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 [...]
Entries Tagged as 'Uncategorized'
New York State Physician License Search, Ajax-Style
June 23rd, 2008 No Comments
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Tags: movable type · perl · php · software · wordpress
Getting Google Calendar on the iPhone
January 27th, 2008 2 Comments
UPDATE 12 Oct 08: I found a great way to constantly keep Google Calendar and iPhone synchronized. Some time ago I wrote about synchronizing Google Calendar data with a Palm device. Since then, I’ve given up the Palm because I realized I rarely used it. Now, I carry an iPhone instead, and have the same [...]
How Effective are Medical Record Privacy Protections?
January 2nd, 2007 No Comments
An excellent story on medical record non-privacy appeared on 12/26/06 in the WSJ, written by Theo Francis. “Spread of Records Stirs Patient Fears Of Privacy Erosion” (original subscription version here) details how one patient’s psychotherapy notes were mixed in with her regular records and used to deny her disability claim for back pain. Her care [...]
Update on EDTA Errors
November 25th, 2006 No Comments
In my earlier post on EDTA errors, I mentioned a Pennsylvania case cited in the Pediatrics article about deaths due to improper use of Na2EDTA. Dr. Kimball Atwood at Health Care Renewal has more details on the Pennsylvania incident, where the doctor intentionally treated the patient with Na2EDTA.
Giving up Thunderbird
October 16th, 2006 No Comments
I gave up Thunderbird this past week, and redirected all of my mail to Gmail. I used to have two different mail accounts within Thunderbird and a Gmail account for newsletter subscriptions. The idea was that I would separate my frequently read academic mail from my less-frequently read personal and bulk mail. Over time, these [...]
Tags: Email · thunderbird
An Efficient Paper-based Medical Record
October 11th, 2006 No Comments
I finished my five-week pediatric rotation last week. I spent half the time on the floor at the local children’s hospital, and half the time in the pediatric ER. Definitely a great experience all around. The ER is the first hospital location where I have worked that uses paper notes for the entire visit. Reportedly [...]
