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!
Category: Electrophysiology
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.
Another EP Simulator Screenshot
Progress on EP Simulator is slow. I’ve been working on multiple screen configuration, since the Prucka/GE system runs on two monitors. Anyway, here is a screenshot (on one monitor though).
Can the Upper Common Pathway in AVNRT be Ablated?
I recently performed an ablation on a 67 y/o woman with AVNRT. She had inducible common variety (slow-fast) AVNRT on isoproterenol, and ablation was performed in the usual slow pathway location. Several burns were done, because no junctional rhythm was seen. Surprisingly, she had no inducible AVNRT on isoproterenol after the ablations, despite being easily… Continue reading Can the Upper Common Pathway in AVNRT be Ablated?
Namespace Blues
I spent the weekend not writing code, but thinking about how to organize my code. EP Simulator is a large project written in C++ and utilizing Qt to build its Gui. There are large chunks of code that really have little to do with each other, such as the Navigator and Recorder modules, though even… Continue reading Namespace Blues