Hacking at 0300 : Medical Informatics

{ Category Archives } Medical Informatics

Medicine and Medical Informatics

Fractions and Units in PHP

For the bililite webservices, I kept all the data in what I would call "standard" American medical units, centimeters for height, kilograms for weight, mmHg for blood pressure, mg/dl for bilirubin. But lots of doctors use pounds and inches, and it would be nice to allow those as well. I could have separate data entry [...]

2011 08 11 Danny PHP Comments (0)

Predictably Unhelpful

A depressing but absolutely correct editorial from Dimitri Christakis of the University of Washington in this month's Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine (behind a pay wall, unfortunately, but the full reference is there). [H]undreds of decision tools in a variety of forms�guidelines, practice parameters, prediction rules�have been generated. Some have been good, some bad; [...]

2011 01 05 Danny Comments (0)

Better Asthma Care through Technology

Part of the drudgery of medicine is all the certification and paperwork, and the petty bureaucrats who need to constantly justify their existence by creating new rules. All the rules are well-intentioned, but taken together pave the road to hell—keeping us away from our patients and actually helping people. One such well-paved path is the [...]

2011 01 02 Danny Microsoft Office Comments (0)

Apple Rocks!

My ever-unreliable AT&T 8525 finally had a permanent white screen of death and, rather than be a slave to AT&T forever, decided to get a separate PDA and phone. I bought an iPod Touch and it is a world of difference. Sync'ing it to Microsoft Outlook was automatic (which never quite worked right with Microsoft [...]

2010 12 08 Danny Comments (0)

Brilliant Online PDF Editor

The bane of modern medicine is the paperwork, especially for a practice like mine that is largely Medicaid. If there's anything the government loves, it's paperwork. Fortunately, most of it is available electronically. Unfortunately, most of that is in PDF form, uneditable and closed. Sometimes the bureaucrats have thought to make it a fill-in form, [...]

2010 11 17 Danny Comments (1)

WHO you calling fat?

The Centers for Disease Control and the American Academy of Pediatrics just recommended that pediatricians stop using the old growth charts, based on 40 years of NHANES data, and switch to new charts from the World Health Organization, for children less than 2. The NHANES study is a survey of child health from the United [...]

2010 10 31 Danny Comments (0)

A real pain scale

I usually don't blog about medical stuff here, but Allie Brosh's comments about the Wong-Baker pain scale are perfectly on-target. The Joint Commission accredits health care organizations and comes up with intrusive, well-intended but largely pointless standards that the rest of us have to uphold. A sort of "unfounded mandate." One of these is the [...]

2010 03 25 Danny Comments (0)

Engauge Digitizer Tutorial

A simple walkthrough to use the Engauge Digitizer to pull values off a "printed" graph There's a far more complete manual that comes with the download, but these are the steps I used to generate the data for the webservices graphs. It assumes you've got a black and white image of the graph, with continuous [...]

2010 01 14 Danny Comments (2)

Digitizing graphs

I wanted to add Down Syndrome growth charts to the bililite.com webservices, but as far as I can tell, the charts are available only as images in the AAP's guidelines (and the original paper; subscription only). The often-cited growthcharts.com has charts, and Greg Richards was generous enough to share his data with me. However, some [...]

2010 01 10 Danny Comments (0)

bililite.com webservices

I've been spending my project time learning how to manipulate images in PHP to let me create custom growth charts and the like, with a RESTful interface that would allow them to be used as the source of <img> elements. I like the way things turned out; they are available at bililite.com/webservices/. It includes height,weight, [...]