Accelerators

One important medical computer application (hereinafter “app”) is a PACS system. PACS stands for “Picture archiving and communication system.” (PACS system is redundant, but so be it.). Wikpedia has a nice explanation at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picture_archiving_and_communication_system. For emergency physicians, it’s where we usually view X-rays and CT scans, and enter “wet reads” (our preliminary interpretations of X-rays, […]

Bad Apple

I don’t own, nor have I ever owned, any Apple products. I tell people I’m not cool enough to own anything Apple. Indeed, as I was writing this post, I just also wrote a Windows batch file; very not-cool. For a long time, I felt marginalized. But with the latest versions of Android and Windows, […]

Pop-Up

There is an electronic medical record program (EMR) called DocuTAP that I use at one of my jobs. It’s not bad overall, and it’s the top-rated Urgent Care Center EMR. But, as with every EMR, it can be improved. In many ways. I just ran across another new way in which it can be improved. […]

Kludge

On occasion, an academic paper is published, but one of the following Letters to the Editor or editorial is much more important, with a longer-lasting influence than the original article. An example is an editorial about sore throats/tonsillitis by Dr. Centor, of Centor Criteria fame. Well, now we have similar situation in the field of […]

Ebola

Let’s suppose it is 1980. Suppose someone shows up in your ED with a fever, and a history of travel to an area with a new plague characterized by fever. The nurse has heard about this on the news, asks the patient about travel to the area, and gets a “yes.” The nurse not only writes this on the paper […]