Archive for the 'policy' Category
Posted: Thursday, February 18th, 2010 @ 2:53 pm in data, health, policy | Comments
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, [...]
Posted: Saturday, February 13th, 2010 @ 9:20 pm in policy, privacy | Comments
Everyone is talking about the privacy disaster that was the Google Buzz launch, and oh my goodness it was. I’ve never been so thankful that I don’t use gmail. I’m frankly surprised that they didn’t do a smaller beta first, or that there isn’t a group at Google charged with thinking about the privacy implications [...]
Posted: Sunday, January 31st, 2010 @ 4:00 pm in policy, security | Comments
So I made a couple of predictions about the iPad, Apple’s tablet, and I realize in retrospect that, while I got some of the details right, I got the gist completely wrong. I thought it was going to be a special-purpose device. And most commentators are saying just that. But I was wrong and they [...]
Posted: Saturday, December 26th, 2009 @ 8:31 pm in autonomy, policy | Comments
Why a prediction? Eh, cause it’s fun and cause I think the Apple Tablet will have a large impact on consumer computing.
I think Apple will launch a tablet computer in January that will be aimed at saving TV and print journalism. On-demand video and on-demand print magazines and newspapers will be at the forefront. And [...]
Posted: Monday, November 9th, 2009 @ 10:48 am in health, policy | Comments
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, [...]
Posted: Wednesday, October 7th, 2009 @ 5:58 pm in data, policy | Comments
On many issues, I’m an Apple fanboy. On the issue of the iPhone, less and less.
Here’s the short version of the story: Apple produces iTunes, which manages all of your music and videos, and syncs them to your iPod/iPhone. Very cool software, magnificently built, great experience overall. I’ve been using this setup for 6+ years.
Along [...]
Posted: Sunday, August 30th, 2009 @ 3:06 pm in autonomy, policy | Comments
My friends and colleagues might soon wonder if they’re witnessing a kind of metamorphosis in me lately: what’s with the Apple criticism, Ben the Apple Fanboy? It’s true, I work exclusively on Macs (often with Linux running inside VMware for development), and I’ve converted many family and friends to Macs. I use the original iPhone. [...]
Posted: Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 @ 10:57 am in data, health, policy | Comments
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. [...]
Posted: Sunday, June 7th, 2009 @ 5:03 pm in health, medical, policy, security | Comments
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 [...]
Posted: Friday, June 5th, 2009 @ 10:16 am in policy | Comments
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 the politics, mechanics, and economics of the issue.