Hans Oh's Blog

Category: analysis

  • More thoughts on the "Fundamental Theorem of Medical Informatics"

    Okay, I couldn’t help but think about this theorem a bit during the day. Here are some of my thoughts: Corollary #1 identifies an intelligent user. I suppose there is an inherent idea that the user is a health care professional of some sort. Friedman provides a bit more detail and describes intelligent user as…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Dear Dr….

    Here’s an interesting abstract from E-Health Insider Primary Care (Issue No. 7). “Four out of five US patients who are online would ideally like to ask their GPs’ advice over e-mail if it would save them a visit to the surgery, according to an online survey undertaken by Harris Interactive. Around 69% of those surveyed…

  • It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to…

    There’s an interesting “debate” going on the current issue (vol 365 no 9463) of The Lancet regarding the work of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (Foundation). The editors ask if Bill Gates is “a 21st century Robin Hood”, pointing to how he has given away over $28 billion USD to date. With an endowment…

  • Equity and eHealth

    In yesterday’s class (Teaching in Higher Education), Dr. Rona Abramovitch lectured on the topic of discussion was “equity issues in teaching and the academy”. Without getting into too much detail, the overall point of the lecture was to create a more inclusive classroom by trying to accomodate different cultural, social, economic, religious, gender, racial,…. backgrounds.…

  • A coming wave?

    I must say that I’ve become very impressed with the software created by open-source community. Three projects that I’ve recently used come to mind: Firefox/Mozilla, Open Office, and Filezilla. What amazes me is how quickly these projects have evolved into stable, high quality products. In fact, I have used Firefox as my primary browser for…