A Lull
Posted on April 26, 2007
When I was earning my bachelor’s degree, as I got into the upper level classes, it seemed strange that people would make this big fuss about finals week, because the week before finals was when all of the big projects and papers were due. I stressed more about the pre-finals week than I did about the finals. Final exams were anti-climactic, a denoument (however that is spelled).
Today in ENG G500 – Intro to the English Language (though it is more like Intro to Lingustics) we had a paper and presentation due. The paper was a linguistic analysis of some sort of data, and I did mine on the controversy between refugee and evacuee in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Nice, fairly solid paper. Online it was easy to find resources relating to the Hurricane, editorials on the controversy, and dictionary definitions of the appropriate terms. All this week, I haven’t gotten to bed any earlier than 12:30 am, and most nights I was up until 2:00 or 3:00. Last night was no different in that I was burning the midnight oil finishing the paper. As I was getting to sleep, I remembered we also had to give a oral presentation. Since I wasn’t about to get up and work on that, I worked on it for an hour and a half before class. I let the class know it the situation, and the instructors were forgiving, I think. A couple of people did some extemporaneous speeches which were good. I thought about doing that, but PowerPoint is such a good crutch. If they didn’t allow PP, I would have winged it, but I don’t think it would have been as informative. On the upside, I can definitely say mine wasn’t the worst of the presentations.
Next week, I have a final project due in the TESOL methods course, but no final. In the ENG G500 class there will be an exam. So until next week (or Sunday when I plan to start studying/writing) I have a small lull, then after next week will be a big lull over the summer.
Latte art
Posted on April 23, 2007
Considering the name of this site, it shouldn’t be a surprise that I’m a fan of latte art. Here is a post found via Digg.
Streaming media
Posted on April 22, 2007
Strangeness. I’ve been trying to access an old file from NPR. Normally, I use Firefox and I normally don’t bother with streaming and such, so I never worried about it. Still, I tried and it didn’t work, either for the windows media stream or the real media stream. I tried Opera and had the same problem. Ditto for Mozilla. Kazehakase – works, as a Windows Media stream.
Electronic Medical Records
Posted on April 18, 2007
Considering the big news at work, I decided to do a teeny bit of research on Electronic Medical Records (EMRs). I still haven’t heard anything about specific plans regarding the new building and such, but I thought if it is going to have clinics, it would seem appropriate if a new state-of-the-art facility had an EMR system. It makes sense to me, though I can see the pros and cons, so I don’t know what the plan is.
Currently we use paper charts, which have their own pros and cons, but there is a movement within the medical field to move to EMRs. Some physicians rave about them, while others are dubious. The two big hurdles are cost and interoperability. Costs at the outset include buying computers to put in each room, buying servers that actually hold the files, setting up a backup (redundant) system to mitigate against a crashed server, software licenses, training the users, salaries of technical staff, and scanning each paper medical record into the system. That’s just the beginning and the costs can be incredible (FWIW, I haven’t gotten actual prices yet). After that the costs should stabilize mostly.
Interoperability is a concern because there are many, many purveyors of EMR’s and they each have their own file formats and ways of doing things. Also, while some EMR systems might be good at some things, they might be weak in other areas. Ophthalmologists look for certain things when they do an exam and note things in the chart, which is okay. However, they are also fond of drawing things and making diagrams of what they see on the exam. I don’t know of many systems that would allow that, though my investigation hasn’t gone that far yet. They are also fairly fond of having pictures taken. This is often a clinical necessity since they might want to know if a spot has grown in the past six months. They can take a look at the picture taken at the previous exam and compare it to the current exam to see if there’s been any change. To make a long story short, I think that costs aside, no EMR system is likely to be 100% of what the doctors want, so then we start weighing the various pros and cons.
All or most of our faculty work at the VA to some extent. Ophthalmologists are sometimes sub-specialized, in that they have done extra studies in certain aspects of eyes and eye disease. If a VA patient needs to see a certain sub-specialist, the sub-specialist will often see them in the VA clinic. Throughout the 80s and 90s the VA system developed its own EMR system. The VA is the largest medical system in the US with over 180,000 personnel, 100+ hospitals, 800+ clinics, and 100+ nursing homes. The VA’s EMR system connects all of those hospitals, clinics, etc so a veteran can go to any VA clinic in the US and their complete medical record will be there. A VA doctor in Indianapolis will be able to see what care the vet recieved when he went to Florida for the winter. The VA system used to be called the Decentralized Hospital Computer System (DHCP), but the latest version is called the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture, a/k/a VistA (not to be confused with Microsoft’s latest operating system). I recalled some of the doctors mentioning that once they got used to using VistA, they were pleased with it. All of the doctors who go to the VA get trained on how to use it. Earlier this week, I found out something amazing about it.
It’s free.
Since VistA was developed at government expense and the government can’t profit from that work, it has been released into the public domain. I don’t know all of the legalities, but I know public domain is about as free as free can get. It’s free as in beer, and free as in freedom. Free is a big plus. The fact that the doctors are already trained on it is also a big plus. Of course there is a downside. The database backend for the Windows version isn’t free and I have no idea what it costs. The Linux version called Worldvista isn’t affiliated with the VA, though it is free, and it’s supposed to have the same functionality.
Another possible problem is that it is written in a language called M (a/k/a MUMPS). From what I understand, M was developed before C, so it’s a legacy language. That isn’t really good or bad, but there aren’t many applications written in M and few programmers have dealt with it. I saw a comment that said it was developed in M so M programmers could be sure they would remain employed. I looked on Amazon to see if they had any books on M or MUMPS and there were only a few, and some of those were written in the 80s and 90s. Talk about job security ;-) All that aside, VistA sounds like it is stable and mature, and it does what it’s supposed to do, so I guess I can’t complain too much.
I’m thinking of trying it out, but can’t decide between VistA and Worldvista. I have a Linux box at work running on an old apple G4, so I could try Worldvista on that, though I have a feeling there is a steep learning curve. Possibly on the upside, last year one of the faculty suggested I look into electronic medical records, apparently impressed by the VA’s system.
Filed Under Code, Net, Technical, Work | 2 Comments
Big news at work
Posted on April 15, 2007
I usually don’t blog about work for various reasons, but I think in the past I’ve mentioned I work for the IU School of Medicine Department of Ophthalmology. My job is split between being a secretary for the Cornea and External Ocular Disease Service and being the Local Support Provider (LSP a/k/a computer guy) for the department. It’s interesting and keeps me busy. Anyway, on Friday the department got some very big news.
Philanthropists Eugene and Marilyn Glick donated $30 million to the IU School of Medicine to establish the Glick Eye Institute, a center for eye research and patient care. The Indianapolis Star has the story here, though since they may require registration you can read the official press release here. I wasn’t at the press conference or the meeting where they announced it to faculty, so I’m a little short on the details and have to go by what I heard second hand. Here is the basic rundown on what I have:
- $20 million for a new ophthalmology facility to house research, clinics, and probably administration.
- $10 million to fund ophthalmology research at IU.
- The site for the facility has not been chosen yet, though it is planned to be either on campus or closeby.
- There are architectural drawings for a building, but I don’t know how finalized the plans are.
- The facility is planned to open in three years
IU School of Medicine occupies a large portion of the IUPUI campus. In addition to several office and research buildings there are four hospitals largely affiliated with IUSM all on campus and within walking distance of each other. These are IU Hospital, Riley Children’s Hospital, Wishard Hospital, and Roudebush VA Hospital. VA is owned by the Veteran’s Administration, Wishard is owned by Indianapolis/Marion County, and IU and Riley are owned by Clarian Hospitals. IU faculty work at each of the hospitals and medical students, interns, residents, and fellows all recieve training at those hospitals. Ophthalmology has clinics in each of the hospitals and also has a clinic on the north side of Indy near the suburbs. In addition, the department occupies most of the Rotary Building on campus, where it has offices and a few labs. There are also labs in other buildings – laboratories take a large amount of space and that kind of space is at a premium on campus, very little of it at the Rotary.
As a guess, and pure conjecture on my part, I would guess that all the labs and offices in the Rotary Bldg will move to the new facility. I heard the new building will also house a clinic (or clinics), so from that I think that the clinic at IU hospital will move to the new building as well. IU Hospital has been talking about moving or renovating the eye clinic for some time, to the point that architectural plans have been drawn up. I’m guessing this announcement changes that, though I don’t know to what extent. The pediatric eye clinic used to be at the Rotary and moved into the new Riley Outpatient Center in 2000, so I don’t know what this does for that either. Wishard and VA clinics are slightly different, in that the space for the clinics is provided and I think the respective hospitals pay the department for the faculty to staff them, so I don’t think those clinics will be going anywhere. The department has a lease on the north clinic, so I don’t think that will be going anywhere soon either.
On a personal level, I’m left wondering what all of this means to me. It’s big news that was kept secret to only a few people in the department. As such, most of us had no clues (apart from rumors) until the announcement. I understand the need to keep it a secret, but apart from a new building and money for research, I’m not sure what it means. Since I work for the department, I guess I’m kind of curious what they will actually spend it on. As secretary, I’m not too worried about the Cornea service, though I think/hope the department will hire more CRA’s (Clinical Research Assistants, IIRC) to help with clinical trials. As LSP, I can probably come up with dozens of questions relating to computers and applications.
As an example, in each of the hospital eye clinics, about 90% of the computers are owned by the respective hospitals’, with 2 – 3 computers in each clinic belonging to the department. I take care of the department’s computers, but not the hospital computers. However, if the new facility has clinics, the department will almost certainly have to buy new computers for the whole clinic. If that happens, it might fall to me to figure out what to recommend, how many, what software, etc.
A little food for my own thought.
Crunch time
Posted on April 11, 2007
Two more weeks before finals week and I’ve got a whole bunch of assignments due in my two classes. Neither class really has a final exam, but both of them have a bunch of final assignments due. In one class I have another microteaching session, another self critique for microteaching, a lesson plan to modify, a teaching unit that consists of four lesson plans, and a research paper. The other class has one or two quizzes, a research paper outline, a research paper, and I think that’s it.
In one of the classes we often get put into groups and one of the people who I usually get grouped with dropped the class. I was kind of puzzled about that. The professor told us the person dropped, but gave no explanation. While it is none of my business, I have one or two ideas about why. Still, with three weeks left, I think I would have tried to stick it out to the end.
StarDict
Posted on April 1, 2007
I’ve been messing around with a program called StarDict for the past week or two. At it’s most basic level, StarDict is like an electronic dictionary. It doesn’t have any data of its own, but you can download dictionaries for it to use. Once that’s done you can just type in a word and get the definition. It also displays words with similar spelling, and there is a “fuzzy” search that allows wild cards.
The reason I got into it is because it can use multilingual dictionaries as well. On the website, there are dozens of them. Some languages even have several dictionaries compiled by different organizations. Most of them are only one direction i.e. Russian to English while a few are bidirectional i.e. Chinese-English/English-Chinese. I went a bit overboard and downloaded several dictionaries in Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Ukrainian, and a few others. However, I quickly found not all of the dictionaries are alike.
StarDict has it’s own format for the dictionaries it uses and it seems like very few of the dictionaries were created specifically for the program. Apparently, to make the software more useful StarDict made a bunch of scripts to convert dictionaries in other formats (like DICT and mova) into the StarDict format. I think this had the intended consequence, as now there are dozens or hundreds of dictionaries that can be used by StarDict. However, I don’t think there was a lot of follow up on it because there are some issues.
I’m running about five or six different Russian dictionaries in StarDict at the moment. I think all or most of them were converted from another format. Two of them have over 100,000 words in the dictionary, however very few of the words are translated. They have the Russian term then a blank definition. I’m thinking the creators’ came up with a list of Russian terms, and only put in the English tems for the words they knew. Another one or two of the dictionaries have the English terms, but there are far fewer terms (between 30,000 and 70,000). The rest, I think, were just improperly converted because the definitions have a bunch of XML markup, in addition to having fewer terms.
To help make it easier for people to make dictionaries for StarDict from scratch, there is a tool called Stardict-Editor. This is a simple program that takes text files formatted just so, and converts them into the StarDict format. The StarDict-Editor also has a built in text editor to use, though I prefer Gedit. Over the past weekend, I’ve been occassionaly working on a bidirectional Russian-English and English-Russian dictionary. I’m up to over 500 terms so far :-) It isn’t difficult, but it is tedious, and I’m using StarDict to help me with it, even though some of the dictionaries are frustrating.
Overall, I think StarDict is a great program, though there are some flaws with some of the dictionaries. It’s currently available for Windows and Linux, and I saw in an online forum somewhere that it is being ported to Palm, which I think will be great, IMHO.
