, and folks are picking it up. The key concept is substitutability, or what software/Internet architects have called loose coupling. … Continue reading →

Posted in health, web | 2 Comments

Distributed Data Stores: the birth of a new layer in the stack

Posted on June 11, 2009 by ben

I learned web programming in 1995, when a SQL database for storing your data was the obvious choice, but the options were still few, expensive, and slow. Since then, the SQL database has become ubiquitous, and the options are many, … Continue reading →

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Empowering the Patient vs. Enabling an Artificial Monopoly

Posted on June 7, 2009 by ben

Health Information Technology is moving along fairly quickly, with the stimulus money and the rise of Personally Controlled Health Records (Indivo/Dossia, Google Health, Microsoft HealthVault). I’m quite optimistic about the future of health data: there is a growing effort to … Continue reading →

Posted in health, medical, policy, security | 2 Comments

Shieber on Open Access

Posted on June 5, 2009 by ben

Stuart Shieber, the architect of Harvard’s Open Access policy and a colleague at Harvard’s Center for Research on Computation and Society, has started a new blog on open-access academic publishing. Worth keeping an eye on if you want to understand … Continue reading →

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