From Anesthesiology’s July issue, an editorial by Abouleish on improving operating room throughput, accompanying a successful case study by Smith of such an improvement on joint arthroplasty surgeries. The key ingredients are parallelizing turnover tasks and using regional anesthesia. I like process improvement studies, and this may be a future classic. However, [...]
Entries from June 29th, 2008
PHP+ZF+ADOdb+YUI = Easy Web Development
June 28th, 2008 2 Comments
I recently finished a very simple non-profit website project using PHP, Zend Framework, ADOdb Active Record, and Yahoo! UI. The original site was written in unmodularized old-style ASP code, and was impossible to maintain or extend. I went with PHP because other people on the project were familiar with it, and because the [...]
Tags: adodb · php · software · yui · zend framework
RFID Tags Interfere with Medical Devices
June 24th, 2008 1 Comment
A JAMA article out this week from investigators in Amsterdam reports that RFID tags induced “potentially hazardous incidents in medical devices” in the ICU room used for testing. Ventilators and infusion pumps just shut down due to interference in some cases. Their website includes a full catalog of the observed bad behavior.
The image here [...]
Tags: interference · jama · phone · rfid
New York State Physician License Search, Ajax-Style
June 23rd, 2008 No Comments
In the hospital, I sometimes need to look up the proper spelling of a physician’s name, or their New York State license number. The state offers a search interface, but it is finicky about commas, and doesn’t have a very pretty display. The search works the way these things did 10 or 15 years ago [...]
Tags: ajax · license · license search · mashup · New York · yui
Other Posts This Week – Bugs & Fungus Edition
June 22nd, 2008 No Comments
Dr. John Halamka shares his thoughts on dangerous mushrooms in the Northeast US.
From the Stanford ER, a horrifying story of a colony of cockroaches living in a patient’s leg. (via KevinMD)
NYU starts a medical broadcast on satellite radio.
Firefox 3.0 has been released! I upgraded this week, and it’s definitely faster with several small improvements. [...]
Tags: cockroach · discontent · er · firefox · mushroom · nyu
Birth of the Whole-Body CT
June 21st, 2008 No Comments
Sittig DF, Ash JS, Ledley RS. The story behind the development of the first whole-body computerized tomography scanner as told by Robert S. Ledley. J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2006 Sep-Oct;13(5):465-9. Epub 2006 Jun 23. PMID 16799115. [PDF]
This JAMIA article provides an entertaining oral history of the invention of the whole-body CT scanner by Dr. [...]
Scutmonkey Describes the Perfect Resident
June 21st, 2008 No Comments
Michelle Au drew another very funny, dead-on strip about the attributes of the mythical “perfect resident.” As with other comedy in medicine, it is so funny because it is so true.
Tags: funny · residency · scutmonkey
Why I Didn’t Switch to Movable Type
June 20th, 2008 1 Comment
After getting a great web hosting deal, I decided to set up this domain “patrickmd.net” for various small software projects. I migrated the posts from my old and mostly ignored blog “medwreck” to my self-hosted WordPress installation here. Moving the old posts was trivial using the import/export feature.
However, before setting up a self-hosted WordPress instance, [...]
Tags: movable type · perl · php · software · wordpress
