Anti-Data Pixels

Less is More —Mies van der Rohe In high school English class, many of my generation were forced to study a book about writing known as “Strunk and White.” Compared to many other books we were forced to read, it had many advantages. It was short. It was to-the-point. It was full of pithy sayings, […]

Giveaway

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 […]

PHR

One of the supposed means to the great gains of electronic health records is that of the Personal Health Record (PHR). Big guns like Microsoft and Google dived into the PHR pool a few years ago (Microsoft HealthVault and Google Health), only to find that the water was quite shallow. Getting information into a Personal […]

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 […]

Cost Disease

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 […]