This week I'm writing about something in politics that may not seem like it will affect healthcare, but it will. There is a bill in progress called the "Lawful Access to Encrypted Data Act." The purpose of the bill is to create backdoors into encryption to make it easy for law enforcement to access encrypted data. The bill sounds like it is about crime and law enforcement, but it is much more ...

Earlier today, I had a conversation with a program coordinator friend. She was running a survey to learn about how people perceive program coordinators. I had some thoughts, and she seemed to appreciate hearing them.

We have been working with GME programs (That's Graduate Medical Education for our friends who are not in academic medicine) for the last eight years. We spend a massive ...

In last week’s post, I defined humane software and asked for feedback. As a reminder, the definition was: an ongoing endeavor that looks beyond the simple goals of the system at any other results and seeks to expand benefits and reduce harms.

One reader wrote in with some profound thoughts on what humane software is. He said that humane software is empathetic and takes into account the ...

In this blog/mailing list, I have been writing about "humane software," particularly as it relates to medicine. Still, I have never stopped to acknowledge it directly or define what it means. So today, I will address that, head-on, by defining humane software. To increase the level of difficulty, or really to avoid a pet peeve, I'm going to try to avoid defining in terms of what it is not. ...

We had a great meeting today with a group of doctors and nurses who are using our scheduling system. This was the first time we had met with them since they started using it, and you won’t believe me when I tell you all of the nice things they had to say. But I am going to tell you two things because they relate to good software overall.

1. One of the doctors turned to me towards the end ...