A new study found that physicians have a surprisingly poor knowledge of the benefits and harms of common medical treatments. Almost 80% overestimated the benefits, and two-thirds overestimated the harms. And, as Aaron Carroll pointed out, it's not just that they were off, but "it's how off they often were." Anyone out there who still doesn't think artificial intelligence (AI) is needed in health care? The authors noted that previous studies have found that patients often overestimate benefits as well, but tended to minimize potential harms. Not only do physicians overestimate harm, they "underestimate how often most treatments have no effects on patients -- either harmful or beneficial"...
Feature Articles
To Err Is Human, To Diagnose Artificial Intelligence is...?
By Kim Bellard | September 5, 2016
Halamka on the ONC Blockchain Challenge
By John D. Halamka, MD | August 31, 2016
Early this year, I posted a collaborative discussion about the potential applications of Blockchain for healthcare. Ariel Ekblaw from the MIT Media Lab collaborated with Beth Israel Medical Center (BIDMC) to actually implement Blockchain medication reconciliation with deidentified patient data. ONC selected it as a winner of the Blockchain Challenge. The idea is simple. Blockchain was invented to handle financial transactions such as deposits and withdrawls. Medication management is very similar to a bank account. Think of your body as a vault.
Fighting Ebola with Open Source Collaboration
By Jeff Neiman | August 31, 2016
The enormity and severity of the West African Ebola epidemic that began in 2014 is hard to fathom. Over 10,000 people died with hundreds of thousands deeply affected by loss. In treating any medical condition, information is needed to provide adequate care, but when it’s an epidemic so severe, so dangerous and so fast-moving, it’s required more than ever. Ebola creates enormous barriers for patient care. It’s communicability means those who directly treat patients within the “Red Zone” must take extreme precautions. The lack of knowledge about who is infected and what constitutes effective treatment — not to mention the swift and severe toll it takes on the human body — makes caring for those affected extremely difficult...
Will Octobot Transform Medicine?
By Kim Bellard | August 28, 2016
Acclaimed futurist Ray Kurzweil has a lot of bold predictions (including that computers will become smarter than us within a few decades), and some of his most interesting ones deal with how technology -- especially nanotechnology -- will soon totally revamp how we manage our health, leading to longer, healthier lives and hugely increased intelligence. Sounds like science fiction, right? Meet Octobot. Harvard researchers have unveiled what they describe as the "first autonomous, entirely soft robot," which they call Octobot (it has eight arms, like an octopus). It has no metal, no battery, no electronics of any sort, yet manages to move under its own power. It uses a "microfluidic logic circuit" rather than a circuit board to control the movements of its arms and to power itself along, using gas reactions...
7 Resources for Open Education Materials
By Don Watkins | February 28, 2017
Shrinking school budgets and growing interest in open content has created an increased demand for open educational resources. According to the FCC, "The U.S. spends more than $7 billion per year on K-12 textbooks, but too many students are still using books that are 7-10 years old, with outdated material." There is an alternative: openly licensed courseware. But where do you find this content and how can you share your own teaching and learning materials? This month I've rounded up a list of seven open educational resources for K-12 and higher education...
How to Organize Your Scholarly Research with Docear
By Joshua Allen Holm | October 15, 2016
The Docear academic literature suite blends Freeplane and JabRef to make a comprehensive academic paper-writing application, with support for mind-mapping, citations, notes, and many other features. Writing a major scholarly paper can be a daunting undertaking. Turning a collection of scholarly research into a coherent paper requires a great deal of organizing and planning. To simplify that task, there are many tools available to assist a researcher with keeping track of their bibliographic citations, and there are also plenty of tools to help a user organize their thoughts...
5 Reasons Professors Should Encourage Students to Get Involved in Open Source Projects
By Heidi Ellis | August 23, 2016
I've been supporting student participation in humanitarian free and open source software (HFOSS) projects for over a decade. I've seen students get motivated and excited by working in a professional community while they learn and mature professionally. Out of the many reasons for supporting student participation in open source, here are five of the most compelling reasons...
What Do We Mean When We Talk About Software 'Alternatives'?
By Seth Kenlon | August 22, 2016
The word alternative is one of those shifty terms, with a definition that changes depending on perspective. For instance, something that is alternative to one person is the norm for another. Generally, the term alternative is considered to be defined by the fact that it is not considered to be in the majority or the mainstream. Then again, sometimes the term "alternative" gets attached to the second instance of something. If a web server, such as Apache, exists, then any time a different web server gets mentioned, it gets the alternative badge, because we all assume that we all silently concede that whatever it is, it's an alternative to that big one that we all know about...
How Scientists Are Using Digital Badges
By Marcus D. Hanwell | August 22, 2016
The open source world pioneered the use of digital badges to reward skills, achievements, and to signal transparency and openness. Scientific journals should apply open source methods, and use digital badges to encourage transparency and openness in scientific publications. Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts know all about merit badges. Scouts earn merit badges by mastering new skills. Mozilla Open Badges is a pioneer in awarding digital merit badges for skills and achievements. One example of a badge-issuing project is Buzzmath, where Open Badges are issued to recognize progress in mathematics to students, or anyone wanting to brush up on their skills...
Pardon Me, Your Interface Is Showing
By Kim Bellard | August 21, 2016
In a great post, "Doctor as Designer" Joyce Lee laments the "sad state of product and design in healthcare," and asks "when will device and drug companies create user-centered innovations that actually improve the lives of patients instead of their bottom line?" I heartily agree with Dr. Lee's point, and think the question can be extended to the rest of the health care system. Dr. Lee uses two examples to compare health care to consumer goods. Heinz took a product design -- the glass ketchup bottle -- that had been around for over a hundred years, and greatly improved the user experience by changing to a squeezable "upside down" bottle. This not only kept the ketchup from concentrating at the bottom but also avoided the need to hold the bottle at a special angle or to tap at a particular spot just to get the ketchup out...
Writing an Academic Paper? Try Fidus Writer
By D Ruth Bavousett | November 2, 2016
The Fidus Writer online editor is especially for academics who need to write papers in collaboration with other authors, and it includes special tools for managing citations, formulas, and bibliographies. If you're writing an academic paper by yourself, you have a lot of choices for tools to edit your document. Some of them even take care of making your footnotes and bibliographies come out in the right format. But writing collaboratively is harder, for lots of reasons. You could use Google Docs, ownCloud, or even Dropbox to share the document, but then you lose useful citation-management tools...
Building an Open Medical Records System for the Developing World
By Don Watkins | August 19, 2016
How do you introduce a woman whose very life is the epitome of humanitarian efficacy? Judy Gichoya is a Kenyan medical doctor specializing in radiology and an experienced programmer who's accelerating the growth of OpenMRS. According to its website, "OpenMRS is a software platform and a reference application which enables design of a customized medical records system with no programming knowledge." Judy first got interested in computers in high school, prior to entering medical school she learned to program at a technical college and through online resources on the internet...
How to Design Your Open Source Project to Encourage Participation
By Laura Hilliger | August 16, 2016
Working openly means designing for participation. "Designing for participation" is a way of providing people with insight into your project, which you've built from the start to incorporate and act on that insight. Documenting how you intend to make decisions, which communication channels you’ll use, and how people can get in touch with you are the first steps in designing for participation. Other steps include working openly, being transparent, and using technologies that support collaboration and additional ways of inviting participation. In the end, it’s all about providing context: Interested people must be able to get up to speed and start participating in your project, team, or organization as quickly and easily as possible...
Out With the Old...Wait, Not in Health Care
By Kim Bellard | August 15, 2016
The last company still manufacturing VCRs announced it has ceased their production. VCRs had a good run, most households had one, but their time has passed. Meanwhile, the stethoscope is celebrating its 200th birthday, and is still virtually the universal symbol for health care professionals. There has got to be a moral in there somewhere. VCRs revolutionized our TV viewing experience. We could record television shows to not only watch programs at our own convenience, but we could also fast forward through commercials! We could watch the movies we wanted, when we wanted to, in the comfort of our own homes. Video rental outlets popped up everywhere, from boutique neighborhood stores to wildly successful chains like Blockbuster...
U.S. Government Seeks Reduced Use of Custom Software, Releases New Policy to 'Free the Code'
By Mark Bohannon | August 13, 2016
As I've written before, there has been a shift, going back almost a decade, away from the debate over whether to use open source to a focus on the how to. The release by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) of the U.S. Federal Source Code Policy on August 8th is the latest manifestation of this shift. It achieves the goal laid out in the Obama administration's Second Open Government National Action Plan (PDF) for improved access to custom software code developed for the federal government. The plan emphasized use of (and contributing back to) open source software to fuel innovation, lower costs, and benefit the public. It also furthers a long-standing "default to open" objective going back to the early days of the administration...
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