The atenolol purchase liver hilum or porta hepatis is a fissure or opening buy t-ject 60 without prescription that allows various structures to pass into and out of generic levitra sale dangers the liver, the body's largest internal organ and second largest viagra cheap drug organ after the skin. The leaves of the Manuka tree, diflucan without prescription also known as a tea tree, have been known for buy serevent without prescription centuries among the indigenous tribes of New Zealand and southern toradol professional Australia for their healing powers. They can answer a person's purchase cheap griseofulvin sale overdose questions about pregnancy, sex, reproductive health, infertility, and numerous other cheapest arcoxia topics. It's injected into muscles in different areas of your buy cheapest viagra online body, depending on the condition being treated. Subclinical hyperthyroidism is vibramycin without prescription a condition characterized by low or undetectable levels of TSH viagra side effects with normal levels of free thyroid hormones. Visit our dedicated triamterene prescription hub for more research-backed information and in-depth resources on bipolar purchase amoxicillin no rx disorder. There are three types of HIV tests, each with buy cheap cipro a window period, which is the time between exposure and when.

Writing in the April 17 New England Journal of Medicine, Pamela Hartzband and Jerome Groopman throw cold water on the way the electronic medical record is being “touted as a panacea for nearly all the ills of modern medicine.” Among the touters they mention are George Bush, Michael Bloomberg, the presidential candidates, insurance companies, Google, and Microsoft. Electronic records are now in wide use, especially in leading teaching hospitals. But in actual practice, they observe, the record is sometimes simply “clinical plagiarism,” in which “physicians have clearly cut and pasted large blocks of text, or even complete notes, from other physicians.” It is now so easy to drop in a patient’s lab results in their entirety, that finding the wheat in the bushels of chaff is “like ‘Where’s Waldo?’,” according to one of the authors’ colleagues. Cutting and pasting for completeness replicates garbage and gold indifferently, making the electronic record “a powerful vehicle for perpetuating erroneous information.” “The worst kind of electronic medical record,” they write, “requires filling in boxes with little room for free text.” In a brief clinic visit, physicians may spend most of their time pointing and clicking rather than talking to the patient. I am reminded of the state automobile inspection process, at the end of which the driver is handed a printout of the dozens of details the inspector “checked” on the screen but not on the vehicle.

In the summer of 1971, KSL needed a programmer for his pioneering startup company, Computer Systems for Medicine, Inc. The company’s systems would take medical histories from patients. The system was a DEC PDP-8 computer and a teletype machine. HRL was starting graduate school and needed to earn a few bucks over the summer. He did the coding. He managed to wedge the entire program into 4K of 12-bit PDP-8 words. The working system was operationally a marvel; the branching logic was much more efficient at homing in on problems than the old fill-it-all-out paper history forms, and as Weizenbaum had discovered five years earlier with ELIZA, people would tell the computer things they did not feel comfortable telling a living, breathing human being.

That was 37 years ago. The engineers have been much more successful at increasing the storage capacity of computing devices than than society has been at figuring out how to make good use of all those bits that are now captured, reproduced blindly, and, very often, never examined critically.

Tags: Databases

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 9:51 am and is filed under The explosion, What is information?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.