Poker for Paralysis
The other night I got out of the hospital, thanks to a good friend of mine, and played in a charity poker tournament. Hosted in midtown west at a luxury auto showroom, Poker4Life is an annual event to raise money for SCI research. Over $250,000 was raised for the Buoniconti Fund, which is the national fundraising arm of the Miami Project.
The venue was gorgeous and the event was well run and really just a ton of fun. Plus, I can’t even express how great it felt to be more than five blocks from the hospital and out in a normal social setting for once. I can’t wait to be out of this hospital.
3 comments
I just now discovered that things have been going on over here while I was off doing a zillion things in San Francisco and the blogosphere.
I hear you’re gettin’ outa jail soon – wonderful! Great news!
Hey, what do you think about the Google Health controversy, Mister Doctor-To-Be? There are large arguments going on about the privacy issues. Google’s not a care provider so they’re not covered by HIPAA privacy regulations. They’re responding to those concerns by saying they wrote their own regulations, stricter than HIPAA… but, heh, unfortunately there’s nobody to enforce the ones they wrote themselves.
I would love to say that I trust Google. “Do no evil,” was their mantra from the beginning. Then they caved to pressure from the Chinese government and censored content in order to gain access to the then single-largest, untapped consumer base in the world. While they claimed providing some content was better than providing none, they also set a precedent that they’re willing to succumb to pressure in order to ensure their operations. That makes me incredibly nervous about Google holding on to all kinds of private data. Interestingly, I just clicked over to the link you included and I see you’ve referenced the same issues in China.
I tend to think that EMRs need to be owned and operated by hospitals. While it’s an old-fashioned way of doing it, I think in this case the issue of patient privacy far outweighs the cost-savings of an ASP-type model.
Additionally, one of the best arguments for EMR systems is the clarity they can provide to healthcare providers when the patient is unconscious or unable to clearly give details. Hospitals cannot and should not be dependent on functional Internet access to obtain this information. What would hospitals do during citywide blackouts? They have generators to run on, but imagine how crippled they would be without information systems they’ve come to depend on.
I would much rather see critical data located on local systems that are not connected to patient-accessible networks. Run separate physical networks for the systems that contain sensitive information, and allow data exchange with other hospitals via a public key-based secure infrastructure. It could easily run atop the Internet with several agencies maintaining authoritative signing keys. Think of it as how SSL works, but far more tightly run (keys manually verified, different types of keys for software vendors and health providers, any key failures or problems automatically disable access, etc). Hospitals could obtain the keys necessary as part of their support contract when they purchase compliant systems, and vendors that implement the open standards could easily be given chained authority to sign such keys.
And right as that’s being implemented, I’ll go see “Satan on Ice.”
Satan on Ice… har! Hadn’t heard that one.
I’ve read a modest amount about EMRs but you’ve provided perspectives I haven’t heard elsewhere.
For an update on Google’s ethics and other bloggers’ thoughts, see my update yesterday.
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