Lab coats are unnecessary. Name tags are a good idea, and more professional. Hiking boots are okay, too.
Morning Headlines 3/20/18
Following earnings discrepancies, an executive exodus and investigation for fraud, Constellation Healthcare Technologies files Chapter 11 for several of its subsidiaries.
Joe Biden: To Save and Improve Lives Using Data, Details Matter
Former Vice President and founder of the Biden Cancer Initiative Joe Biden responds to the Trump administration’s MyHealthEData initiative with next steps that include mandating the provision of a patient’s digital health data within 24 hours of treatment.
Trump administration to seek stiffer penalties against drug dealers, reduce opioid prescribing
Trump administration officials share plans to fight the opioid epidemic, including the creation of national PDMP that would flag suspicious prescriptions.
Re: Biden’s remarks– I’ve been letting slide all this talk of patient “data” and access to it, feeling it isn’t worth the time to try to stand in a river and push in another direction. Do we really mean data? Most of what I see in motion, even with interoperability initiatives and FHIR API’s, are *records*, which is to say, documents–text representing the documentation of care, mostly in a legal medical record sense. As a clinician, I can say that, no doubt, this information has use and value, especially compared with the alternative. Still, it is far from computable. Biden’s interest in “data sets” shows he is reaching for the latter, and I am beginning to think the lack of distinction is really a problem, expectations-wise.
Hopefully, ongoing progress in natural language processing (is the language really that natural?) will save us (by which I mean, me, the clinician) from fixing it, by becoming even more of a data entry worker.
Keep up the good work,
rb
Randy Bak, MD JD FAAP