Category Archives: medical

in praise of hands-on expertise

Posted on May 17, 2012 by ben

(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?

Posted on August 27, 2009 by ben

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?

Posted on August 3, 2009 by ben

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

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

Personal health record: it’s about the feedback loop

Posted on April 20, 2009 by ben

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

Posted on April 17, 2009 by ben

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 →

Posted in medical, voting | Leave a comment

Pinker on Personal Genomics

Posted on January 13, 2009 by ben

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

Posted on November 25, 2008 by ben

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

Posted on October 31, 2008 by ben

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 →

Posted in genomic, medical, privacy | Leave a comment

An Inconvenient Truth about the Left

Posted on March 23, 2008 by ben

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