In medication safety screening, alert fatigue occurs when the signal:noise ratio is so low that clinicians develop a habit of ignoring alerts, thereby potentially missing important alerts when they occur. One idea for reducing alert fatigue is to display relevant and recent lab results alongside the alert, thereby allowing physicians to make a more informed decision of the risk of a particular drug-drug interaction in a given patient. For example, if a drug-drug interaction may cause an increase in serum potassium (hyperkalemia), and if a patient’s serum potassium is already on the high side of normal, a physician may determine that it’s too risky to continue with the prescribed drug combination in this particular patient. Read further >

… and jogging is significantly reducing intelligence …and information really helps our customers.

I just went through a speech, which Neil Postman held back in 1990, where he cited people from even 50 more years back in time. And I find it hard to refute his central claims, including: “Information is not part of the solution, but instead creates new sorts of problems”.

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In approaching the professional development market for US accounting professionals, I have become painfully aware of the dichotomy between helping professionals learn and helping professionals get continuing education credits. In the world of Learning and Development, the 70/20/10 model has long been cited as the reason learning professionals should increasingly focus on how a firm can better facilitate informal learning than worry about the management and creation of formal courses. To be fair, it’s not a mutually exclusive proposition, but because formal course performance is much easier to evaluate and measure progress against (as well as state regulatory bodies emphasis), it takes up more mindshare of the learning professionals day than perhaps it should. Read further >

Google Docs and Gmail have always been in the cloud. Microsoft has followed more of a hybrid model. Both are interested in generating revenue from highly targeted advertising. Microsoft and Google have invested money and brain power into creating algorithms that target advertisements to end users. The algorithms increase the precision of the targeted advertising by becoming aware of end users’ interests. Algorithms attribute interests to end users based on their search terms, the contents of their electronic communications, demographic information and the contents of their word-processing documents. If you have a Gmail account, you probably have experienced Google’s contextual targeting, based on keywords in Gmail messages. Other insights for these thoughts come from patents and patent applications, including the following: Read further >

Few weeks ago a new portal for legal professionals has been published by Wolters Kluwer Italy: it is called Studio Legale and integrates solutions prototyped within our R&D department and discussed also in some of my previous posts about semantic search and technology. Read further >

As mentioned in the previous post, in corporations the innovation happens at three levels. The first type happens in the individual capabilities; the ideas are generated inside the minds. But teams and corporations are needed to execute complex ideas. Read further >

I was triggered by this Quora: “What are some of the most ridiculous startup ideas that eventually became successful?”. I have been pondering how to recognize and/or validate a great idea. Moreover what does it take to follow through when you are on to something? Google, Facebook, Twitter, Paypal all made the grade according to Quora for various reasons. Even iOS got mentioned, while I still believe Google Wave was amazing on many levels. So when is an idea really great? Read further >

For professionals consumers of tax, legal and regulatory content, I believe that both search alerts and editorially authored news are important sources of current awareness. Think of a Venn diagram in which current awareness results from search alerts appear in one circle and results from editorially created news appear in the other. There is a convergence, specifically, new content that would be identified by both search alerts and by editorially authored news. But there would also be coverage unique to each. Read further >

A bigger part of the Netherlands is located under sea level, which gives me the association of living in a submarine. But this does not imply that the Dutch are hiding from anything, quite on the contrary!

Exquisite research is taking place here, which was very well illustrated during our LOD2 plenary meeting end of March in Amsterdam; after last year’s plenaries in Vienna and Cambridge.

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Just a few weeks ago, the Ministry of Health released the new 2012 Essential Medicines List [1], which will go into effect May of this year. This revision seeks to address the limitations of the previous list, released in 2009 [2]. Specifically, that there were not enough different drug varieties, that the list was not often used by larger hospitals, that there weren’t enough medications for pediatrics, oncology, and other specialties, and that there wasn’t a standardized way for regions to make their own additions to the essential medicines list [3]. Read further >