Paramedic ehealth - bringing out the dead?

I started watching a movie on TVO called "Bringing Out the Dead".  Nicholas Cage was playing the role of a burnt out paramedic in the Hells Kitchen area of New York city - a really run down, high crime area of the city.  Looked like a great movie but I never had time to watch it all so I went online to my public library to place a hold on the DVD.  Turns out they didn't have the DVD, but they did have the book, written by Joe Connelly.  So now I am reading the book and it turns out that Joe Connelly was a paramedic for 10 years in New York, and is writing from front line experience. I have heard that the work of paramedics is an area that is in need of ehealth technologies. I know several researchers personally from my ehealth studies who work in this area. One is studying the messaging systems from the ambulances to the hospitals.  The other developed a mobile app that will allow anyone to locate the nearest public Automatic External Defibrillators (AEDs) . This latter study is more like public health but it was developed by a former paramedic. < Here > is a link to the paper on it.

White Coat Black Art eHealth

I saw Dr. Brian Goldman give a keynote address at eHealth 2011 in Toronto.  I missed getting a signed copy of his book - The Night Shift - but I took it out of the library later that week and enjoyed reading it.  His CBC radio program - White Coat Black Art -  is excellent.  I remember him saying at the conference that his pet peeve about ehealth technologies was too many usernames and passwords.  After all, he is an ER doctor, where every second counts, so having to remember dozens of usernames and passwords under time pressure, would be frustrating.  I don't know a solution off hand to that.  I know there is Open ID, but from my limited experience with hospital IT systems, and their privacy and security requirements, I can't see them using that.  There does have to be more privacy by design put into systems, for security reasons, but designers also need to think about patient safety - and I would argue that usernames and passwords is possibly an encumbrance to that in the ER.  

Program or be Programmed

I can essentially agree with the argument that we all need to know about programming, and at a bare minimum get over any phobias about it. I am sure that many of the 1% have other people do their programming for them, probably by others in the 1%, I mean, after all, they are programmed to be the 1%. The rest of us are the "bungled and the botched". Python interests me because I am working on a Plone site now and I want to better understand the Zope database. It just doesn't make as much sense as PHP and mySQL right now. Plone can be quite the robust CMS (Content Management System). I even know a tethered Personal Health Record system that deploys it. I once tried to program Zope to connect resident forms to an MS Access database. It would have required a third party integration bridge, but it was possible. Just learning how to import, and then display, CSV data, seems to be a problem I am having at present. If anyone knows an easy way to do that, please let me know.

The Panic Virus

Books! I am reading the Panic Virus by Seth Mnookin. Might even see him at a conference next month where he is the key speaker at the Canadian Association of Research Ethics Board. The first 70 pages or so about vaccines and those in the public who advocate AGAiNST them, reminded me of another book I read recently by Michael Bliss on the smallpox epidemic in Montreal in the last century. The role the media plays with science stories is huge, but so is the role parents play who advocate for their kids. This book is not about ehealth or technology. It is mostly about Autism and how bad science created the impression that vaccinations were responsible for causing it.