April 20, 2011
There they were. My new glasses, sitting on the floor, chewed up by a tough-looking pug who didn't care. Worse, I had a schedule full of meetings the next day and didn't have a spare pair of glasses. The next afternoon, I went to a local one-hour glasses shop in my prescription sunglasses and asked them to have my eyeglass prescription faxed from my optometrist so we could get new glasses started. That's when the fun began.
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April 08, 2011
This question was posed by a reader in response to my previous blog post about the anticonvulsant medication valproic acid and drug-induced liver injury that occurs in a modest percentage of patients where the risk disproportionately involves individuals with a particular gene polymorphism.Measuring or predicting risk for an individual vs. measuring or predicting risk for populations is an important distinction to make. Epidemiologists call applying a population result to a person the "atomistic fallacy." The converse (applying risk that is known for an individual or for a small group to a larger population that is different from the individual or small group) is called the "ecological fallacy."
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March 22, 2011
Cerner has been working, in one form or another, on personal health solutions for many years. We've reacted with surprise when people don't end up engaging with our solutions as much as we'd hoped. Over the last year and a half, we've begun the journey to deliver a new stack of personal health solutions called Cerner Health. The Mission: create a personal health record (PHR) platform that lets people pull all their health information together in one place, and share it with their doctors, family, pharmacy, and other "health partners," as well as provide recommendations on how to live a healthier life. The Problem: most people don't know they want to do that. Or more likely, they just don't want to do that. Sure, there are people with a complex health condition or new diagnosis that provide them with an incentive to be interested in their records. However, this incentive might come too late. The person in the hospital suddenly really wishes they'd been better-managing their health records all this time.
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