Month: March 2005
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Thoughts on the "Fundamental Theorem of Medical Informatics"
I’ve been doing some reading on what Charles Friedman calls “The fundamental theorem of medical informatics”. Basically, it goes as follows: Corollary #1 (Person): The intelligent user’s personal knowledge and beliefs are at least as important as anything the technology does. Corollary #2 (Technology): The technology must be able to tell the user something he/she…
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Evaluation as a meta-discipline
In recent discussions and readings I’ve been doing, an idea seems to be recurring: evaluation is meta-discipline. This concept isn’t something that’s new to me, as I was initially trained by Dr. Anita Myers in program evaluation during my time at the University of Waterloo. We were taught that evaluation is embedded within a context…
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Threats to validity: training and teaching in studies
I had an interesting discussion with someone the other day about threats to attributing causality in studies with “training” as part of the intervention. This discussion reminded me of another discussion I had with a few other colleagues about a paper that was published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR). The article is…
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Annual CES/AEA Conference 2005
This year’s joint conference of the Canadian Evaluation Society (CES) and American Evaluation Association (AEA) is scheduled for October 24-30, 2005 in Toronto, Canada (Sheraton Centre Hotel). The theme is “Evaluation 2005: Crossing Borders, Crossing Boundaries“. Some of the conference tracks sound interesting. Here’s a short description about this year’s theme: “We live in a…
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Chipping away at the glacier…
A few articles in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) recently caught my attention. Sorry, no links to the articles – NEJM is an access-only journal (i.e., you need to have a subscription). I’m getting a sense that ehealth issues are slowly getting on the radar-screen of the traditional biomedical journals like NEJM, The…
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Competencies for the 21st Century Health Care Worker
In the most recent issue (2005;330:637-639 – March 19) of the British Medical Journal (www.bmj.com), there’s an interesting short article titled “Preparing the 21st century global healthcare workforce” in the Learning in Practice section. Pruitt and Epping-Jordan mostly discuss skills and needs in terms of preparing health care professionals to handle the shift from acute…
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No Hans Club
With much disappointment, I have realized that I am not invited to this year’s HCTP Annual Interdisicplinary Workshop titled “Human bodies, health care technologies and places: 21st Centry practices and scholarship” held on April 14-15, 2005. Last year’s event was such a treat to attend. I really enjoyed the interaction between the different perspectives and…
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It doesn’t look right…
Well, there goes another day. I spent most of the day learning how to use “master documents” in Microsoft Word (I’m using Office XP Professional). Gotta admit that after trying to work through the idiosyncracies of Word, WordPerfect sure is a great word-processor. The advanced features were so easy to use, especially things like drop…