Monthly Archives: May 2016

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Cognitive computing, along with its technological brethren artificial intelligence and machine learning are wading into the provider space now. IT consultancy IDC, in fact, predicted that by 2018 nearly one-third of healthcare systems will be running cognitive analytics to extract … Continue reading

Password strength – something all radiologists should know

While taking a break from studying for the Core Exam, I stumbled upon this 2016 document from Microsoft about password security (yes, in some circles that is considered “taking a break”).

As radiologists, every day we are being asked to type in some sort of authentication username and password at work.  Every other week, we’re asked to change passwords for security reasons.  Every month, we forget one of those 23 passwords we’ve created over the past 3 years for the VA or another affiliated hospital, or some software you’ve not used for a while, or even just plain forgot. Continue reading

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The use of the phrase, “Artificial Intelligence” has exploded within the past few years as the theme of dozens of our most popular movies and television shows, magazines, books, and social media. This is despite the difficulty that many experts … Continue reading

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The May 2016 iteration of FHIR… has arrived. Most notable among its new capabilities: support for the Clinical Quality Language for clinical decision support as well as further development of work on genomic data, workflow, eClaims, provider directories and CCDA … Continue reading

The Paradox of Standardizing Broad Data

Last October, my team started working on a project to bridge the communication gaps between inpatient general medicine and radiology.  Despite having done a full year of internship before starting residency, we quickly realized that as radiologists we knew very little about healthcare is delivered on the wards.  Understanding how well the imaging workflow runs from ordering to reporting, identifying possible delays by systematically analyzing patient data seemed straightforward.

Hypothesized imaging workflow for admitted medicine patients. Source: post author

A 2-hour meeting, eight weeks of delay, and several email exchanges later, we now rely mostly on manual data collection. This blog post is about what happened. Continue reading