The KHIT Blog: A quick note of thanks to KHIT readers

Sunday, December 18, 2016

A quick note of thanks to KHIT readers

Earlier this month I thought that perhaps this blog would get to 600,000 hits by the end of December. Launched my MacAir this morning at 9:02 when I got up. Lordy.

My traffic has been on a significant upspike for the past 2 weeks or so. Not sure as to the cause(s), but I am grateful for you readers. The recent accelerated traffic spurt looks to have begun with my post about Trump HHS Secretary nominee Tom Price (committed ObamaCare, Medicare, and women's reproductive rights foe), then on to my latest on the continuing woes of Theranos (regarding which there will be more shortly; their sorry QA data deserve an entire post), followed by my post about the fabulous new Michael Lewis book The Undoing Project on the lives and important work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, and finally my most recent post on the Donald Trump-Silicon Valley CEO Trump Tower "Summit."

All I can say is a "sincere thanks" for continuing to stop by. I'll keep at it. I don't do this for money; I just continue to do it because it's important -- no sponsors or other "monetization." The overlapping topics of Health IT (including coding/database platforms, mHealth, UX, HIE, and hardy perennial misnomer "interoperability"), Biomed Tech, health care delivery and economics, "upstream" issues (apropos of "population health"), workflow, organizational culture, leadership, startups and venture capital, intellectual property, privacy and security, clinical cognition, clinical pedagogy, clinical science, genomics, analytics, policy and law...

No shortage of relevant subject matter and contentious issues.

SAVE THE DATE

I will again be there. Register here.

Below, the next day (January 12th), the NorCal HIMSS Chapter is hosting a one-day event in Santa Clara.

From the email I got:

Come hear leading innovation physicians and national clinical HIT innovation experts offer forward leaning perspectives that include:

Innovation thinking from outside healthcare to transform personalized health and patient engagement through digital, mobile and the cloud.

Genomic and IOT - behavioral, clinical and genetic data capture/analysis - Intel's "inside-out model."

How formal collaboration optimizes "inside-out" commercialization, research and tech transfer, and venture fund approaches to bringing ideas to fruition and fertile markets.

Generating actionable insights and speeding innovation by continually looking at new and better ways to manage data

Understand how machine learning can be woven into existing population health and personalized care business intelligence and analytics efforts.

Who should attend: C-Level, Physicians, Nursing Informaticists, IT professionals, health innovation leadership, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, startups and anyone involved with and passionate about improving the delivery of care.

I asked for a press pass. I don't think they're gonna grant me one. Got an equivocal response (after having to bypass their broken "event organizer contact" template on the conference pitch page), asking how much I would do to promote the event in advance (just a tad late, 'eh?), but never answering my media pass question.

Maybe my timing was unfortunate, in light of my snarky, tangentially "off-topic" prior post.

Pretty sleepy over at the NorCalHIMSS TwitterVerse. Last tweet was about 10 months ago?

Whatever. There's lots else to do. Just FYI anyway, in case you might want to attend.

ERRATA

Hahaha...

Below, duh: it occurs to me that I have long been remiss, and need to join the Health 2.0 San Francisco Chapter and contribute.

I just put a permanent link in the right hand links column.
____________

More to come...

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Brave New Health

Commonwell Health Alliance

Another important read (pdf)

I love this kind of stuff. It sustains and humbles me. "As politicians, advertisers, salesmen, and propagandists for various political, economic, moral, religious, psychic, environmental, dietary, and artistic doctrinaire positions know only too well, fallible human minds are easily tricked, by clever verbiage... Common language—or at least, the English language—has an almost universal tendency to disguise epistemological statements by putting them into a grammatical form which suggests to the unwary an ontological statement. A major source of error in current probability theory arises from an unthinking failure to perceive this."

Quotes

"An economist is a person who sees something that works in practice and tries to figure out whether it will work in theory."

- J.D. Kleinke, medical economist
___

"The only person who enjoys change is a baby with a wet diaper."

"Every misspent dollar in our health care system is part of somebody's paycheck.

- Brent James, M.D., M.Stat

“We could do healthcare, at markedly higher quality, for everyone in this country, without rationing or denying anybody the care that they need, without having the government dictate how doctors practice or whether hospitals could expand, at half the cost we do it now.”

- Health Care Futurist Joe Flower

Most of the sciences, unlike parts of medical science, are not concerned with the impossible. There is not complementary and alternative physics, or chemistry, or biochemistry, or engineering. These disciplines compare their ideas against reality, and, if the ideas are found wanting, abandoned."

- Mark A. Crislip, MD

"Q: How much alcohol is too much?
A: More than your doctor drinks."

- a physician I once heard speak during a CME presentation

“Just because science doesn’t know everything, doesn’t mean you get to fill in the gaps with whatever fairy tale most appeals to you.”

- Dara O’Briain

'[I]t is one small step from using the computer for "helping" doctors to monitoring them, judging them, dictating to them what to do, and withdrawing payment for computer non-compliance. The use of computer data is a multi-edged sword. It can be used for the "good," facilitating diagnosis and treatment and making it more accurate and up-to-date, and for “evil,” invading privacy, inviting security breechs, and making decisions based on the opinions of remote authorities rather than those present at the patient-doctor encounter.'

- Richard Reece, MD

“[T]here ARE statistics which are non-political. Just because The Washington Post/Fox News reports the temperature is 75 degrees doesn’t mean it’s really snowing and sunscreen is a liberal/conservative plot. Even if you earn a living being ideological.”

- Michael L. Millenson

"It is a generally a fairly convincing argument that people shouldn’t have to be subsidized to undertake a change which is in their best interest.

The reconciliation seems to be that EHR is not supposed to make a doctor’s practice more efficient and higher quality. It is supposed to make the system of care more efficient and higher quality, which is not the same thing. Those of you who took calc recall that maximizing the total of variables is not achieved by maximizing any one variable and this is a perfect example of that.

Those of you have served in combat certainly noticed that too — if everyone works as a team the unit takes fewer casualties. If you try to save your own hide, you might, but at the expense of more casualties overall."

- Al Lewis

"There are two ideas to keep in mind about Bayesian reasoning and how we tend to mess it up. The first is that base rates matter, even in the presence of evidence about the case at hand. This is often not intuitively obvious. The second is that intuitive impressions of the diagnosticity of evidence are often exaggerated."

- Daniel Kahneman, "Thinking, Fast and Slow"

"Physicians apply advanced scientific knowledge, but they must do so without the favorable conditions that experimental scientists create for themselves. Multitasking is forced on physicians, often in chaotic environments and under severe time and resource constraints."

- Lawrence and Lincoln Weed, "Medicine in Denial"

"It’s time to stop the whining about Obama care and acknowledge we already have universal health care. We just pay for it in the stupidest way possible that ensures problems are that much more disastrous and complicated when they’re finally treated."

- Mark Hoofnagle, MD, PhD

"Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily."

- Thomas Szasz, MD
___

"Of course, one reason that process metrics* are so popular is that processes are much easier to define and measure than outcomes."

- The Skeptical Scalpel
___

"There is an “illusion of validity” for any random data point, a seductive sense that is colored by what we hope will be true. Mountains of pharmaceutical claims are often made from mere molehills of data."

- Danielle Ofri, MD
___

"Joy empowers people. It is a source of energy that enables people to hope and plan and change their lives for the better. Spend some time around someone who is relentlessly negative and how do you feel–drained, right? More and more research shows that joy is not something that just happens to you, like a bolt of lightening out of the blue. Joy is, instead, a habit to cultivate. Negative thinking and despair are the crabgrass of our souls–weeds that take root and spread, sometimes to all areas of life. Joy, in contrast, is a soul’s rose–hardy when cared for, able to put down roots over time and withstand disease and extremes. Like a rose, however, your joy can become blighted from neglect or harsh conditions. We all need to tend to our joy–to prune away the badness, and to know that, even though it may look like a prickly bare root, if you invest time in a joyous outlook, gorgeous things will bloom, even in the harshest conditions."

- Dr. Jan Gurley
___

"'Solutions' exist only in mathematics."

- Karen Martin
___

"The issue of how to regulate clinical software is, in the long run, indistinguishable from the issue of how to regulate medicine. The only difference is that medicine is practiced in the open, without secrecy, subject to peer review, and under a merit-based state license."

- Adrian Gropper, MD
___

"Economist, rope, tree: some assembly required."

- Source unknown

DISCLAIMER:

I write this blog wholly on my own time and my own dime. The views proffered are expressly my own as a concerned and active citizen/taxpayer (in addition to being the result of my substantive experience in the various IT fields), and in no way reflect any policy views of my former employer, notwithstanding that some of the thinking has indeed obviously been spurred by the implications of the work with which I have been doing for them.

FAIR USE POLICY
I cite a ton of news and web sources spanning the breadth of relevant technical and policy domains, sometimes at substantial length. I believe I remain well within the bounds of "Fair Use," as [1] I am not doing any of this for profit, [2] I always provide attribution and links -- which, [3] far from negatively impacting any copyright holders' commercial interests, might actually increase traffic to and interest in their offerings.

Nonetheless, should I post anything of yours regarding which you have any objection, just let me know and I will remove it forthwith.

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Sunday, December 18, 2016

A quick note of thanks to KHIT readers

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