The Veterans Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VISTA) is the nationwide veterans clinical and business information system of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. VISTA consists of 180 applications for clinical, financial, and administrative functions all integrated within a single database, providing single, authoritative source of data for all veteran-related care and services. The U.S. Congress mandates the VA keep the veterans health record in a single, authoritative, lifelong database, which is VISTA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VistA (EMR) (more)

Electronic Health Record (more)

The VA's credentialing system (Reputation Management) has generated red flags on 17k out of their 56k Physician-s that require further investigation as to whether they can continue to practice.. On Aug. 10, the surgical director at the Marion facility was notified that the agency's National Surgical Quality Improvement Program had flagged the hospital because of the abnormal number of patient deaths. (HealthCare) (more)

Epic Systems Corporation (commonly known as Epic) is an American privately held healthcare software company based in Verona, Wisconsin. According to the company, hospitals that use its software held medical records (EMR) of 78% of patients in the United States and over 3% of patients worldwide in 2022. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Systems#Criticisms_and_controversies

Epic's overhaul of a flawed algorithm shows why AI oversight is a life-or-death issue. Epic Systems, the nation’s dominant seller of electronic health records (EMR), was bracing for a catastrophe. It was June 2021, and a study about to be published in the Journal of the American Medical Association had found that Epic’s artificial intelligence (AI) tool to predict sepsis, a deadly complication of infection, was prone to missing cases and flooding clinicians with false alarms. (more)

John Shagoury, president of Nuance Healthcare, says While the HIT Policy Committee has recognized "electronically capturing data" as part of the "Meaningful Use Of EMR" criteria, the rich nature of the physician narrative needs to be specifically identified. In order to ensure that patients' medical records do not suffer in quality, and that caregiver communication via shared notes does not lack necessary detail, electronic health records (EHR) must not be reduced to point-and-click templates alone (Structured Data). The physician Narrative should be accounted for and measured as part of quality care tracking.

The VA and DOD have spent over $1 billion dollars and began their EHR project over a decade ago. Unfortunately, the bureaucratic giants are far from reaching full EHR interoperability (InterOp) by their mandated live date of September 2009.

Dan Davies: last chapters and how to avoid them. “Recoding America: Why Government is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better” by Jennifer Pahlka. Strong positive recommend. (more)

Electronic Medical Record (more)

geek, systems thinker https://www.kalzumeus.com/ (more)

Google notebook+LLM app https://notebooklm.google/ (more)

hypertext junkie (more)

Screens, Research, and Hypertext, an online hypertext-ebook/wiki-ebook by Joe Miller, published 2022. https://screensresearchhypertext.com/ (more)

Steven Johnson: Introducing NotebookLM. About five months ago, I shared the news that I was collaborating with Google on a new AI-based tool for thought, then code-named Project Tailwind. (more)

EleanorKonik: On Testing Hypotheses Instead of Setting Goals. I picked up Tiny Experiments on a whim. Yes, that’s an affiliate link, yes I hope you buy the book, the whole point of this essay is going to be “this is genuinely the best self-help—sorry, Personal Success in Business—book I’ve ever read.” (personal development, goal-setting) (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: AI #109: Google Fails Marketing Forever. What if they released the new best LLM, and almost no one noticed? Google seems to have pulled that off this week with Google Gemini 2.5 Pro. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: They Took MY Job? No, they didn’t. Not so fast, and not quite my job. But OpenAI is trying. Consider this a marker to look back upon in the future, as a reflection. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: AI #108: Straight Line on a Graph. *The x-axis of the graph is time. The y-axis of the graph is the log of ‘how long a software engineering task can AIs reliably succeed at doing.’ (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: AI #20: Code Interpreter and Claude 2.0 for Everyone. There is no shortage of people willing to talk about every week as a huge week in AI with tons of amazing new releases and announcements. At first this was usually right, then it mostly stopped being right. This week we had Code Interpreter and Claude 2.0 and x.AI (whatever that actually is) and a bunch of other stuff, while I was still processing OpenAI’s huge announcement of their Superalignment Taskforce. As usual, when there’s lots of great stuff that makes it that much harder to actually find time to play around with it. Things are good and also can be overwhelming. (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: The One Mistake Rule. If a model gives a definitely wrong answer anywhere, it is useless everywhere. (more)