Suicide

This entry is part 31 of 44 in the series Words

Data mining has been a topic of interest to businesses and researchers for many decades. For physicians and other clinicians, and those designing systems for clinicians, data mining has been of less interest. Yes, you can use data mining to predict the volume of patients in your ED by day and hour. Yes, you can […]

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iPhones

This entry is part 30 of 44 in the series Words

On May 3, Steve Stack, Chair of the American Medical Association (and an emergency physician from Lexington, KY) gave a presentation on electronic health records (EHRs) to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The paper is worth a close read. He observes that physicians are technology early-adopters, but that there had to be Federal […]

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Giveaway

This entry is part 24 of 44 in the series Words

In a February 19 article in the New York Times,  Julie Creswell calls the healthcare IT portion of the 2009 stimulus bill (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009)  ‘a $19 billion government “giveaway”’ resulting from the lobbying of the big HIS vendors. One of the quotes in her article points out the usability limitations […]

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Skeuomorphism

This entry is part 25 of 44 in the series Words

Skeuomorphism has been around for a long time. Architects including Frank Lloyd Wright have eschewed it. Alan Cooper, known as one of the founding fathers of user interaction design for computer systems, decried it in the first edition of his classic text, About Face: Essentials of User Interaction Design. And more recently (~October 2012), people […]

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Cost Disease

This entry is part 20 of 44 in the series Words

The Cost Disease is both the name of a book, and the economic theory espoused by this book. The theory is relatively simple at its base. There are two segments to our modern economy, the progressive and the stagnant. The progressive sector makes rapid improvement in efficiency. Examples include manufacture, particularly of items such as […]

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