Medical informatics needs a rock star. Not a David Brailer-esque figure who could excite people in the technology sphere, but perhaps a Don Berwick type who can reach every level and constituency of health care, and even capture the imagination of the general public.
I had this thought yesterday during a highly engaging session at the American Medical Informatics Association's annual symposium in Washington, a session with the mouthful of a title, "Harnessing Mass Collaboration to Synthesize and Disseminate Successful CDS Implementation Practices." In English, that means panelists were discussing the forthcoming "Improving Outcomes with Clinical Decision Support: An Implementer’s Guide" and related feedback mechanisms, including a wiki.
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17
November
By now you know that Senator Max Baucus (D-MT) has offered a “Call to Arms†for health care reform by way of a 98-page policy document. There is much to think about in Baucus’ proposal, so you might have missed the section where he talks about increasing payments to primary care providers at the expense of compensation for specialists. But in the future, keep your eyes peeled for developments around this proposition—because supporting primary care is going to be a complex and controversial undertaking.
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17
November
I don't often use THCB for direct political protests. I don't care what the obscure cult known as The Church of Jesus and the Latter Day Saints does in the privacy of its own congregation, even though it (like many other churches) discriminates against all types of people and actively excommunicates homosexuals.
I don't even care that a group that left the east coast because of the discrimination it faced from people and groups there (including the killing of its founder by an angry mob) has somehow become a bastion of its own bigotry. I don't even care that many in the Mormon church hypocritically wink at the concept of "non-traditional marriages" so long as they contain one man and many women. And I guess that I don't care that a group of any kind decides to spend $20 million and organize to influence election results, even if their stance is riddled with bigotry and hatred coded with terms about "defending marriage."
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17
November
CALL FOR PAPERS
Special issue of Subjectivity on
‘NEUROSCIENCE AND SUBJECTIVITY’
Edited by:
John Cromby
Tim Newton
Simon Williams
The 1990’s ‘decade of the brain’ saw the beginning of a massive expansion of research into and publicity about neuroscience. New imaging techniques, capable of producing arresting pictorial images of patterns of brain activation, proliferated through the mass media, and evocatively named subdisciplines (social neuroscience, neuropsychoanalysis) grabbed the attention of many scholars.
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17
November