Archive for the 'Development' Category

iPad: the lowest common denominator

Monday, March 29th, 2010

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 [...]

The interconnection con

Friday, March 26th, 2010

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 [...]

iota Mockups

Friday, March 19th, 2010

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.

One iota more

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

Putting my money where my mouth is, or my wiki where my iota is, I decided to wikify the effort. But first it needed a name and I came up with “iotaMed” which stands for “Issue Oriented Tiered Architecture for Medicine”. You can find the wiki at iota.pro. Be there.

Confidentiality of the right thing

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

If we use “issues” as the top level item in the EHR, instead of the “encounter”, it comes naturally to attach confidentiality attributes to the issue instead of the department, doctor, or encounter. That’s a huge improvement. Let’s take an example to show why. As things are in current systems, confidentiality walls or borders are [...]

Having issues

Monday, March 8th, 2010

In my last post I described the positioning of the SRR record and I also painted it as a form that can either be predetermined in the form of a clinical guideline record or a free form record to which the doctor can add steps, or a mixture of both. Since we don’t want to [...]

What’s this SRR thing, then?

Friday, March 5th, 2010

In my last post, I arrived at the conclusion that the main element in the electronic healthcare record should be a list of problems and each of those problems should be an SRR, that is a document that is updated with  the most recent data pertaining to this problem, not a document that gets replaced [...]

Data kinds and the medical record

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

In my previous post, I described the two kinds of data that I think I see in most, if not all, applications. The two kinds are the “state reflecting record” (SRR) and the “transformation additive series” (TAS). Cumbersome names, I admit, but if you have a better idea, let’s hear it. A medical record, be [...]

A tale of two data kinds

Monday, March 1st, 2010

In my neverending quest to straighten out the electronic healthcare record, I have to introduce a view on data that is essential if I’ll be able to explain what’s wrong with the current model and how it should be fixed. As always when we’re in a mess with the design of systems, we climb the [...]

Subversion server on Snow Leopard server

Sunday, November 29th, 2009

As I already bragged about, I got me one of those delicious little OSX Mini Snow Leopard Server boxes. So sweet you could kiss it. I just got everything together to make it run a subversion server through Apache, too, and as a way to document that process, I could just as well make a [...]