Virtual Care, Real Challenges
2020 has been much worse than anyone expected - and I don ' t think people expected much. I take some comfort that, when things were getting cataclysmically bad in New York City, in March and early April, our virtual urgent care staffed up, met the demand, and was able to help some patients.This is the story of Mount Sinai Now and COVID-19. (Source: Blogborygmi)
Source: Blogborygmi - May 11, 2020 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: nickgenes Source Type: blogs
Enter the Informaticist
The Meaningful Use program to incentivize adoption of EHRs was announced right as I was wrapping up residency, and planning to embark on subspecialty training in Clinical Informatics. My first real articles for EPMonthly were about Meaningful Use.Ten years later seemed like a good opportunity for me to reflect on the program ' s success (almost all of us are, finally, using electronic records for patient care) and failures (the systems are more limited and frustrating than they ought to be). The two-part article is availablehere andhere. (Source: Blogborygmi)
Source: Blogborygmi - January 12, 2020 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: nickgenes Source Type: blogs
Academic deliverables
While the job I trained the most for is Emergency Medicine, the job I spend more time on these days is clinical informatics. And that job is further subdivided: mostly supporting our ED ' s electronic record system, but increasingly, helping to study, operationalize and guide adoption of medical apps and wearable devices. It ' s honestly the most exciting part of my job, because it seems like we ' re helping to bring about the future.Two documents that summarize a lot of my recent thoughts and efforts these on these topics are available online. The first (pdf) is a deep-dive intomHealth apps in Emergency Medicine - the pot...
Source: Blogborygmi - July 16, 2018 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: nickgenes Source Type: blogs
The Last Social Network
We could have prevented a lot of damage and waste, with the " new " " social network " called Binky. Binky that dispenses with illusion that social networks give us useful information that we need to check frequently;Binky exists solely to pacify. But Binky ' s designed to never disappoint or enrage its users - and all your likes and comments disappear into the ether.Binky is a social network app with no network and no socializing. And yet, Binky is not just as satisfying as “real” social apps like Twitter or Instagram, but even more satisfying than those services. Its posts are innocuous: competent but aesthetically u...
Source: Blogborygmi - November 13, 2017 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Nick Genes Source Type: blogs
Paul Ford's not sentimental
Well, when I was thinking up andwriting my last post,Paul Ford was writing this, on the occasion of 20 years of blogging:I took it very seriously for many years and it earned me thousands of readers, thousands of emails, and tons of opportunity. It was better at generating opportunity than money. I drifted away for all the regular reasons. I had many thoughts about how to mark this moment and all of them were self-indulgent and exhausting. What I do is completely relevant and alive, thank you, and what was lost was lost. People keep expecting me to be wistful and nostalgic. But there was no innocence or purity. Not id...
Source: Blogborygmi - November 5, 2017 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Nick Genes Source Type: blogs
Housekeeping
Six (!) years ago I collected a lot of my writing from EPMonthly and Medscape,in links on Tumblr. I thought it looked pretty spiffy, and that I was establishing a beachhead on the next big platform. That didn ' t exactly work out. I had aFlavors.me splash page to organize my online web presences, but they closed down.I set up aMedium account a while back, but haven ' t done a great job of maintaining that, either. This morning I cross-posted a few of my recent articles for EPMonthly and Telemedicine Magazine to Medium - they make it easy to import, and I like how theretrospective on pagers turned out. Maybe it ' ll get som...
Source: Blogborygmi - October 26, 2017 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Nick Genes Source Type: blogs
The shape of things to come
What ' s Apple going to do in a few years, when smartphone technology plateaus, and people don ' t spring for an upgrade every 2-3 years? There ' s been speculation abouta car, but I think the world ' s most profitable company isn ' t going to add much to its profits by selling something out of the reach of most of the world (and those that can buy an Apple car probably won ' t do it as often as they buy an iPhone).Instead, I think the answer is now apparent, with the new product introductions of the Tim Cook era - Apple Watch, AirPods, and the forthcoming HomePod. These interconnected " smart " devices are all relatively ...
Source: Blogborygmi - June 10, 2017 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Nick Genes Source Type: blogs
Health IT, under attack
With the recent news of theWannaCry ransomware attack and how it particularly hurt UK hospitals, I figured it was appropriate to link to our writeup of An Academic Medical Center ' s Response to Widespread Computer Failure (PubMed /ResearchGate). This was our experience in the hours and days following a botched 2010 McAfee ' s antivirus update, which began attacking a core component of Windows, and rendering PCs unusable. While accidental, in many ways it resembled a cyberattack.Of course, there ' s been great coverage of the attack and its implications.Halamka was quoted:“By prioritizing clinical functionality and uptim...
Source: Blogborygmi - May 29, 2017 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Nick Genes Source Type: blogs
A year without blogging
It ' s not I ' ve stopped writing - besidesthe peer-reviewed stuff there ' s articles and commentary atEPMonthly andTelemedicine magazine, tweets @nickgenes, and the occasional piece forMedscape.But coming to blog at this site doesn ' t just feel like a chore - it ' s laden with a sense of guilt. I was so very wrong about the potential of blogging and social media.There were warnings. Back in 2010 I commented ona WSJ blog about our experience implementing electronic medical records in our ED. Another commenter then accused me of practicing " Tuskegee medicine " and experimenting on patients without consent, because EM...
Source: Blogborygmi - May 27, 2017 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Nick Genes Source Type: blogs
One week in
I ' ve commented before that politics is increasingly like sport - more and more we ' re just rooting for our side. Ultimately it means policy and ideas don ' t matter; only winning does. One side has already made this an explicit part of their strategy; they ' re playing to win, not respecting " norms, " and using every tool at their disposal to keep winning.Aquote from The Economist, on the occasion of President Trump ' s inauguration:All populists are at heart conspiracy theorists, who pretend that easy solutions exist to society ’s woes and have only not been tried to date because elites are wicked and deaf to the st...
Source: Blogborygmi - January 27, 2017 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Nick Genes Source Type: blogs
#SAEM16 panels
SAEM's Annual Meeting is in New Orleans this year. While a lot has changed since San Diego, I'm fortunate to again be participating in several didactic sessions this week. The program is available online - links to slides are forthcoming. Tuesday @ 1:45pm or so in Napoleon Ballroom C2 (3rd floor): As part of the Social Media Bootcamp, I'll be talking with Megan Ranney about using Social Media for research - slidesThursday @ 8am in Napoleon Ballroom B2 (3rd floor): DS-22: I'll speak about conducting EM research using social media tools, in a panel with Megan Ranney & Austin Kilaru - slides&...
Source: Blogborygmi - May 8, 2016 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Nick Genes Source Type: blogs
mHealth Toolbox at #ICEM16: Cape Town, April 16&17
I'm honored to be participating in the mHealth Toolbox next month. The two-day event is taking shape with a terrific lineup of physicians, entrepreneurs, technology enthusiasts, and many, many gadgets. Check back for links to presentations and resources. (Source: Blogborygmi)
Source: Blogborygmi - March 14, 2016 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Nick Genes Source Type: blogs
mHealth Toolbox at #ICEM16: Cape Town, April 16 & 17
I ' m honored to be participating in the < a href= " http://www.mhealthtoolbox.com/ " target= " _blank " > mHealth Toolbox < /a > next month. The two-day event is taking shape with a terrific lineup of physicians, entrepreneurs, technology enthusiasts, and many, many gadgets. Check back for links to presentations and resources. (Source: Blogborygmi)
Source: Blogborygmi - March 13, 2016 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Nick Genes Source Type: blogs
Post
Another bit about software - iOS mail clients.Federico tweeted that iOS mail clients are today what Twitter clients were a few years back. Sure, but I never cared so much about reading and writing tweets because my job(s) didn't depend on it. E-mail is mission critical.I loved Mailbox but it never did Outlook. Acompli was a leap forward, flawlessly blending Outlook and Gmail; I even liked its built-in calendar and recent files feature. I thought it was good that Microsoft bought it - but then innovation stalled and they removed the one feature I was really enamored with - programmable long swipes. Yeah, this may have been ...
Source: Blogborygmi - February 27, 2016 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Nick Genes Source Type: blogs
The Big To-Do
So, I've become one of those people that blogs about organizational software. I'm sorry. Just writing this post will probably squander every extra minute I'd have ever saved by using such software. For years I've been using OmniFocus, and it's been pretty good. Before that I was using Apple's own Reminders solution (I was a big fan of the Siri integration, which Omnifocus also takes advantage of). Before Reminders, I used Remember the Milk and Wunderlist. I've been on Todoist for a few weeks, and it's pretty great. Omnifocus just got really frustrating in recent months, and wrestling with it became another i...
Source: Blogborygmi - February 26, 2016 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Nick Genes Source Type: blogs
