Andy Oram
Andy Oram is an editor at O'Reilly Media. An employee of the company since 1992, Andy currently specializes in open source technologies and software engineering. His work for O'Reilly includes the first books ever released by a U.S. publisher on Linux, the 2001 title Peer-to-Peer, and the 2007 best-seller Beautiful Code.
One-click analysis: Detecting and visualizing insights automatically
Arijit Sengupta of BeyondCore uncovers hidden relationships in public health data
The importance of visualizing data is universally recognized. But, usually the data is passive input to some visualization tool and the users have to specify the precise graph they want to visualize. BeyondCore simplifies this process by automatically evaluating millions of variable combinations to determine which graphs are the most interesting, and then highlights these to users. In essence, BeyondCore automatically tells us the right questions to ask of our data.
In this video, Arijit Sengupta, CEO of BeyondCore, describes how public health data can be analyzed in real-time to discover anomalies and other intriguing relationships, making them readily accessible even to viewers without a statistical background. Arijit will be speaking at Strata Rx 2013 with Tim Darling of Objective Health, a McKinsey Solution for Healthcare Providers, on the topic of this post.
Open Source convention considers situational awareness in cars, and more
A report from OSCon
Every conference draws people in order to make contacts, but the Open Source convention also inspires them with content. I had one friend withdraw from an important business meeting (sending an associate) in order to attend a tutorial.
Lots of sessions and tutorials had to turn away attendees. This was largely fall-out from the awkward distribution of seats in the Oregon Convention Center: there are just half a dozen ballroom-sized spaces, forcing the remaining sessions into smaller rooms that are more appropriate for casual meetings of a few dozen people. When the conference organizers measure the popularity of the sessions, I suggest that any session at or near capacity have its attendance counted as infinity.
More than 3,900 people registered for OSCon 2013, and a large contingent kept attending sessions all the way through Friday.
Community Leadership Summit tracks the forces that spread ideas
Inclusivity and recruitment among the themes at the unconference
American businesses, along with many others around the world, hustle to find enough programmers and computing staff. The gap widens precariously between the number of job openings and the number students graduating with the necessary skills. And yet, at the same time, we seem to drown in an overabundance of software packages. If you want JavaScript frameworks, large-scale data stores, bulk system configuration tools, mesh networking protocols, or even a new functional language, you have almost too many choices. So the shortage of programmers does not apply when people offer their code to their colleagues across the globe.
Open source software’s ever-expanding options show a programming culture that is proud of its accomplishments and eager to explore untapped potential. But above all, they reveal a desire to work together on problems. The existence of open source packages shows the strength of community.
The Community Leadership Summit (CLS), which started four years ago at the Open Source convention and has been held on the weekend preceding it ever since, drew more attendees than ever this year (I estimate some 200 at the opening plenary), and a large fraction of them actually work as community managers. The field has matured in other ways as well. At early conferences, people expressed aspirations and complained of problems that this year are finding solutions.
Donald Berwick discusses health care improvement: goals, exemplary organizations,and being at a turning point
A video interview with entrepreneur Colin Hill
Last week, a wide-ranging interview on data in health care took place between Dr. Donald Berwick and Colin Hill of GNS Healthcare. Dr. Berwick and Hill got together in the Cambridge, Mass. office of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, a health care reform organization founded by Dr. Berwick, to discuss data issues related to O’Reilly’s upcoming Strata Rx conference.
Berwick returned to IHI after his year as administrator of Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Throughout these changes he has maintained his stalwart advocacy for better patient care, a campaign that has always been based on a society’s and a profession’s moral responsibility. Even an IHI course for the “Patient Safety Executive” program puts “Building a just culture” on its agenda.
Among the topics Berwick and and Hill look at in these videos are the importance of transparency or “turning on the lights,” ways of learning from the health provider system itself as well as from clinical trials, types of personalized medicine, the impediments to collecting useful data that can improve care, exemplary organizations that deliver better healthcare, and how long change will take.
The full video appears below.
Open source software creeps in to health care through clinical research
Report from OpenClinica conference
Although open source has not conquered the lucrative market for electronic health records (EHRs) used by hospital systems and increasingly by doctors, it is making strides in many other important areas of health care. One example is clinical research, as evidenced by OpenClinica in field of Electronic Data Capture (EDC) and LabKey for data integration. Last week I attended a conference for people who use OpenClinica in their research or want to make their software work with it.
At any one time, hundreds of thousands of clinical trials are going on around the world, many listed on an FDA site. Many are low-budget and would be reduced to using Excel spreadsheets to store data if they didn’t have the Community edition of OpenClinica. Like most companies with open-source products, OpenClinica uses the “open core” model of an open Community edition and proprietary enhancements in an Enterprise edition. There are about 1200 OpenClinica installations around the world, although estimation is always hard to do with open source projects.
What is Electronic Data Capture? As the technologically archaic name indicates, the concept goes back to the 1970s and refers simply to the storage of data about patients and their clinical trials in a database. It has traditionally been useful for reporting results to funders, audit trails, printing in various formats, and similar tasks in data tracking.
Ways to put the patient first when collecting health data
Report from 2013 Health Privacy Summit
The timing was superb for last week’s Health Privacy Summit, held on June 5 and 6 in Washington, DC. First, it immediately followed the 2000-strong Health Data Forum (Health Datapalooza), where concern for patients rights came up repeatedly. Secondly, scandals about US government spying were breaking out and providing a good backdrop for talking about protection our most sensitive personal information–our health data.
The health privacy summit, now in its third year, provides a crucial spotlight on the worries patients and their doctors have about their data. Did you know that two out of three doctors (and probably more–this statistic cites just the ones who admit to it on a survey) have left data out of a patient’s record upon the patient’s request? I have found that the summit reveals the most sophisticated and realistic assessment of data protection in health care available, which is why I look forward to it each year. (I’m also on the planning committee for the summit.) For instance, it took a harder look than most observers at how health care would be affected by patient access to data, and the practice of sharing selected subsets of data, called segmentation.
What effect would patient access have?
An odd perceptual discontinuity exists around patient access to health records. If you go to your doctor and ask to see your records, chances are you will be turned down outright or forced to go through expensive and frustrating magical passes. One wouldn’t know that HIPAA explicitly required doctors long ago to give patients their data, or that the most recent meaningful use rules from the Department of Health and Human Services require doctors to let patients view, download, and transmit their information within four business days of its addition to the record.
Patients matter most, but technology matters a lot
Report from the Health Data Forum
Computing practices that used to be religated to experimental outposts are now taking up residence at the center of the health care field. From natural language processing to machine learning to predictive modeling, you see people promising at the health data forum (Health Datapalooza IV) to do it in production environments.
The elusive quest to transform healthcare through patient empowerment
We need to provide data to patients in a form they can understand
Would you take a morning off from work to discuss health care costs and consumer empowerment in health care? Over a hundred people in the Boston area did so on Monday, May 6, for the conference “Empowering Healthcare Consumers: A Community Conversation Conference” at the Suffolk Law School. This fast-paced and wide-ranging conference lasted just long enough to show that hopes of empowering patients and cutting health care costs (which is the real agenda behind most of the conference organizers) run up against formidable hurdles–many involving the provision of data to these consumers.
Read more…
Looking ahead to a world of data-dominated decisions
Review of Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier's Big Data
Measuring a world-shaking trend with feet planted in every area of human endeavor cannot be achieved in a popular book of 200 pages, but one has to start somewhere. I am happy to recommend the adept efforts of Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier as a starting point. Their recent book Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think (recently featured in a video interview on the O’Reilly Strata site) does not quite unravel the mystery of the zeal for recording and measurement that is taking over governments and business, but it does what a good popularization should: alert us to what’s happening, provide some frameworks for talking about it, and provide a launchpad for us to debate the movement’s good and evil.
Because readers of this blog have been grappling with these concerns for some time. I’ll provide the barest summary of topics covered in Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier’s extensive overview, then provide some complementary ideas of my own.
Read more…
Three organizations pressing for change in society’s approach to computing
Talks with the Association for Computing Machinery, Open Technology Institute, and Open Source Initiative.
Taking advantage of a recent trip to Washington, DC, I had the privilege of visiting three non-profit organizations who are leaders in the application of computers to changing society. First, I attended the annual meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery’s US Public Policy Council (USACM). Several members of the council then visited the Open Technology Institute (OTI), which is a section of New America Foundation (NAF). Finally, I caught the end of the first general-attendance meeting of the Open Source Initiative (OSI).
In different ways, these organizations are all putting in tremendous effort to provide the benefits of computing to more people of all walks of life and to preserve the vigor and creativity of computing platforms. I found out through my meetings what sorts of systemic change is required to achieve these goals and saw these organizations grapple with a variety of strategies to get there. This report is not a statement from any of these groups, just my personal observations.