…um, at least as far as medical records go. SQL remains useful for a lot of other things, of course. But as far as electronic medical records are concerned, SQL is a really bad fit and should be taken out back and shot. Medical records, in real life, consist of a pretty unpredictable stack of [...]

When designing new system architectures, you really must design for updating unless the system is totally trivial. This isn’t hard to do if you only do it systematically and from the ground up. You can tack it on afterwards, but it’s more work than it needs to be, but it’s still worth it. I’ll describe [...]

Just read this in a forum post (Swedish, sorry ’bout that), and simply had to tell you. In the Stocks app that comes with the iPhone, you can add in a number of other things than the most obvious, like this: Add the exchange as a suffix. For example TLSN.ST results in the share price [...]

iotaMed is intended as an organizing overlay to existing information. It adds the guideline layer, including knowledge transfer and checklist functionality, to the classic electronic health care record. The information needed cannot be stored in the existing EHR systems, simply because they lack the necessary concepts. In other words, we do need our own database [...]

Verbatim quote from the CNN iPhone app today, due to the Icelandic volcanic revenge: “Jens Stoltenberg, who was in New York for President Barack Obama’s nuclear summit, is running the Norwegian government from the United States via his new iPad, his press secretary Sindre Fossum Beyer said.” That’s one amazing gadget. Gotta have one.

In the previous post I did a simple medication domain model. After a brief exchange of comments on my Swedish blog, I was quickly made to realize it was far too simple, so let’s see how it looks today: In this diagram, I’ve replaced the “prescription” object with a “prescription worksheet” that works very similarly [...]

In conventional EHR systems, medications are usually just a list found under the patient. The problem here is that there is no direct relationship between the medication and the reason it is administered, simply because there is no concept that could function as “reason”. Lucky us, with iotaMed we do have “issues” so that’s what [...]

Before I get into today’s topic, I’ll just have to point you to a review of the Apple iPad by a doctor. Main point: it fits in a regular white coat pocket. Very important. In Sweden, we do have a problem, though, since doctors in general aren’t allowed old fashioned white coats, but go around [...]

The by now famous paragraph 3.3.1 in the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement for iPhone OS 4.0 says that “Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited”. Which, of course, ruins the day for Adobe and Flash CS5. The idea was to have Flash scripts run [...]

As is simply too painfully obvious, current EHR systems aren’t fit for purpose. There is a serious defect in the domain analysis, so that fundamental concepts such as “disease” and “clinical guideline” are simply missing from the EHR domain analysis. Let’s discuss the parts in this highly simplified diagram. The objects in green are unique [...]