Signal-to-Noise Ratio

I work at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. UPMC has prioritized IT, and compared with many other academic medical centers, the IT department is fairly well-funded and well-staffed. The central IT umbrella spreads wide, including 16 major hospitals and numerous other facilities. UPMC uses Cerner for an inpatient electronic medical record (EMR) (and for […]

Flat

The Master said: “When the noble man eats he does not try to stuff himself; at rest he does not seek perfect comfort; he is diligent in his work and careful in speech. He avails himself to people of the Way and thereby corrects himself. This is the kind of person of whom you can […]

Suicide

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 […]

Skeuomorphism

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 […]

RAND

In the January 2013 HealthAffairs, Arthur L. Kellermann and Spencer S. Jones of the RAND Corporation look back  at the projections of a 2005 RAND study of healthcare IT. Why, in defiance of that study’s projections, are our medical computer systems not saving us $81 billion a year? They list reasons: slow adoption, lack of […]