Category: opinion
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The branding of eHealth
I’ve been thinking about some of the concepts that James Twitchell talks about in his book Branded Nation : The Marketing of Megachurch, College Inc., and Museumworld. Basically, he takes a marketing paradigm and uses it to explain some of the behaviour seen in churches, universities, and museums. His essential argument, as far as I…
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Aggh!! My computer just died
Aghh!! My desktop computer just died (actually, it’s my mom’s and I just use it on occasion). I had purchased it on Feb. 04, 2005 to replace another dead PC. What’s up with this string of back luck? I took this machine apart and basically re-built it, and yet it will not start. Maybe this…
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Open Access Publishing – power to the people
There’s an interesting commentary in this week’s BMJ titled “Open access publishing: Too much oxygen” by Jeffrey Aronson. Aronson’s basic argument is to temper support of open access publishing. He also believes that the current model of publishing is working well pointing to the number of different journals sprouting up. Aronson argues: We need to…
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eHealth is not a panacea
There seems to be a prevailing sense that by using information and communications technology more effectively in health care, that many of the problems we face will somehow (magically) disappear. An opinion piece available on Computerworld’s website (“It’s the year for e-health records” by John Halamka) makes it seem like eHealth will be the cure…
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eHealth: A North American phenomenon?
Question: How widespread is eHealth around the world? Answer: I think that there’s considerable interest from many parts of the world. I mean, when I see the many health informatics/ehealth research centres (e.g., UK, Australia, Canada, United States, Germany) there seems to be considerable interest. But, since I was born and raised in a Canadian…
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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…
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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…
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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.…