Neuroscientist and former software engineer Ruggero Scorcioni found himself consistently distracted by the phone while he was trying to work. “If I’m busy coding or thinking about research and have phone calls coming in, it’s hard to get back into the same mental state,” says Scorcioni, 42. “Maybe you had a great idea, but then it’s gone.” In January, on a whim, he entered an AT&T app-development hackathon, and came up with a solution.
It happened on flight from Washington, DC to San Diego.
The pilot’s urgent question reverberated over the intercom during a cross country flight, “Is there a doctor on board?” A passenger was experiencing severe chest pains, and luckily for him Dr. Eric Topol was sitting in seat 6A.
Topol is the energetic chief academic officer of Scripps Health, a prominent cardiologist and the foremost figure in the field of wireless medicine. He believes the future of health lies in our own hands, namely in our smart phones and other portable electronic devices. According to Topol, “the smart phone will be the hub of the future of medicine. And it will be your health-medical dashboard.”
Photo Credit: Stuck in Customs via Compfight cc
Orlando, Florida, was recently host to the eHealth Initiative Big Data conference. Tabbed “Leading IT Forward,” the conference brought together a variety of stakeholders to discuss issues related to data interoperability, analytics, and sharing of best practices.
What is meant when someone uses the term ‘Big Data’? Wikipedia states that Big Data:
is a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand database management tools or traditional data processing applications. The challenges include capture, curation, storage,[3] search, sharing, analysis,[4] and visualization.
Big Data as it applies to patient health has its own set of challenges. The lack of interoperability between different EHR vendor platforms prevents a complete longitudinal view of the patient necessary to tell the full health story. Just think of the gap in EHR communication that exists between the outpatient and inpatient care delivery systems as one of many examples. More…
Datamob currently lists 227 data sources, 165 apps and 66 resources, which are categorized by 67 tags. It’s sort of like this:[/caption]
Datamob aims to show, in a very simple way, how public data sources can be used. We believe good things happen when governments and public institutions make data available in developer-friendly formats. Things that can help save us from bad government and bad decisions. We’re out to find the good things, and get developers excited about the data.
