Let’s harken back to the early days of the Internet, say the 1990s. In those days of yore, characterized by limited bandwidth and lack of flash animations, people by trial and error attempted to work out the dos and don’ts of online communication. This was before Facebook messaging and tweeting, before SMS and MMS. Communication… Continue reading Whatever Happened to Netiquette?
Category: Computers & Software
Lost in EPIC Land
One of the many unanswered questions about the handling of the first Ebola case in the United States is the role of the Electronic Health Record (EHR). Initial reports put at least some of the blame for the patient’s being sent home from the hospital despite a high risk travel history on a failure of… Continue reading Lost in EPIC Land
How to View Your Doctor’s Drug Company Payments
The CMS Open Payments database is up for the public to view, but the site is difficult to navigate. Here is a step by step guide to using the site. Go to openpaymentsdata.cms.gov From the list of databases, click on the General Payment Data with Identifying Recipient Information – Detailed Dataset 2013 Reporting Year (or skip step one… Continue reading How to View Your Doctor’s Drug Company Payments
AutoLayout Revisited
My initial experiences with Apple’s iOS AutoLayout were pretty negative. Using Interface Builder’s (IB) ability to generate AutoLayout constraints automatically based on the positioning of views turned out to be frustrating, as it would generate constraints that were incompatible with iOS 7. As iOS 8 has only been out for a few weeks, I definitely… Continue reading AutoLayout Revisited
How Secure is Your Medical Data?
With the recent discovery of the ShellShock vulnerability affecting a large number of computers, the question comes up again: how secure is medical data? Thanks to the federally mandated push to transfer medical data from paper charts to computer databases, most if not all of this data is now fertile ground for hackers. As pointed… Continue reading How Secure is Your Medical Data?
AutoLayout Headaches
The new larger iPhones and iOS 8 are here. Xcode 6, upgraded to deal with these new beasts, is also ready for download. Anyone who has written apps designed for the iPhone has to make sure their apps run on these new devices and the new iOS. Previous iPhones had two different heights (3.5 and… Continue reading AutoLayout Headaches
Using Social Media in Moderation
I’ve been backing off from social media recently. For someone who writes a blog as well as publishing medical apps this may appear to be a risky tactic. In truth this retreat has not been completely voluntary. Something known as “real life” has been seeking my attention and gotten in the way of my online life… Continue reading Using Social Media in Moderation
Is a Mobile Electronic Health Record Possible?
It’s been a while since my last rant about Electronic Health Records (EHRs), so let’s remedy that right now. EHRs in their current iteration are — how to put this delicately? — an unmitigated disaster. Nevertheless, much of the criticism of EHRs, including mine, has been in the destructive category. What about some constructive criticism?… Continue reading Is a Mobile Electronic Health Record Possible?
Dark Clouds for the Sunshine Act
I finally decided to review my Sunshine Act data. We are in the period of time when the data can be reviewed by physicians and disputed if necessary. On September 30 the data will be released to the general public. The data in question is a list of payments (whether food and drink, honoraria, travel… Continue reading Dark Clouds for the Sunshine Act
When Downloads Take a Century
Back in the good old USA and the first thing that smacks me in the face is how bad my Internet service is. In Paris, France I clocked my Internet speed at 66 Mbit/s. Here in Parker, Colorado, just south of Denver, a major center for telecommunication companies, I clocked my speed at 0.93 Mbit/s.… Continue reading When Downloads Take a Century