Posts tagged #healthtech on Dynamo Geeks: 8 posts from the community, most useful first.
On the last Sunday of October most of Europe goes back from summer time to standard time, and the hour from 02:00 to 03:00 happens twice. For most software this is a small annoyance. In a hospital it can mean a dose documented twice, or an infusion total calculated over the wrong number of hours. Siobhan wrote a very good story here some weeks ago about a renewal test that failed one night a year. This is the…
Friendly reminder: "the data are anonymised" is a claim, not a property. Ask how. Ask who checked. Ask what happens when someone combines it with a second dataset.
A small team I advise is building an assessment form for nursing homes. It has more than 200 fields in about 15 sections, many conditional fields ("if a fall in the last 6 months, then ask..."), and it must save drafts, because nobody completes it in one sitting. They started with controlled inputs and one big state object, and typing became noticeably slow on the tablets the staff use. I am not a frontend…
I review data flows for health projects quite often, and one sentence appears in almost every design document: "the data are anonymised". Then I look closer and the data are pseudonymised. The difference is not academic. Under the GDPR it decides whether the law applies at all. The two words Pseudonymised data are personal data where the direct identifiers (name, insurance number) were replaced with something else,…
Before I became an engineer I was a nurse for six years, the last three on a cardiology ward. I want to describe one thing from that time, because I see the same pattern now in software: in dashboards, in on-call rotations, and in the apps we build for clinicians. On a night shift you hear alarms all the time. The monitor alarms when a patient turns over and an electrode slips. It alarms when the saturation probe…
Last time I promised something about HL7 v2. Here it is. If FHIR is the modern REST API, v2 is the message format that has been running inside hospitals since the late eighties, and it still carries most of the admissions, lab orders and results today. You will meet it, even in a "FHIR project", because something behind the FHIR facade still speaks v2. What a message looks like…
Since three years I spend most of my working time between hospital systems, and the most common message I get from other developers is some version of: "the customer says we need FHIR, what is it and how bad is it?" So here is the introduction I wish someone had given me. It is not complete. It is the part you need in the first two weeks. What FHIR actually is FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources,…
