Schadenfreude

The more I hear about digital national health records, the more I worry about them with regards to security. Various interpretations of the new legislation in the 2009 Stimulus bill could mean anything from implementing something like SAFEHealth, a decentralized system, to something like Google Health, which would centralize medical records. I expect that a decentralized system will not be what the government will choose. Proper usage of a decentralized system would be fine, but removes a lot of the utility promised by proponents of electronic health records, such as the possibility of access to updated health records from anywhere. I’d like to start off with an alarming quote I found in this interview with Karen Bell, director of the Office of Health IT Adoption at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services:

TR: What about the public-health benefits? Systems that house large quantities of patient data could enable new types of research studies.

KB: Absolutely, that’s something I get really excited about. It will totally break open our knowledge base. For example, I have been diagnosed with low-pressure glaucoma, which is fairly unusual. No one knows what causes it. I would love to be able to search the system for anyone with this form of glaucoma and start to look for similarities.

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Uncategorized databases, government, health, healthcare, politics, security

Today, we installed our brand new Doulton CP200UC+ water filter.

We received it a few days ago, but had to buy a faucet fitting for it since it didn’t come with a 3/4” female faucet adapter. After $4 at Home Depot, it works perfectly. We bought ours with a fluoride filter as well as a ceramic filter, giving us the best water we’ve had in quite a while. I highly recommend these as this is the second Doulton filter I’ve been very happy with in my lifetime.

Uncategorized health, Home, kitchen, water filter

I “dare” to say so. This is a great article. My favorite part:

“Diarrhea kills five times as many kids as AIDS,” said John Oldfield, executive vice president of Water Advocates, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that promotes clean water and sanitation.

“Everybody talks about AIDS at cocktail parties,” Oldfield said. “But nobody wants to hear about diarrhea,” he said.

This is interesting too:

“There needs to be a rational system for how to apportion scarce funds,” said Helen Epstein, an AIDS expert who has consulted for UNICEF, the World Bank, and others.

Maybe we should allocate them per country or per region such that the amount of money for a given epidemic or other health concern is proportional to the need (now I’m starting to sounds like a communist, but bear with me) for that treatment. Now, of course there will be issues with estimating how much of each treatment a country might need in the coming year, especially first aid materials, but for most illnesses (see AIDS and malaria) we can probably safely use this year’s statistics to estimate the amount of treatment that needs to be available next year. Therefore, the various charitable organizations that accept donations for healthcare, as well as the World Bank, should accept money with a policy that it will be used as efficiently as possible rather than promising to use the money for AIDS, cancer, etc.

The problem with this is it doesn’t sound like you’re addressing a particular problem when you do it, so you can’t use it to prop up your ego. If one were to lose a loved one to cancer and he/she wanted to donate to a cancer fund, the only ones available would be the general healthcare funds and specific cancer research organizations. Another problem is that it wouldn’t make any difference to reform the policies of the organizations, because they could just split up into multiple entities (cancer, AIDS, malaria), and the money would be mis-allocated in the same fashion. The only real way is to outlaw receiving or donating funds for specific types of healthcare, which is completely insane.

So, do we make it cool to donate to diarrhea? That doesn’t seem possible to me. Perhaps in cases of foreign aid, we should only allow general donations because of this resource mis-allocation problem.

Uncategorized aids, economics, health, misallocation

I decided today that I wanted to track my calories burned per day on a nice line graph. I did it, and I think I will continue. The total is automatically calculated by the PHP data source. This was made using my Mephisto Plugin for Open Flash Charts.

Uncategorized charts, exercise, flash, graphs, health, mephisto, php, plugins

Now I only need one meal a day! Thanks to this energy packed combo meal, I can get all the calories and protein I need for a daily sitting at my desk! And its so good for me – look at those veggies on there!

When are people going to stop buying these products? At least I have heart disease on my side.

Uncategorized fast food, fat, gross, health, life