ed-informatics.org

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 […]

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 […]

Fitts’s Law has been known since Paul Fitts first proposed it in 1954. Wikipedia has a detailed exposition of Fitts’s Law. In essence, it says that “the time required to rapidly move to a target area is a function of the distance to the target and the size of the target.” “Targets that are smaller […]

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 […]

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, […]