Upgrading my IDE

Ah, upgrade time. Always interesting to see exactly what plugins and libraries I have installed and then making sure they're still installed afterwords.

Eclipse plugins:

• Scala
• Groovy
• Pydev
• OxygenXML
  
• GWT/GAE
• Mylyn
• Subversion
  

Libraries:

• Jena
• Aperture
  
• GData
• Google Collections
  

Not bad, a nice little mix I think.

I Was a Teenage Heavy Metal Nerd

The first song I ever programmed a computer to play was Black Sabbath's Iron Man. It was a TI-99/4A, and no big trick, given the reference of musical notes to frequency, the simple sound commands (and even simpler melody). Sometimes when I sit down to a big/daunting/exciting/fun software project I'll start by playing Iron Man on iTunes. Since Apple introduced the genius button, I can build a custom playlist starting with Iron Man and continuing with a pseudo-random selection my favorite old school metal bands.

One summer in college I had an internship at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, WV. As a side project I was helping put together a computer readout system for one of NRAO's oldest radio telescopes. To make sure the A/D card was ready to pick up analog signals, I tested it by plugging in a walkman with a Type O Negative CD. That 40' telescope is now part of the National Youth Science Foundation summer program.

Heavy metal nerds, rock on.

More and Better Links

Plugging In

I am at the moment marveling at an order of magnitude improvement in information flow. Not only volume, but also the tools to filter, route, search, organize, and share.

So here's a few links of interest coming through the feeds lately.

TWEET IDEAS: 13 Things to Do on Twitter Besides Tweet

Personal Health Records - Who are the key PHR providers and how are they handling lab results?

Soon we will all be e-Patients

Me, I'm working at one of those HIEs beginning to link patients directly to their own health data.

While the government attempts to pave the way for a national health information network.

So we can all have our own Personal Health Records (PHR).

A view from inside the HealthVault — Reviving The Health Revolution

• Understanding Vocabularies #2 – HealthVault Recommendations
  
• Working with HealthVault XML APIs — Reviving The Health Revolution
• Google Health v Microsoft Healthvault
  

The whole world is interested in this:

• Healthcare around the world, there are innovations to consider (PBS)
• Digital Healthcare, Participatory Healthcare (Germany)
  

From Twitter, I got a report from iHealthBeat on the use of Twitter in Healthcare.

Also, a discussion of social media in healthcare.

And that's just the past few weeks. How about a medical wiki like Medpedia?

Speaking of wikis, try the Knowledge Mobilization Works Wiki / Wiki101


Not to mention the reference manuals, I'm a JEE/SOA type guy, so...

• JAX-WS RI 2.1 FCS-- Users Guide
• ebXML - Enabling A Global Electronic Market
• What's New in JSF 2? From the blog of Andy Schwartz

That's enough for now. I expect we will all get better at managing information, channel it from many sources into the most useful format we can manage. As the tools improve so does my skill at using them.

A Funny Thing Happened on Facebook

It looks like people are busy recreating their old haunts online, and the whole gang is showing up.

I've been finding pages like the Dead Cafe Poet's Society dedicated to the gone-but-not-forgotten Las Vegas coffee house scene (yes such a thing did exist), and a group called Las Vegas Alternative Scene: the 1990s which is really just a collection of people who used to hang out in places like the Enigma, Cafe Copioh, Double Down Saloon, and the KUNV DJ booth. I'm looking through photos, finding old familiar faces, and clicking on them. I am literally getting in touch with people through a picture.

High School? Yeah, we got 'em. Ever re-connect with people by clicking on a 4th grade class photo? In true social network style, you connect with one old friend, look through their friends and photos, and pretty soon the gang's all here.

Before you know it, this will seem normal. Staying in touch will be the default, and all our friendships will last a lifetime. If it's not facebook, it will be something else, but the technology is proven to work.

What a PHR Should Never Do

What would you do if you discovered a company you never heard of had access to your medical records? Well, if you were at the Googleplex up all night coding, you might be furiously tweeting and calling everyone on the Google Health team you can think of saying WTF. Second, you would listen to the voice at the next laptop over saying DON'T PANIC because there has to be a good explanation.

And there is, sort of.

Turns out, the system wasn't hacked, nothing was stolen, but this is still a big issue. According to HIPAA standards you must explicitly give people access to your records for a limited amount of time. You must "opt in" to every application. There's this one application, which operates on an "opt out" basis. So you install an iPhone app, sign in to your GHealth account, and voila! Your records are linked to an affiliated web application you did not install.

Bad, bad, bad.

This is exactly the fear expressed when PHRs first came on the scene, and it didn't help when Google adds to their sales pitch that btw, since we're not a healthcare organization we're not really bound by HIPAA.

Technically this is not a violation by GH, but they could make some simple changes to force explicit permission for any account linking. Allowing this implicint linking is just not acceptable. The good news is they are working on a fix.

I have plenty of complaints about GH but... BUT... they are the ONLY PHR which has a public API to encourage and foster innovation, so I'm grateful for that. Everyone working on PHR applictions in the open-source community is grateful, and face it, PHRs are so new, we need all the crowdsourcing we can get. Upcoming FOSS applications like ChiefMedicalOfficer, Health Wave, and Patient Aware Wave demoed this past weekend are proof of the value in that.

Google has been, and continues to be very responsive to the developer community. That's good news on the Don't Be Evil front.

I Am Become Cliche

I drive my Audi hatchback down the exit marked "Downtown San Jose" and a sign showing NASDAQ's current value greets me. I have a Daffy Duck kooshball for my desk and a flying spaghetti monster on my car. How did it come to this.

Patient Identifiers as Functional Equations

Not long ago I was talking to the CIO of a major hospital - won't say which one ;) - and describing how the Brazilian national EMR uses URIs to render unnecessary the traditional names, addresses, and other identifiers which many people in the Amazon River Basin simply don't have.

URI - Universal Resource Identifier.

His reaction surprised me. First, that he had not heard of this, a nationwide paperless medical record system, the largest open source project in the world, funded in part by the United Nations global health fund. I came across it through the open source Java community. Then he asked, "Why can't we have a universal identifier?"

So right now I am telling you to forget about universal identifiers. Not in this country. Instead start thinking about something better:

Organizational identifiers and computational inferences of equivalency.

I just started studying the IHE technical framework, and I have not yet dug into the guts of the live system, but I'm already getting the feeling that this approach is more in line with how I have been thinking about things.