Archive for December, 2010
Year in Review – Books of 2010
December 31, 2010
Following Kent Bottle’s lead in influential books in 2010, I decided to compose my own list:
- Chasing Medical Miracles The Promise and Perils of Clinical Trials. Tells it like it is – to be a participant in a clinical trial.
- Googled-The End of the World as We Know It – somewhat disappointing in that it discussed the advertising side of the business and less about the history of its technical evolution.
- DIYU: Epunks, Edupeneurs and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education. This book was recommended by a speaker at the J. Boye conference in Philadelphia. Questions the future viability of universities as they are undermined by Web 2.0 technology.
- Leading Geeks – Required reading for anyone who manages geeks, especially programmers. Helpful for anyone to understand the culture of geekdom, understanding the mindset of managing ambiguity and tearing down some stereotypes.
- The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil – mind blowing futurism and undying optimism in technology even though this is from 2005 and 650 pages. The law of accelerating returns puts us on a fast track to the future. I am now following Kurweil’s Accelerating Intelligence blog.
- A Little Booklet About Health 2.0 – by Lucien Engelen. Brief but advancing health 2.0 concepts with a peak to the future from a European perspective.
- Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More – this lead to my blog post on Partnerships with Online Communities – The Long Tail, discussing some of the implications of the long tail in healthcare.
- The Collapse of Complex Societies – a venture into history and anthropology which I enjoy and blogged about: Declining Marginal Returns of Complexity
- Laugh, Sing and Eat Like a Pig by e-Patient Dave – a personal, signed gift from Dave himself when he visited Cleveland and had dinner with us.
- Connected for Health: The KP HealthConnect Story – Probably the best story of successful implementation of an EMR on a large scale basis with honest, realistic discussion of struggles and successes.
- Program or Be Programmed – Ten Commandments of the Digital Age – read appropriately as an ebook, makes some good points without being paranoid about technology’s growing role in our lives.
- The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can be Done About It. Recommended by @Ciscoiii when visiting the World Bank in Washington, DC. Excellent analysis of failed states with recommendations at the UN level for solutions.
- Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom – found this in Philadelphia at the Liberty Bell bookstore.
One on my shelf is Reading in the Brain: the New Science of How We Read.
More book reviews to come next year and many more will be on my Sony Reader.
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Book Review: Program or Be Programmed – Ten Commandments of the Digital Age
December 30, 2010
This quick read by Douglas Rushkoff is less ominous than the title sounds but still thought provoking. The author does not advocate becoming a programmer per se but understanding the greater control and influence over our decisions that apps have on our everyday lives. Particularly the chapter on Choice: You May Always Choose None of the Above; here he emphasizes the need to be aware of and not locked into choices made for us. Whether it is Google search results/adwords or Amazon recommendations of what others have selected, were are ever so gently guided toward choices. It reminds me of the decades old book of Alvin Toffler, Overchoice. Even then he anticipated the problem of hundreds of choices of models and colors and didn’t anticipate the ability to search millions of products online. Maybe we need tools to help us in our choices to guide us to our preferences to reduce the number of choices. But understanding enough about how this tools are programmed frees us from a type of slavery to them.
In addition, there are chapters about online identity: Do Not Be Always On, Live in Person, Be Yourself, Do Not Sell Your Friends. Increasingly, the lines between our online and offline identities are becoming blurred. Some handle this better than others, but identity confusion occurs with the most distasteful evidence in cyber-bulling and getting lost in game worlds. The advice to retain our humanity is well founded.
While the book does not address health issues on the internet and social media in depth, there are some implications for ePatients and patient-physician relationships. These need to be based in reality, not the virtual world. These identities and relationships can be extended by apps and tools but not to the exclusion of real life.
Share this:2010 Year in Review
December 24, 2010
It has been a year full of travel and accomplishments. Here is a month-by-month review:
- January – hosted Lucien Engelen and others from Radboud UMCN Hospital in the Netherlands at the Cleveland Clinic for two days on everything from the group practice model to innovation and patient experience in two days.
- February- vacation in Naples, Florida
- March – HIMSS 2010 in Atlanta presenting twice and AMIA Clinical Research Informatics Symposium presenting a poster. Also visited the Googleplex. Stopped in Salt Lake City for a day on the way home.
- April – Toronto for the - TAHSN Education Day for Healthcare Communicators – spoke on social media
- May - J. Boye Conference in Philadelphia – spoke on social media in healthcare and published my first article in iHealthbeat “Social Media in Health Care: Barriers and Future Trends”
- June – Visited Washington, DC. Vacation and some consulting
- July – Attended the Leadership Institute of the Group on Information Leadership of the American Association of Medical Colleges in La Jolla, California for a week and became a fellow.
- August – brief vacation in Salt Lake City including the Bonneville Salt Flats
- September – Named a fellow in the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society and named in a NIH grant on Risk Calculators
- October – Presented at Toledo (Ohio) Hospital on social media and attended the CTSA Innovative Informatics for Clinical and Translational Researchers at the NIH. Did live tweeting while attending the Cleveland Clinic Innovation Summit.
- November – coauthor of an article on a disease registry in the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology and another prespectives piece in iHealthbeat on the secondary use of EMR data.
- December – Second article on the chronic kidney disease registry published. A positive editorial by a well known informaticists about the registry published
Looking forward to more in the coming year – conferences, presentations, publications.
Share this:Editorial on Secondary Use of EMR Data
December 2, 2010
As a follow up to the recent article on the Cleveland Clinic Chronic Kidney Disease Registry, there is now an accompanying editorial by William Hersch of Oregon Health Sciences University titled: Electronic Health Records Facilitate Development of Disease Registries and More. He states, “Their study shows that the quality of data in the registry is comparable to that of the data that would come from a much more labor-intensive and expensive process of human abstraction. This registry will be used for quality improvement, clinical research, and other important tasks. ”
He also makes good points about the importance of CPOE in the process as well as the benefits of secondary use or “reuse” of data.
Share this:Secondary Use of EMR Data
December 1, 2010
Part of the value of EMRs is the secondary use of the rich clinical data. Quality studies are an obvious win. This week, a new article by Kaiser Permanente Medical Group used this data in one of several registries to analyze 80,000 Total Joint and 5000 ACL Reconstruction Procedures in the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery. The data was collected “through standardized documentation at the point of care” and “supplemented with existing administrative data from our electronic health records and other independent databases.” See the registry database structure here.
Also published this week is a second article from the Cleveland Clinic Chronic Kidney Disease Registry regarding the eGFR definition. This is another example utilizing these registries with secondary data for addressing significant issues in medicine.
The HIMSS 2011 conference will feature a symposium on secondary use of data as well.
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