"Caused by a woman"
What, she actually beat both of them up and the casualties didn't admit it?
Political correctness be damned, the cause seems unlikely to have been external to at least one of them.
68 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Jul 2007
And we have patient records for groups of around 2000 (per GP) to 30 000 (largest Practice at present. They have since 1900 or so been intended to be cradle to grave records, thus having extracts of hospitals' etc records in them. With electronic records one may be a bit more clever.
There is something to be said for automating access by other healthcare entities to the record held by the Practice, among other things it significantly increases the difficulty of obtaining the record of a specific person, if some finite number of holes exist, and it vastly multiplies the effort of getting all the records, or trawling all or some of the records for particular profitable information. (The address of someone for instance who has reason not to want to be found by someone non-official. Oh, and who has what as well).
For making queries about disease tracking and other bits of epidemiology there are a couple of considerations:-
1. It is actually more economical and more virtuous to send the query to everyone, than to collect all the data from everyone and then run the query on it...
2. Medical records like other records tend to be very bad at answering questions that they were not designed or intended or used so as to be able to answer - random data mining is something that is presented as solving problems and valuable, but many of us are unconvinced as yet.
Compare and contrast "Send me all your medical records on everyone, I wish to count the cases diagnosed and coded as Typhoid" and "How many cases diagnosed and coded as TYphoid have you?"
One gets a gigabyte, the other gets "0". (Or in the context of an epidemic, perhaps a small set of names and addresses and geocodes.)
I quite like "loose" for what has happened - I've not seen the detailed reports to know whether the people involved were clinicians (whatever they are - I'm a doctor and there are another 100 000 or so of us, and then a bunch of people playing doctor whose informational needs and abilities may well be very different) and the 300 000 users for the NHS Net seems a low number to me, actually, given the access via Whitehall and the porters' lodge. Think 1 000 000 as a start, I'd say.
The data is not lost. That construction is one with the RIAA and FAST and the like. It has indeed been let loose. The media have been lost. Precision in talking about NHS IT was lost long ago among the politicians and managers, and is worth trying to recapture here.
The 130 000 can reasonably be expected to buy one PC each per 5 years.
That makes 40 000 in part of the first year look like a rather high proportion[1], not that there is any information on the concurrence between the suggesters and the buyers.
[1] more than 100%, not 30% not that I'd rely on the rate remaining constant
Turn it around, rather than "what can the reader do with it" consider what the company could lose.
Nothing, so far as I can see.
Therefore their reason - if it is reasoned rather than simply an inability to deal with a demand they conform to a licence condition of software they are using which would carry its own message about the wisdom of dealing with them as a business partner or investor - appears to be something else.
IE they are incompetent as a business, or they are deliberately picking a fight over something which has no value to the company.
The latter also might interest actual or potential shareholders, if the company management can't show an income for picking that fight, and an expectation of profit from it.
It seems too stupid to not be malign.
Consider for a moment general practice medical records, which are presently stored in 10 000 systems of around a dozen different sorts in a like number of places.
A question such as "How many people have Diabetes, of which types, by age and sex distribution and what medicines are they prescribed?" can be approached in at least two ways.
One way is to construct a large computer system notionally placed in Richmond House, Whitehall, suck all information from the 10 000 systems into it, and then make an SQL query against it.
Another way is to write two lines of Perl for each of those dozen sorts, which launch a (possibly SQL, possibly M, possibly procedural) query against the system to produce an answer, a small table of figures, ship that to a rather smaller computer notionally in RIchmond House and with another two lines of Perl aggregate them into a table of figures.
The first is more popular with the suppliers of large, and rather fanciful, computer systems, the civil service, and allegedly MI5. The latter has certain advantages, such as being known to be possible, easy even, cheap and as a small but topcially relevant feature, of not transferring identities from here to there or concentrating them into one place.
If a missile was faster than a satellite, it would be less useful on terrestrial targets. Even anti-satellite missiles are likely to be slower than their targets, they only need to place a cloud of bits in front of the target just as it arrives, not match orbits.
The interesting thing about a State launching a satellite is it proves that they can throw something that size to any point on Earth.
Have people stopped being embarrassed at displaying ignorance in public?
I think my colleagues may find it hard to recognise the NHS in this.
Perhaps it is some other nation, a different sort of health or an alternative use of "service" which describes the organisation whose huge ambitious IT project is going so well.
If so I expect everyone in it is acclaiming the clever people and virtuous companies running and providing the IT.
Alternatively ...
Microsoft has been distributing GNU GPL'd software in the Interix (now Services for Unix package) -- in particular the gcc compiler.
The download includes GPLv1 and GPLv2 text; some of the tools are licensed "GPLv2 and later". The source code, or where to find it, is not apparent.
Perhaps Microsoft has felt itself above copyright law these past few years already?
Link
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=896c9688-601b-44f1-81a4-02878ff11778&DisplayLang=en
If you stick your head into a supermarket giving away carrier bags, and ask if you can have one, _please_, then I'd be surprised if the answer was no.
If you ask for a hundred, then it seems to be a business transaction.
If you pick one up that has been dropped outside, and use it, then it would be odd if the state or the shop objected.
The Michigan case seems more in the range of the first and last, but not completely.