Category Archives: medical

in praise of hands-on expertise

(I don’t usually share personal stories in public fora, but in this case, and with my wife’s permission, I’m making an exception.) “Shoulder Dystocia,” said the Obstetrician, as we neared the end of my wife’s otherwise-routine delivery of our son … Continue reading

Posted in medical, personal | 3 Comments

What about the less obvious errors?

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 … Continue reading

Posted in genomic, health, medical | Leave a comment

HealthEngage leaking email addresses?

For more than 10 years now, I’ve used custom email addresses when I log in to a web site I don’t fully trust, e.g. ben-SITENAME at adida.net. Until recently, the only time I’ve actually been able to trace emails to … Continue reading

Posted in medical, privacy | 4 Comments

Empowering the Patient vs. Enabling an Artificial Monopoly

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

Personal health record: it’s about the feedback loop

In my basic electronics college course, the classic lab that always got the teaching assistants laughing was the robotic arm. The task seems simple: build a circuit that measures the amount of weight carried by a small robotic arm and … Continue reading

Posted in medical | 2 Comments

Helios @ CodeCon

I’m at CodeCon presenting my Helios voting system in a little bit. But first, there’s a talk on sequencing your own genome at home using basic kitchen equipment. It’s quite rare for me to be at one conference that combines … Continue reading

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Pinker on Personal Genomics

As some folks know, I’ve spent the majority of my time over the last 1.5 year as a member of the Faculty at Harvard Medical School in the Informatics group, thinking about security and privacy of web platforms for managing … Continue reading

Posted in genomic, medical, policy, web | Leave a comment

Privacy Advocacy Stunts

Deborah Peel, a well-known patient privacy advocate, and EPIC have joined forces to ask Google some questions about Google Flu Trends. Google is analyzing its search logs to detect flu outbreaks by region, which is super nifty. Peel and EPIC … Continue reading

Posted in medical, privacy | 1 Comment

Genomic Records & Voting

So part of my research is on voting. And another part is on the privacy of genomic medical records (which, admittedly, I haven’t spoken about much on this blog yet). It’s not often that I find an article that combines … Continue reading

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An Inconvenient Truth about the Left

For the last few years, Bush and others within the Republican Party have ignored and distorted scientific evidence because the evidence didn’t match their ideology. The latest example this weekend is the administration’s attitude on the Endangered Species Act, but … Continue reading

Posted in medical, policy | 3 Comments