I wrote about Pandora back in December 2009. It was a great piece of software back in the day. I remember a time when nearly everyone in pharmacy that used Pyxis ADC’s to control their medication distribution at nursing units also used Pandora to generate reports, look at data, and detect controlled substance diversion. The two … Read more
I spent the day in San Francisco attending the Tableau 8 Roadshow event.
Tableau is an amazing piece of software that helps you link to data in various forms – SQL databases, Excel spreadsheets, Google analytics, and many, many more – and use that information to create stunning visualizations. It’s insanely easy to use, and quite frankly is one of the most impressive pieces of software I’ve ever used to present data in an easy to understand manner.
Welcome to March everyone. So much happens each and every week that it’s hard to keep up sometimes. Here are some of the tabs that are open in my browser this morning along with some random thoughts….
I picked up the coffee mug to the right in Fitchburg, WI last summer while on a business trip. I drove there from Chicago after stopping off to visit a hospital in Winfield, IL. Wisconsin was a pretty nice place to visit in the summer. I wasn’t able to do a bunch of touristy stuff, but I did get a chance to see a movie at one of the nicest movie theaters I’ve ever been in. The theater was big, and it had a piano in the lobby. Strange thing about Wisconsin, they have the nicest highway rest stops I’ve ever used. If you’re ever in California I’d avoid the rest stops; good place to skip.
I had an interesting phone conversation this morning with Kevin Sneed, Pharm.D.(@DeanSneed), Dean at the University of South Florida College of Pharmacy (USF COP). I’ve been trying to connect with Dr. Sneed for a while now, but as you can imagine his schedule is pretty full. Fortunately for me I was able to grab about 30 minutes … Read more
LA Times: “Altogether, 16,288 patients’ information was taken from the home of a physician whose house was burglarized on Sept. 6, according to the UCLA Health System. The data were on the physician’s external hard drive, officials said. Though the hard drive was encrypted, a piece of paper with the password was nearby and is … Read more
EHR outlook: “Patients are still worried about how secure their data will be when stored in an EHR systems, a new study suggests. Xerox Corporation found that of 2,720 poll respondents: 80% were concerned with stolen personal information 64% were concerned with lost, damaged or corrupted files 62% were concerned with the misuse of information” I’m … Read more
A wise colleague of mine once told me that lots of people collect data, but few people know what to do with it. I didn’t understand what he was talking about at the time, but I’ve come to have a better understanding over the years. It basically boils down to the difficulty that many of us experience when it comes to the best way to handle information. Our brains do some amazing things, but fail to “see†things when the perspective is all wrong.
Data surrounds us. It’s in everything we do, from the bank statements we receive in our personal life to the mountains of data collected by every healthcare institution. Regardless of the data collected, there are basically three things that can be done with it. Data can be ignored, it can be archived or it can be used. Unfortunately only one of those three things is truly useful; using it. Many people chose to ignore or archive data not because the information isn’t valuable, but because they are overwhelmed with the amount of information they receive and the way that the information is presented.
When my brother, Rob and I get together it often brings our wives to tears with boredom as we often get deeply engrossed in long conversations about computers, software and technology in general. Super Bowl weekend was no different. Rob and I started talking about strategies for connecting various pharmacy systems to other hospital systems … Read more
There’s an interesting article at InformationWeek about healthcare and the cloud. The article talks a little bit about the concerns surrounding security in the cloud and what I believe is an undeserved fear of using cloud based services and storage for healthcare information.
In the article a pediatrician that is also director of clinical informatics for Atrius Health is quoted as saying “At the moment I’m not convinced that there’s a secure enough place in the cloud or that the functionality exists for us to do everything that we need to do in the cloud. The cloud allows for a tremendous amount of interconnectivity between computers because it’s using data storage that’s free amongst different networks and I wouldn’t want healthcare information being scattered in a way that I couldn’t protect it appropriately.” I’m not sure I understand the perceived insecurity of the cloud as the existing infrastructure for storing patient information in healthcare is, by design, insecure.
