Benlog

The worst part of my job is dealing with the mess of document formats and coding systems in healthcare. The acronym soup is insane: HL7, CCD, CCR, CDA, Green CDA (which I just heard about from John Halamka’s blog but… no link!), and that’s just the document formats. Then there are coding systems like LOINC, [...]

I meant to mention this a while ago, but I keep forgetting. Amy Wallace at Wired wrote a fantastic piece on how irrational fears of vaccination are putting us all at risk. The feedback to Ms. Wallace has been enormous, and although tilted towards the positive, the negative feedback from the anti-vaccination crowd is insulting, [...]

Next week, I’ll be in Boston for 2 days for a workshop we’re putting together at Harvard Medical School on Health IT Platforms. We’ll be using this workshop to launch a new hub for discussion and debate around the design of a modular health IT infrastructure. Check out the new site ITdotHealth, the welcome message, [...]

The New Scientist points out a case of genotyping error by one of the consumer genomics companies, where a software bug caused a genotype to appear non-human. The article attempts to be reassuring:

Before other deCODEme customers get too irate about errors in data for which they have paid almost $1000, the bug affects only a [...]

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. I hope that its contents appear in derivative works such as other blogs, websites, and wikis. [...]

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. The idea is to build modular rather than monolithic systems, and ensure that the modules [...]

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 free the data in order to empower patients. And then there are some really boneheaded [...]

It blows my mind that, mere days after we discover this new virus, we have its source code.

Over the last two years, I’ve spent most of my time on… not elections believe it or not, but rather the personal control of health data over at Children’s Hospital, Boston, with a fantastic crew. And so now it turns out that health data is super cool, what with the Obama recovery plan and the [...]