Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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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…
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bio-diversity revisited
Previously, I wrote on the topic of bio-diversity as related to standards (read post here). I read an interesting post on slashdot.org that is prompting me to re-visit the idea of bio-diversity in health care, and specifically in eHealth. As we know from our high-school biology classes, “bio-diversity” means having a variety of biological matter,…
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A patient-specific DNS?
Here’s an interesting opinion piece by John Halamka, titled “Health Care Needs a DNS for Patients” available from Computerworld.com. Basically, Halamka argues that there should be a better way of accessing and locating patient information that is stored in physician offices, hospital records, patients homes, and wherever else patient information is stored. He argues that…
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Disruptive Technology #5: Patient reports
Trust. Who do you trust? Who do you trust to take care of you and your family? The disruptive technology profiled in this post is: Consumer reports and ratings. When we go to purchase a consumer good, most people do some research before making a purchase. Today, much of this research gets done online via…
Got any book recommendations?