Category: opinion
-
Nintendo Wii: A glimpse into the future of health promotion?
I’ve been very impressed with the Nintendo Wii. The game system is simple to use and very fun. Even though I have a Sony Playstation 2, I hardly ever play it any more. When I do try to play it, I find the games to be far too complicated to play (especially trying to learn…
-
Telehealth Ontario: Is it doing more harm than good?
A while back, I wrote about my experience using the Telehealth Ontario service. In my particular case, my experience was satisfactory. As I understand things, Telehealth Ontario is meant to be a service that “can help you decide whether to care for yourself, make an appointment with your doctor, go to a clinic, contact a…
-
Learning from the past and living with legacy systems
Over the past eight years that I’ve been in the “real worldâ€, I’ve had opportunities to work at various parts of the health care system from promoting healthy behaviours to children of family violence, preparing a small community hospital implement a new electronic records system, developing a quality improvement program and conducting business process re-engineering…
-
Disruptive Technologies in Health Care: A summary
My apologies for not getting to this post sooner, but this past year has been … eventful. Here is my list of disruptive technologies that could be used in to improve and change health care. I have included links to the entries highlighting each technology – no need to rehash what’s already been written. Disruptive…
-
A look at the "dark side" of ehealth
A look at the “dark side†of ehealth In his book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, Neil Postman writes about the unconscious effects of television in society. He later generalizes that technologies inherently favour certain types of interaction, thinking, conceptualization, and communication. For example, the written word (i.e.,…
-
Lessons Learned from Canada’s 2006 Federal Election
In Canada, we recently held an election at the Federal level (January 23rd, 2006). The election was called in late 2005 when the Liberal minority government fell. On election day, Canadians voted and received a Conservative minority government. While the overall result was not surprising, some of the details were (and continue to be) quite…
-
Do we need a health care version of the olympics?
I’ve often wondered why people (and society in general) can get so worked up and passionate about certain events, and yet remain absolutely untouched by others. Previously, I noted the zeal and passion that some people have for computer products – the same concept applies to fans of music bands or car aficionados and so…
-
ehealth, specialists, and strategy
Sometimes I wonder if the strategy for developing and deploying ehealth/health inforamtics is effective. In Ontario, and probably in many parts of Canada, the government has developed a series of massive infrastructure projects to create a functional electronic health record. What this means is that there are multi-million dollar projects to design, develop, test, and…