Informatics Nerd

This is the first in a series of posts I'll be doing to recount the recent AMIA 2011 Symposium in Washington D.C.  What can I say - WOW!  It was a week ago already that I arrived, and after a few days of having my brain filled I (needless to say) needed a few days to relax and decompress. I began AMIA on Sunday night with a Late Breaking session about the Sorrell v. IMS Health case in Vermont where it was outlawed for pharmacies from selling prescription information to data mining and pharma companies.  While I make it no secret the details of legal proceedings are often over my head (I initially attended to see a fellow OHSU classmate present), this was a great discussion and raised some important considerations about the sharing of data. While many of the details of the discussion revolved around the legalities of how data miners were justifying the acquisition of the data under "Freedom of Speech", I found the discussion around how data could and should be used ver...

I'm always amazed by the plethora and quality of software released by the biomedical informatics community.  I personally have benefited from great projects like i2b2 and cTAKES amongst many others, and know of a ton of others that are available for use. While not to question or point out any particular project, there are examples where there is an existing system that does something quite well, and another organization either funds or gets funding to build another similar system.  It's true that in many cases this can bring about a new innovation or new direction in solving a problem, but one also has to question the amount of resource that's being used to reinvent basic components. To make this more concrete, let's come up with a hypothetical example of two open source de-identification systems.  System A is developed and provides an algorithm that performs fairly well, as well as a user interface that allows people to review documents.  System B is also deve...