EconTech

Apparently, it doesn’t get funding:
Why Medicine Should Care Less About ‘Sick,’ More About ‘Normal’
If you had died 50 years ago, your body would have stood a pretty good chance of serving science. In the 1960s, autopsy rates at US hospitals exceeded 50 percent. Pathologists weren’t necessarily looking for what killed people — they were taking [...]

Or so some want it. I don’t disagree that this is a good idea. But, as the article points out, there are more ways to disguise unfavorable results. Let’s hope the regulators can outwit the cheaters in these other instances. Also, note that many problems are discovered using observational data. I resubmit EMR as a [...]

Jason over at Healthcare Economist seems to think this is a good idea. I have to disagree with the specific instantiation described here (going solely on Jason’s description). Besides the obvious problem, pointed out by Jason, that most people have way too little expertise in medicine to properly document their health history, making that history [...]

The article itself seems interesting. Jason’s summary is below. I want to make a point on the meta-issue here. This type of study is not possible without proper documentation and recording in a compatible electronic format. The cost of collecting the non-electronic data is simply too high. I have said before that EMR will allow [...]

The linking of data in genomic and bibliomic (spelling?) studies and what it apparently allows (see article below) and what Hans Rosling is trying to do, in a slightly different way, for the social sciences could be possible with clinical data. Probably it cannot replace clinical experiments, but it can add to our ability to [...]