This is an interesting post by Tim O’Reilly pointing out one of the disconnects with data in the health care system: who actually owns the data? The patient? Most health care systems would probably argue against that, but as we want to move to a system of personalized medicine it will be difficult to argue that the patient should not own their own data and be able to decide which providers it should be shared with.
The world of integrating all of the electronic medical record systems that we will be seeing will be a messy and complicated one.
A Manifesto on Health Data Rights - O’Reilly Radar
I need to check this out some more when I have time, it looks interesting … it is supposed to be a web based data discovery tool developed in Ontario, shades of old consulting projects (accessing databases fro Canadian Opinion Research Archives, Stats Can, etc)
ODESI - Home
An interesting summary of real world experience with the amazon cloud computing environment … interesting take away that the cloud is more expensive than actual servers, but I wonder if that is before or after infrastructure costs are factored in - or just what the math is behind that statement
Real-world cloud computing
This is an excellent article from the New Yorker on the reason why health care is so expensive in the US. It takes a good look at why one of the poorer counties in the country has an average medicare expenditure that double the national average and 25% more than the income per capita in the county. And it is not because they have better equipment (they don’t), or newer hospitals (they don’t) or better doctors (they don’t) or are even substantially better than other places in the state with similar demographics that cost half as much (they aren’t)
Annals of Medicine: The Cost Conundrum: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker
Interesting technology for monitoring cancer treatment: “The devices, which could be implanted at the time of biopsy, could also be tailored to monitor chemotherapy agents, allowing doctors to determine whether cancer drugs are reaching the tumors.”
It gets more interesting as you imagine some of the other types of similar applications that might be possible.
Implantable Device Offers Continuous Cancer Monitoring |
Interesting post by Seth Godin about the importance of the distinction of luxury vs premium as it relates to apple and microsoft.
Seth’s Blog: Luxury vs. premium
Infochimps.org
Something about the name infochimps that attracts me to the site and makes me want to spend some time digging around to see what they have come up with.
What it is, is a rather large collection of free datasets and is well worth checking out for some useful and not so useful datasets.
I found it by tripping over pitching stats for Josh Beckett at dataspora.org
