Power to the Patient!
This is an emergency.
If you haven’t been keeping up, here is a good concise summary of the virus situation – a 17 minute summary of the situation from Capt. Samuel Philbrick, an Air Force flight surgeon (doctor) in Anchorage. It covers the statistics of how this is going to overwhelm hospitals where it gets out of control. (Email readers, click the headline to come online.)
[Read more…]This post is for information hogs. If you’ve had enough already about the virus, you’re not like me :-) and you won’t want this post, so move along. :-) Still with us? Good.
Yale cardiologist and friend Harlan Krumholz @HMKYale has been live-tweeting notes from a webinar Wednesday morning (US time) from Wuhan, China. Most of us won’t know all the lingo but you can google; most of us will recognize most of what’s going on. (If you’re not a regular on Twitter, just be aware that you can ignore most of what shows up in blue.)
First I’ll paste in a tweet from the end that summarizes a lot of information, particularly the image (click to view):
[Read more…]Zubin Damania MD is a social media / video god – his ZDoggMD site is terrific. He’s snarky and smart. But this time he meets his match: he sat down – live, not edited – and did a 30 minute “ask me anything” with his 12 year old daughter, whose school just got closed for the virus. She. Has. Questions. And I bet a lot are questions you’ve had.
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Nashua NH, Feb 18 – You know what happens when you don’t die, and then you KEEP not dying?? Years keep getting added to your age! Who knew?? And it doesn’t stop!
Five years ago I blogged I’m 65! That’s *really* old (you’ll be amused). But to be honest, as this magic “decade” birthday approached I was getting creeped out. I’m not alone: upon turning 70 in 2004, Gloria Steinem, who had famously declared “This is what 40 looks like” and “This is what 50 looks like,” told Time, “This one has the ring of mortality.”
[Read more…][Readers who are familiar with HIPAA can skip to the tweets below.]
Recently there’s been a lot of discussion about how the 1996 HIPAA law, whose regulations govern health data privacy (and access), is not sufficient for today’s world of apps and digital everything. For instance, the regs say docs & hospitals generally have to be careful with your medical records – but apps and wearables like Fitbits didn’t exist at the time, so HIPAA says nothing about what apps learn about you, nor what such companies do with it. Same for sites like Facebook and Amazon’s ever-listening Alexa. So everyone in the field agrees HIPAA needs to be replaced.
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