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Entries Tagged as 'Medical'

Thinking about medications

April 1st, 2015 by Mark · No Comments

Handling medications in clinical medicine is difficult. One of the easy wins for information technology in medicine is electronic prescribing. Our colleagues in general practice have had such systems for many years but those of us working in hospitals have lagged behind.

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Tags: Databases · Medical · Research

NHS informatics strategies

February 21st, 2013 by Mark · No Comments

This blog post is written in response to a brief twitter comment reproduced below:

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Tags: Medical

Apache Lucene

May 25th, 2010 by Mark · 1 Comment

A short post. Apache Lucene is amazing – I was faced with slow full text searches searching >1.6 million SNOMED CT descriptions using PostgreSQL’s built in full-text search. Apache Lucene performs these searches in microseconds – I rapidly turn the list of concept Ids into full enterprise objects and my work is done! Please check […]

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Tags: Databases · Medical · WebObjects

Recursive SQL with PostgreSQL 8.4

March 4th, 2010 by Mark · 1 Comment

Representing hierarchical data in a relational database is easy. For instance, modelling the contents of a filesystem with directories and subdirectories is straightforward using self-joins on a parent key. The root node(s) are represented as those without a parent. Such a model is useful for modelling other types of data – in particular, hierarchies in […]

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Tags: Databases · Medical

More posts

March 4th, 2010 by Mark · 1 Comment

After a long hiatus while we both finish our theses (one of us [1] more successfully than the other) and obtain substantive posts (one of us [2] more successfully than the other), we are keen to restart regular nerdy medical technology posts. Welcome back! (1) Completed his MD in 2008 (2) This is not necessarily […]

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Tags: Medical · Research

Encrypting a USB Key using TrueCrypt

October 26th, 2008 by James · 33 Comments

If you are a healthcare professional you have a duty to maintain the security of patient identifiable data. Within your job you sometimes need to use a USB key to transfer lists or letters between computers. If you lose your un-encrypted USB key with patient identifiable data then it may deemed negligent and you may […]

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Tags: Free · Medical · Open Source · Software

Producing Spaghetti Plots using R

April 6th, 2007 by James · 11 Comments

If you wish to analyse longitudinal data sometimes it is helpful to plot each experimental subject’s data at each timepoint to get a feel for the patterns or trends. You can often learn more from this raw data than a boxplot or line graph of the means. I am a habitual SPSS user but have […]

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Tags: Graphics · Medical · Open Source · R statistical computing · Software

How to add a Free Medical Spell Checking Dictionary to Word/Firefox

February 26th, 2007 by James · 4 Comments

Spell checking medical documents can be a real pain. My spelling at the best of times is atrocoius atrocious. Luckily most software, even browsers now support spell checking. The problem is now getting hold of a good medical dictionary to use with your application. Now e-medtools.com a site which specialises in medical spell checking, medical […]

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Tags: Free · Medical · Open Source · Software

Pedigree drawing software

February 13th, 2007 by Mark · 2 Comments

Pedigrees are essential when documenting large complex families with inherited disease. I spend a lot of time looking after families with a variety of inherited neurological disease, and have spent a similar amount of time trying to find decent software to make this work easier! I last did a systematic search for software last year. […]

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Tags: Medical · Open Source · Research · Software

Tracking Journal Articles with Google Reader

February 13th, 2007 by James · 2 Comments

Keeping up to date in your speciality is always a challenge, but this can become far easier by creating customised dynamic pubmed searches conviently summarised in Google Reader. In this article I will show you how to easily create a feed for your favourite subjects, journals and authors.

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Tags: Free · Journals · Medical · Research