Computing

The Pew Trusts has commented on this issue as part of new regulations governing the EHR Incentive Program, asking Medicare & Medicaid Services to ensure that doctors are aware of patients' advance care plans and can easily locate them. Pew also endorsed the recently introduced Personalize Your Care Act 2.0, which includes a provision requiring the secretary of HHS to establish standards for advance care planning documentation in EHRs. Although EHRs have been widely adopted — thanks in large part to financial incentives from the federal government — there is no common place for medical staff to note patients' end-of-life wishes.   Although electronic health records have been widely adopted, there is no common place for medical staff to note patients’ end-of-life wishes. Electronic health records (EHRs) have the potential to dramatically increase physi… more »

Rose Madeline Mula writes: Today's kids don't have to struggle with typewriter ribbons, correction tape, Wite-Out, carbon paper, mimeograph stencils, Ditto machines, and a myriad other medieval instruments of torture that plagued secretaries of old. What's a secretary? It was a woman (never a man) who munched a brown-bag sandwich at her desk as she typed, while her boss, who made more than ten times her salary, was out enjoying expense-paid 'business' lunches and martinis with other bosses. If I sound bitter, it's because I am. I was born way too soon I envy all who weren't. more »

Ann Voorhees Baker writes: The lesson is that sometimes it's worth breaking the fourth wall, to borrow a term from the theater when an actor breaks the imaginary wall at the front of the stage and speaks directly to the audience as himself, not his character. Sometimes when the whole beautiful program or platform just gets messed up, or you mess it up, it's time to break that fourth wall and exit the system entirely and contact the humans who built it and say 'what the heck.' more »

Like fireworks bursting through a smoky haze, protostars ignite within colossal filaments of gas in a new supercomputer simulation of stars forming inside molecular clouds. The simulation covers 700,000 years, and is based on computer code created by UC Berkeley astrophysicist Richard Klein to capture the effects of radiation, magnetic fields, gravity and other physical phenomena and paint a realistic portrait of star formation. more »