medicalnerds.com

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

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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