Quick review of things worth reading this week

I missed my regular Saturday morning coffee post yesterday for a couple of reasons. I have a cold that has been kicking my butt all week. Not sure why this cold feels particularly weighty, but it does. Is it that I’m run down or that I’m aging? I pray that it’s the former, but fear that it is the latter. My good friends acetaminophen, antihistamine and decongestant have helped me through the week. Top that off with one of the worst travel weeks I can remember in a while and I’m ready for a day on the couch.

Yesterday was a bit of a reprieve as I found myself in Los Angeles visiting my daughter and watching the UCLA men’s basketball team lose to Oregon in an exciting game. I would have preferred that UCLA won, but at least I had some downtime with my family and the weather in Los Angeles was spectacular.

However, life goes on and there were at least a few things I read this week that are worth sharing:

– StumbleUpon led me to a website called Interactive Clinical Pharmacology. The site offers some great interactive graphs that demonstrate the principles of pharmacokinetics. Take a minute to play, it’s fun.

– Mashable has a nice little article on Google+ Communities. When Google+ announced Communities I was skeptical. No longer. I’ve found them to be quite useful and find myself visiting my Communities first, before looking through my general Google+ stream.

– UMPC Portal: Lenovo Ideatab Lynx Early Review (Tablet Only). UMPC Portal is a great place for information on mobile computing, especially their video reviews. I’ve been going there for years. This week Chippy takes a quick look at the Lenovo IdeaTab Lynx. “The Lenovo IdeaTab Lynx, an 11.6” tablet PC is a completely different story however and is easily the best 11.6” tablet PC I’ve used, and that includes the original Samsung XE700, a well-crafted tablet PC with Core CPU and a digitizer.” That statement carries a lot of weight in my book.

– In the no-duh article of the week: “A study of text messaging designed to influence teens to adopt healthy lifestyles has found that adolescents prefer messages with an active voice that reference teens and recommends specific, achievable behaviors, according to an article in the January issue of the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior.” – Fierce Mobile Healthcare

– MediaFire is an online storage solution that you might be interested in. They start you off with 50GB of free space. I know, I know, not another cloud storage solution. What can I say, I like this stuff. I’ve been playing with it off and on all week. They have a ways to go in terms of usability, but it’s not bad, and the 50GB of storage has its advantages.

– Taking the pharmacist to the patient. What a novel concept. Fierce Healthcare: The power of pharmacists in reducing readmissions: “So with new technology and new full-time pharmacists, the St. Louis hospital gave patients the ability to fill prescriptions at their bedside. The initiative has already seen results, with more than 2,800 patients filling 13,000 prescriptions, and approximately 40 percent of patients now leaving Barnes-Jewish with their medication, the article noted.” I’ve been working on an idea around this concept for a while now. Anyone interesting in talking about it just let me know. Always happy to share information.

– Wachter’s World: Making Clinicians Get Flu Shots: “I was recently speaking to the clinical leaders of a mid-sized hospital, and a senior administrator posed the question, “should we require our doctors and nurses to get flu shots?” The answer, I said, is yes, and it isn’t just to prevent the flu. It’s to get into the habit of making our folks do the right thing when it comes to patient safety.” – Bob opened a can of worms with this one. Read the comments, you’ll be entertained. I believe that people in certain categories should get the flu shot and I recommend it to those people, but it is clearly a personal choice. Do I think people that refuse to vaccinate their children are idiots? Yes, yes I do, but mandating injections for things like influenza for “the greater good” is a slippery slope. Where and when do you draw the line at personal choice? I remember being in the Army and getting injected for various “things”. I had no choice and it always gave me the creeps. Something to think about.

– Thanks to Carla Corkern for the lead on this one. The John A. Hartford Foundation: “Pono and his friends were entering a FIRST LEGO League competition to build a robot that could assist older adults. FIRST LEGO League is “a robotics program for 9 to 16 year olds, which is designed to get children excited about science and technology — and teach them valuable employment and life skills.”” – Great stuff. Awesomeness is what you get when imaginations are unencumbered by experience. I ran into some “encumbered imaginations” at work this week where “can’t be done” is our motto. Sometimes experience is a bad thing. Kudos to these kids. Keep up the good work.