In December, I suffered what turned out to be a minor injury. During an exercise with one of my volunteer groups, I was doing a training exercise that involved falling and allowing the members of the group to catch you. I had not (in hindsight!) fully trained my group, and when I was falling, I ended up falling into the hands of a single individual. He did his best to catch me, but was unable to do so (not his fault!), and as I fell I struck his knee with my throat.

That blow took my breath away, and made my voice increasingly hoarse. Since I only have one airway, I thought perhaps it would be best to get it checked out to make sure it wouldn’t swell shut during the night J. My local urgent care clinic looked briefly, and immediately referred me to a nearby emergency room, as they didn’t have the tools to check it out. The emergency room (where I went post-haste) was excellent – conducted a brief triage (but got no real information from the original clinic), assigned me to a bed in the ER, got me seen by a doc pretty quickly, and then scheduled for a CT scan. There was a PC in the room that the nurses, the phlebotomist (who inserted an IV line in my hand) and others used to record what had happened with me thus far.

When the doc came through (pretty quickly, I thought), he brought a scribe with him. Turned out she was a local college student, studying to be a nurse. Her task was to enter data on my case on behalf of the doctor – a nice compromise which allowed the doctor to focus on me and my case, and not pay attention to a laptop. I suspected that it made the doc’s time much more efficient.

Then things got interesting. They took me away to run a CT scan on my throat, and brought in a throat specialist to run a scope in and look at my vocal chords (the structure most likely to have been damaged). The CT scan was delivered electronically to my records, so the throat guy could review it. He arrived very promptly (all things considered, since they brought him in from home on a Sunday night), checked things out, and prescribed a medication to be given intravenously (good thing I had that IV in already).

Some time later, the original ER doc came by to check in on me. In the pre-digital era, that would have involved him looking at my paper chart to see what had happened with all of his orders, and what the other doc had found. But not this time! Turned out that he asked me for a recap of events – had I seen the throat specialist? What did he say? What did he prescribe?

Now I suspect that if I had been unconscious or less than fully functional, he might not have used that approach. But it struck me as odd, and perhaps indicative of an issue in the ER. Perhaps the process for the ER doc to access and review records online is cumbersome? Perhaps there’s not an easy way for the doc to review patient info while retaining the efficiency he got while using his scribe to record information?

And that, of course, led to questions. What could be done differently? Is there some way, other than a laptop, that an ER doc could use to efficiently access patient information? Was he trusting my report of the information to be complete and correct, or did he go back and review the actual records later? (I assume he did, but have no way of knowing for sure.) In a more holistic way, could the original clinic have put information online in a medical record that could have been accessed by the ER doc directly, to reduce the friction in getting me into the ER system?

Have you ever experienced medical care in a digital records (paperless) environment? Have you seen anomalies that surprised you? Have you seen the benefits of those online records? I’m interested in your experiences!

Source: stock.xchng, plusverde

A recent blog post by Simson Garfinkel (of MIT Technology Review) raises an interesting possibility – that Facebook may be positioning itself to be your pathway to a myriad of other Internet sites, so that you don’t have to manage a plethora of user IDs and passwords. Interesting, strategic, potentially scary – lots of words come to mind when thinking about this possibility.

Facebook introduced Facebook Connect in 2008, and it’s now part of a collection of tools Facebook calls Facebook for Websites. To understand Facebook Connect, think about two different styles of building security. In one model, with a whole lot of exterior doors, you have to have a separate key to each one to get into the individual rooms – analogous to your separate passwords for each website you visit.

With Facebook Connect, you have the potential for a new model – a single exterior door, controlled by Facebook, and a single key – your Facebook user ID and password. Once inside, you can then have access (with no new keys required) to any room allowing use of the Facebook key, and you won’t have to get your key out again (retype your password), either. So instead of carrying many keys (user IDs and passwords), you need only carry one, at least for all those sites that support Facebook Connect. Techies call this single signon.

Facebook for Websites gives the sites that implement Facebook Connect access to a number of additional tools. Those sites allow users to “Like” things on non-Facebook sites, to allow users to easily register for a new site (with data pre-filled from their Facebook account, and Facebook Graph, allowing the site to see all of your Facebook Friends so it can leverage that information for marketing and other purposes.

Facebook Connect (and Facebook for Websites) was created, I believe, with the intent of making Facebook a more central part of its users’ Internet experience. Assuming that people used Facebook as their path to other web sites, that makes Facebook itself even more “sticky” as a destination for its users. Dropping their Facebook account would then require re-creating accounts at those places where they had previously logged in with Facebook.

As Garfinkel notes, this idea makes some sense for users. 500 million of us already have a relationship with Facebook, and have a lot of data there, making it already “sticky”. But there are potential issues, of course, in that Facebook doesn’t have a stellar track record of protecting the privacy of your data that you post there. And if your Facebook account password is compromised (by Firesheep, by someone guessing it, or by any number of other means), you’ve now lost “the key to the kingdom” – all accounts to which you connected with Facebook are now compromised.

Technologists have tried lots of things to solve this problem for consumers – having browsers remember your passwords, separate devices that could store them, specialized services like myonelogin.com to do single signon, etc. All have downsides in terms of both their risk profile and their usability, and Facebook Connect does too. What do you think? How do you manage your Internet passwords?  I look forward to hearing from you.

The iPad’s display is a standard LCD – nothing you haven’t seen before, though of course not in this particular form-factor. Great for some things, like web browsing and perhaps (as others have noted) being the Internet access device that you could hang on the wall, or readily teach technophobes how to use. But for other things, like reading a book, that LCD is alleged to be somewhat hard on the eyes.

Enter the displays like the Amazon Kindle, Barnes and Noble Nook, and Sony eReader, made by a company called eInk. Very low power (for long battery life), high contrast display readable in bright light, and reportedly much easier on the eyes. But, there’s no color – making for a very monochrome view of the world.

Now, reportedly, eInk is preparing to ship its first “newspaper-grade” color displays for eBook reader makers to start integrating. Perhaps next year, we’ll have access to those devices – and then a couple of years later, to “magazine quality” color. All steps in the right direction, waiting for those early adopters to buy them, start to build volume in the market, and drive the price down for those of us who are later in the adoption curve.

Such devices may give new life to newspapers and magazines, getting folks to pull their content “on the fly” whenever they want it, wherever they want it – so they’re no longer tied to reading at a laptop (inconvenient and awkward) or paper (for better or worse, folks seem to be turning away from this medium).

Should be an exciting few years!

Far be it for me to add noise to all the hoopla around Apple’s iPad, announced several days ago. But after reading numerous reviews, and seeing a few sample usage models, some observations come to mind.

Kindle Killer? Using a more “standard” LCD color display, it’s likely to be viewed (at least by some) as not as easy to read as the Kindle and other dedicated “e-Reader” devices. It’s likely to have a MUCH better user interface than the Kindle, but that won’t make the screen easy to read. On the flip side, it will have color – making for a new opportunity for publishers to put out content to a device that folks may want to read books and news on.

It will certainly be interesting to see how the market for books settles down between Apple and Amazon. Until the industry gets cross-platform capabilities to work right, and allows me to move my content (that I bought) from my Kindle to my iPad, I’m going to be reluctant to make any big investments in either hardware or content.

Giant iPhone? Some had hoped that perhaps one could use the device as a cross between phone and laptop, and get the best of both in one device. Alas, no phone, no camera in the iPad.

Most notable, to me, is not the question of what device it might kill, but what new path it might start. If, instead of viewing it as just a tablet (nice in itself, for the kinds of things we do today with “tablet-ized” notebook PCs), if one adds a keyboard (already being pitched as an add-on), what emerges is a potentially very capable notebook replacement for e-mail, web browsing, book and document reading, etc. Not sure if that’s what Apple has in mind, but it does look attractive from that perspective – but only if they put enough application power on the device (read – what apps can I run, and what will it cost?) to make it useful for those people.

One key remaining concern for me is Apple’s continued stranglehold over apps for the device. I understand the desire to make the experience robust and secure for their users, but they’re also conveniently stifling competition in the process (witness Google Voice for the iPhone).

Other missing features to make it really useful in this mode (and for other things as well!):

• Multi-tasking
• USB or other suitable connectivity
• Printing

What do you think? I’ll be interested to hear.

For other good reads on the topic, check out:

10 Features missing from the iPad (eWeek)

The iPad Questions Apple Won’t Answer (InfoWorld)

A tablet based on Google’s Chrome OS? (HotHardware)

A compendium of blogosphere comments assembled by CNN