gag clauses

At my Jan. 2009 post "Waste Feared in Digitizing Patient Records: Wall Street Journal" and others I have written about the illegitimacy and abuse of patient rights, as well as abuse of clinician trust committed by health IT vendors using patient care settings as an unconsented software development laboratory and beta testing site.

I wrote:

My letter "Health Care Information Technology, Hospital Responsibilities, and Joint Commission Standards" was published in JAMA yesterday.

A preview of the letter can be seen here, or a full version here if you subscribe to JAMA.

Here is some sense on healthcare IT from the European Union, echoing a number of themes I've written about at Healthcare Renewal and my academic site on HIT difficulties and failures.

As I have written many times, health IT can achieve many of its touted benefits, but only if done well. "Done well" is not as easy at it might seem in the complex world of healthcare.

I am providing a link to a fascinating story by a patient.

It is worth reading in its entirety. It illustrates many of the points I've made on HC Renewal about healthcare IT difficulties in the real world (as opposed to the Bernie Madoff world of "unlimited returns, no matter what.")

Fiduciary (fidOO'shēe"rē), in law, a person who is obliged to discharge faithfully a responsibility of trust toward another.

A preprint article "Health IT Project Success and Failure: Recommendations from Literature and an AMIA Workshop" (link to free preprint PDF) by Bonnie Kaplan and Kimberly D.

Harris-Salamone (doi:10.1197/jamia.M2997) has just been published and made available in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA).

It will appear in the May/June 2009 issue of JAMIA.

Bill Gates's company, Microsoft, touts the User Experience as the Sine Qua Non of computing.

Billions of dollars have been spent tweaking every little nuance of Windows, with version 7.0 soon to appear. Apple has done likewise with Mac OS X.

(The various X-windows managers for Linux, less so). I respect these efforts and use both mainstream OS's in my daily work.

(Note: part 1 is here, part 2 is her