Power to the Patient!
I haven’t been blogging nearly as much as I did five years ago, largely because my early blogging was all about trying to figure out “what the heck is up with the American healthcare system???” and it’s now been two years since I had any new realizations. Here’s a summary of that, then some quick hits on recent and upcoming events.
No, wait – this part turned out long, so I’ll continue tomorrow with the “quick hits.” For today, here’s the baseline I reached two years ago.
[Read more…]Updates May 8:
I’ve often blogged and spoken about the many parallels between the women’s movement and the patient empowerment movement. Here’s one perfect quote from Miriam Hawley, one of the founders of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, whom I met last year:
[Read more…]If you’re in the health data world, you’ve surely heard of FHIR. If you work in that world but you’re not a hands-on data wrangler, you might have heard of it but not really have a clue what it means in the real world.
Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a way to learn about it? There is. Register here.
[Read more…]Chances are you’ve heard about this already but the news coverage hasn’t been saying what I think is significant, so I’m posting. The New York Times piece starts thus:
Federal prosecutors are conducting a criminal investigation into data deals Facebook struck with some of the world’s largest technology companies, intensifying scrutiny of the social media giant’s business practices as it seeks to rebound from a year of scandal and setbacks.
I heard about this while out for pizza with my chorus buddies after a performance. Friends on Twitter were talking about #FacebookDown, so I popped open my phone’s browser and got this: Facebook was down.
“Something went wrong” indeed. :-)
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My post January 7 about why I stopped participation on Facebook has drawn lots of discussion, which is great. In this era, it’s increasingly important for us all to THINK about the information that floats past our eyeballs: “Wait – who put this here?? Do I trust it?? What if it’s wrong??”
It’s true for the news feeds that we watch (online or off), as well as everything we see on Facebook and everywhere else on social media. The hard truth is that sometimes what “broadcasters” show us (and make no mistake, Facebook is both a broadcaster and an editor, because it modifies what it shows you based on your past likes) is NOT a random feed of stuff that happened, but something chosen to keep YOUR eyeballs glued to YOUR screen.
[Read more…]It’s been a busy winter. Amid all the Facebook scandals and new government regulation work that’s going on, I thought I’d send an update on travels. Here are some visuals from a recent 17 day, six country, seven speech trip. (Fun facts: nine different hotels, and doing laundry in a Vienna laundromat that only takes instructions from a smartphone app.)
The background image is the HIMSS19 (health IT systems conference) logo repeated over and over and over and over, because that brutal exhausting conference is like that :-), and is the background of everything else.
Counterclockwise from left:
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