Tales from the hospital ward

Digital Pathology, the way of the future in pathology. Will digital pathology be implemented? Read more here .

As I am still green about the ears when it comes to configuring a Raid array using two hard drives, I opted to let Fedora 16 configure them for me at installation, as Raid 0. Raid 0 means that the data is "striped" across the two hard drives. My system has only one SATA raid controller. Both drives are assigned the same letter and visually the system shows one hard drive, with one hard drive of space available. So what is the value of having a Raid 0 configuration? If I had opted for Raid 1, at some point where one of the hard drives fails, I would be able to recover the data by putting in a third hard drive, and magically back up my data to the third drive before disabling the  failed hard drive and removing it. As it is Raid 0, the only value is that data is retrieved faster than if working with one hard drive. Next time an upgrade is required I will hopefully have learned how to reconfigure it to Raid 1. So now, with Fedora 16 freshly updated to Fedora 17, I chose to...

Practitioners know that digitising health records has the potential not only to improve patient outcomes, but to save lives. What implications are there for the GP that works in a small team? Critical decision making by the GP will be on record for other health providers to assess. This can only serve to better patient outcomes, but will put the GP under more pressure to improve decision making. This may only add to their reluctance to participate in ehealth schemes  as they know that they will also be burdened with the large cost of implementing the required hardware and software to make the practice ehealth compliant.

The implementation of ICT can revolutionise the delivery of health care. It makes so much economical sense to have a standard health record that can be accessed by users and providers, if it can be monitored by an independant authority. A health record, for example, could eliminate duplicate pathology testing, which costs the taxpayer and only serves to put money in the health provider's pockets. A patient can go to a doctor, who will order a battery of pathology tests to get a diagnosis. If the patient wants a second opinion, the patient may visit a second doctor, who will again order the same battery of tests, from a different pathology provider. As all of these tests are subsidised by medicare, the taxpayer pays for the entire process. There are no regulations in place to prevent this from occurring. The Australian government has set up NETHA to manage the transition to an ehealth system. Yet the process is buried by mountains of oppositon from man...

When ever its time for an update to eclipse I make sure I've backed up all my existing projects first. By chronicling my install problems here in this blog, I can refer to it for my next install. I'm wanting to install the openMRS source code and get it running on my machine. OpenMRS is an open source volunteer project, to develop an open medical record system that will contain a patient's history. The goal is  to  use it in places like Kenya Africa, to track the history of patient treatment for diseases including  HIV and TB, and also keep check on pregnant women to ensure that they receive medical care for the safe delivery of their babies. The instructions indicated that it would work with the Eclipse version of Indigo that I had been working with. But on installing Maven, all my web projects blew up. And to add insult to injury, Maven was installed, but it wasn't visible in the console. Ok. Time to update Eclipse to the la...

The debate about open source software compared to proprietary software in the area of ehealth is worth following. An article in a  journal  , jmir, on medical internet research, lists some compelling cons for open source use in the field of health informatics. Notably it states "Successful OSS projects tap into the skills of the community that forms around them to suggest new features, report bugs, and modify the source code accordingly. A nascent developer community must have something testable to play with but, once formed, open source communities can put skilled time of much greater orders of magnitude into a problem. The central argument to OSS development is that when everyone can inspect the source code, the software gets more scrutiny and more corrective feedback than a single development team can provide." The website ehealthaustalia.org contains ehealth information and links to commercial companies providing proprietary softwar...