Month: June 2005
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Podcasting in Healthcare: Is there a future?
I’ve been following the “podcasting” phenomenon ever since I heard of the term. At this year’s Apple World Wide Developer’s Conference, Steve Jobs announced that future versions of iTunes will have features to make it easier for users to find and listen to podcasts. Basically, “podcast” or “podcasting” is a combination of the words “broadcasting”…
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Google Scholar – not ready for prime time
I came across a comprehensive review of Google Scholar available from the Thomson Gale Publishing group. As you know, Google Scholar is a dedicated search tool aimed at “academics” to search information regarding journal articles, reports, and other “scientific” literature. In a previous post (Google Scholar: Don’t believe the hype?), I shared some of my…
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Case report: A paperless hospital
Here’s an interesting article/case study from Computerworld.com titled “The paperless hospital – really!“. The article is a profile of Baptist Medical Centre South hospital and how it managed to succeed when others (i.e., Cedar-Sinai Medical Centre in Los Angeles). My take home message after reading this article was that technology is not the problem (nor…
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Is this the end for Canada’s health care system? Some preliminary thoughts on the Supreme Court of Canada’s ruling
Wow. If you haven’t heard, the CBC.ca reported that the Supreme Court of Canada has judged that “Quebec patients should be allowed to buy insurance to cover medical treatments already provided by medicare, citing the physical and psychological suffering caused by long waits for services in the publicly funded system” (Health-care ruling called ‘stinging-indictment’ –…
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Waiting for a ruling from the Supreme Court of Canada
Today, the Supreme Court of Canada is to release its decision regarding two cases regarding the legality of the existing health care system in Canada. Basically, the two cases question the legality of prohibiting patients from paying to receive health care services faster and for health professionals from charging for services covered under provincial health…
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Hospital rating web sites
Here’s a quick follow-up to my previous post on Patient Reports and how these types of reports have the potential to change health care and eHealth considerably. The article is from BusinessWeekOnline and is titled “Hunting for Hospitals That Measure Up“. The article doesn’t reveal anything new, but I found the small vignettes to be…
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A step in the right direction…standards for health interoperability
Computerworld.com reports in an article titled “HHS tackles health care IT interoperability” that the US Health and Human Services Department announced a new initiative to address the lack of a commonly accepted interoperable standard for health care. Basically, a new committee, the American Health Information Community (AHIC) will be charged with working with public and…
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Disruptive Technology #6: Wearable technologies
The disruptive technology profiled in this post is what I generically call “wearable technologies”. By wearable technology, I mostly mean “wearable computers”, but I don’t want to limit myself to just computers. Wikipedia.org defines a wearable computer as “a small portable computer that is designed to be worn on the body during use” (you can…