Electronic health care record systems are widely and frequently claimed to reduce injury and death due to prescription errors, since they are able to detect and warn for interactions between products. This claim is largely nonsense, because of the following: Interactions between products are not the only dangerous effects we have from bad prescriptions Interactions [...]

Prescriptions made in classic EHR systems have no context of “why” and “for what”. The only information about the reason for the prescription is an entirely optional field on the physical label informing the patient about the purpose of the medication. That is far from sufficient. The drawbacks due to the lack of a structured [...]

I’m at point 2 in the list of problems we need to solve. You can also find this text, possibly improved, on the iotaMed wiki. As new discoveries are made in medicine, we need to get these out to “the factory floor”, so they are applied in practice. If there’s a new more efficient diagnostic [...]

Oh, boy, this wasn’t easy. I’ve been trying for years to get my email life organized. The problem is this: I’ve got almost ten different email accounts I subscribe to tens of mailing lists I want mailing lists to be automatically moved to dedicated folders I want the same folder setup on different machines I [...]

Let’s expand on the first item in the list I made in the previous post. I called this item “Lack of overview of the patient”, and that’s actually a pretty serious understatement of the problem. What we get in most electronic healthcare records systems is an evenly thick layer of prose stretching from a variable [...]

As the interest in iotaMed and the problems it is intended to solve clearly increases, we need to get our ducks in a row and make it simple to follow and to argue. Let’s do it the classic way: What is the problem? What is the solution? How do we get there? Let’s do these [...]