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 [...]

…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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

There’s a reason why our medical records systems don’t work and that reason goes back quite a way. As I’ve mentioned before, it goes back to when IT people started implementing the paper records in computers, assuming the paper records contained a complete model of the medical management of the patient, which they didn’t. Automating [...]

After watching Apple vs Predator, a short YouTube video, I had a blinding flash of the somewhat obvious and this is it: no other interface but the iPhone/iPad interface can seamlessly transfer to a virtual surface and gestures. Let’s expand on this. If you’ve seen “Minority Report”, the movie, you must remember the interface Tom [...]

Every project and initiative in healthcare IT can be classified into one of two types: interconnection and the rest. Interconnection projects, as the term indicates, all have in common that they involve improving just the exchange of data and nothing else, by actually interconnecting two or more systems, or by creating some standard that is [...]

I’ve started to do mockups of the iotaPad interface, so I can illustrate the workflow of the iotaMed journal. I think those mockups are needed, since it’s very hard to illustrate how a medical record should work, unless you can see it in action.