Sometimes the stars are aligned a certain way and good things happen. Sometimes they line up another way and #@$% happens. I seem to be in the latter phase right now. Among the bad things that have happened, a low point was my Monday this week. After being on call over the weekend, I assisted… Continue reading Weathering The Storm
Category: Electrophysiology
Who Should Get An MRI-Compatible Pacemaker?
The Medtronic Revo MRI SureScan™ pacemaker is out, and the natural question arises: who should get it? Up until now, pacemakers have not coexisted well with MRI scanners. Problems including inductive heating of the leads, spurious reprogramming, and various malfunctions have been reported. Up until now, patients getting pacemakers have been told that they could… Continue reading Who Should Get An MRI-Compatible Pacemaker?
Startling New Guideline Conflict of Interest Revelations!
Fast on the heels of a study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine this week showing that over 50% of cardiologists who write clinical practice guidelines have potential conflicts of interests with drug or device companies, comes an even more startling revelation. A new study published today reveals that an astounding 100% of those… Continue reading Startling New Guideline Conflict of Interest Revelations!
Cut Us Some Slack, JCAHO!
The Joint Commission (aka JCAHO, universally pronounced “Jayco” and thusly spelled in this post) is a group of fuddy-duddies who, since they apparently can’t get real jobs in health care, go around inspecting hospitals and making up increasingly onerous and byzantine rules in order to punish legitimate health care workers. For years this rogue agency… Continue reading Cut Us Some Slack, JCAHO!
Medicare Witch Hunt
One of the local hospitals is undergoing a Medicare audit of Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator (ICD) implants, and, in order to avoid fines, is preemptively paying back the government for “questionable” implants. ICD implant guidelines are quite strict and are based on the results of randomized controlled multi-center studies. Each hospital has a checklist that the… Continue reading Medicare Witch Hunt
New ClickIt Coming Soon
I’m working on the next version of ClickIt. ClickIt is an automatic computer document signing program. It allows batch signing of documents in programs that don’t allow batch signing. It was originally designed to work with the Allscripts EMR system which forces the user to repetitively click the Sign button, wait for the next document… Continue reading New ClickIt Coming Soon
Singleton Madness
I’ve been spending the last few weeks trying to exorcise a pesky singleton class from EP Simulator. This is the Options class, which contains all the program options that are saved from session to session. There is only one set of Options, so I had naively made the class a singleton. Singletons being what they… Continue reading Singleton Madness
EP Studios Projects Update
Here’s a rundown of current activity at the EP Studios mothership: EP Office EP Office is the flagship project of EP Studios. Version 1.7 is out and basically is the culmination of the original software, which started out as a Microsoft Access version 2 database way back in 1995. It is proprietary software, but very… Continue reading EP Studios Projects Update
When Science Is Proprietary
After working with open source and/or free software (I’ll let the purists argue the difference there), it is jarring to look up scientific papers in the real world for my real job (electrophysiologist). It costs money to read these papers! The results of scientific research, intended to better the world and spread knowledge, costs money… Continue reading When Science Is Proprietary
Plugging Away At EP Simulator
Just to show that I have been working on this project, here’s another screenshot which I posted at SourceForge. Source code is hosted at GitHub. I expect to upload Windows and Linux binaries soon for download for those of you who aren’t into compiling source code.