For some, weekends are a good time to sit around and relax. I tend to do that in the early morning hours of the weekends because the house is quiet and it doesn’t take away from any of the activities that happen during the “normal hours”. It gives me time to catch up on things that I like to do; surf the net and read articles.
– At the moment about 50% of everything I come across on the internet is related to the iPad, and that’s probably a conservative estimate. Everyone has something to say about the device and as predicted by many people healthcare appears to have embraced the device like nothing I’ve seen in recent memory. Our facility has even taken a proactive approach to using the device, which is a little out of character as we typically move at a slower, more methodical pace. It’s a good thing.
Anyway, I did discover a couple of interesting things about the iPad this weekend. First, the Evernote application for the iPad is off the charts in functionality and usability. There were a couple of weird screen glitches while using Evernote, but overall the experience was great.
The second thing I discovered was that there is a real need for healthcare related applications for the iPad. I spent a lot of time this weekend searching for medical applications to throw on the device and I was disappointed by what I didn’t find. I suspect that will change in the very near future as developers start to see the niche market created by this device in healthcare.
– I found a very interesting YouTube video featuring Dragon Dictation for the iPad. I’m a big fan of speech recognition software and would like to see more of it in healthcare.
The new Android 2.1 update features speech-to-text functionality and my wife and I have been using it to send text messages back and forth on our DROIDs. It’s not a 100% accurate, but it’s still pretty cool stuff. I digress.
Dragon Dictation for the iPad looks like a great little app and one that I think many physicians already using the iPad will find useful.
– Have you seen the new Barbie Computer Engineer Doll? No? Well check it out. Now all we need is a Pharmacist Ken doll.
– Read an interesting blog post on Clinical Decision Support on the Practice Fusion website this weekend. According to the post “we should not be discouraged by early studies showing variable efficacy of CDS systems. Instead, we should view such studies as a wake-up call. Implementing CDS is a lot harder than simply designing the alerts themselves. But the enormous promise of CDS should motivate us to put in the time and the research dollars required to get this right.” – I agree with the sentiment. From a pharmacists point of view I can tell you that clinical alerts are helpful at times, but most are useless and contribute to alert fatigue.
– RxInformatics.com: “I happen to catch this amazing program from PBS FrontLine. Highly, highly recommended on many levels.  It even freaked me out a bit and I spend way too much time on line.” – I started watching the program mentioned in this post by John Poikonen and looked up to find my wife sitting next to me. The program was sobering to say the least.
– I have found the lack of flash support to be quite annoying on the iPad. And yes, the iPad does frequently drop its Wi-Fi connection or forgets credentials necessary to gain access to secure wireless; also quite annoying.
– The Annals of Pharmacotherapy: “Medication Risk Must Be Balanced with Benefit, not Fear – This article is a reminder that safety is always at risk when progress and benefit are the outcomes of pharmacotherapy. Risk and benefit are mutually inclusive ideas and should never be separated. When risk dominates, fear is generated.” – Yep, every medication carries with it some degree of risk. The trick is being aware of what that risk is and making a personal decision whether or not to accept it.
– Baseball season started. Two questions: first, when will it be over? And second, when does football season start?
– Top 10 search phrases that brought people to this site over the past 7 days: (1) cloud computing cartoon, (2) dynamed uptodate, (3) pharmacokinetics iphone application, (4) medication reconciliation, (5) xcelolab, (6) hybrid cloud, (7) perforated label, (8) mansonella perstans, (9) talyst, (10) alaris infusion pump.
Here’s to a great week everyone. Enjoy.
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