The Integrative Stream

ISEPHR Call for Papers

The International Symposium on Electronic Personal Health Records in Trondheim, Norway has published their call for papers. I mention this because I’ll be giving a talk at the meeting, representing the Children’s Hospital Informatics Program’s Personally Controlled Health Records project.

Also on the conference front is PCHRI 2006, the Harvard Medical School Meeting on Personally Controlled Health Record Infrastructure, which I am co-chairing. It’s shaping up to be quite the Fall.

Spammers Again

It doesn’t show up for readers because I have moderation turned on, but this blog attracts a lot of comment spam. Thankfully, Akismet (the WordPress 2.0 spam filter) catches 99.9% of it without my having to look. It’s caught over 2,500 attempts since I installed it a few months ago. A few snuck through today, and it seems to be because the link spammers have started to take over public wiki pages, and are using the comment spams just to link to the wikis. And since the wikis are on real sites, often at universities, it’s not so obvious to the filter that the content is not legit. Sneaky, and it’s probably going to be a problem for wikis going forward.

A Personal Change of Venue

I’ve been a little quiet here the last few weeks; mostly because I’ve been going flat out to get ready to relocate to Washington, DC. I haven’t mentioned it up to this point because I was waiting for the final confirmation paperwork, and you never really know with government until things have settled down.

So here’s the big announcement: I’m taking time off from MIT Sloan and from the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences & Technology to join the staff of the Office of Policy at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in Washington, DC. Specifically, I will be focusing on healthcare information technology and its implications for the present and future of Medicare and Medicaid. I start on July 23rd.

Those who know me well are aware that I’ve already had a fascination with government. While, this time last year I did not expect to be in a government position right now (certainly not an extended duration one), I’m pretty pleased that everything worked out.

As for the implications for this blog: I’m honestly not sure. The main issue is that I may have to scale back my discussion of healthcare IT issues and possibly of broader public health policy issues as well. It goes without saying that anything discussed on this blog does not represent the opinion of the United States Government, nor does my hiring represent an endorsement of anything I may have written here to date. There are very few federal employees who maintain active web sites, which means there are few models. I will be consulting with the ethics office over the next few weeks to determine what the boundaries are. Practical considerations may play just as much of a role, in which case the posting schedule here may shift to less frequent, longer articles.

As for the process of moving? Not fun. Not fun at all. I’ve managed to avoid moving more than a 2.5 hour drive at a time for my entire adult life, and over the last five years I’ve bought a lot of furniture. The truck comes tomorrow, and am I ready? No.