The Notorious BIJ blog

I just went through…

I just went through Google Health today for the first time and it seems easy to use however there are somethings that are missing that might be helpful to a physician. Those things include a patient’s past medical histories, their family history, and social histories, which we often take during our initial interview. It also seems like the database has no way to time and date notes associated with medical conditions except as “notes”.

But then I realized that Google was not trying to make a EMR for physicians but for patients to track their own conditions. However, if a patient came to the hospital with a google health file, it may not be as useful to physicians as initially thought. 

RITE of passage

My mindless memorization fest is finally over and now I can focus on fellowship apps, research and other various projects including putting together a lego version of the SDF-1 with full transforming abilities(see above). I’m in the process of putting together a plan of attack for this project. Any ideas?!?!?

I also have obtained a wii which took a week longer than I expected…from walmart, which made me buy 6 games and some other accoutrements. I love legal exploitation!

Wii parties to be announced!!!

-bijal

Mechanical Wild Animal Park

These guys are building a bunch of “Jules Verne” -esque mechanical creatures to put together a wild animal park…kind of like a safari of robo-animals. Really cool…

Drug Company Swag

I thought this (click for the article) was an interesting article on the swag (aka “mostly” junk, pens, clock, post-it notes etc…) that drug companies hand out to us on a daily basis.

But it made me wonder how much paper they must shell out to us too. Most of which ends up in the garbage and not even looked at…

Rather than having a system wide removal of all things with drug company’s names and drug names on them, why not come up with a paper-less presentation that these reps can dole out to us in person or direct us to an on-line site for our own perusal.  to some degree they already do this at lunch meeting and rep sponored dinners, but why not make it more pervasive. By getting us to go to websites, it creates an audience whose attention is not disturbed by the growling of their stomaches. Incentives could be given to go to the sites…like free pens (just kidding) or incremental credits to things like amazon.com or movie tickets. I know that they do have things like on-line seminars that I’ve looged on to the past and been rewarded with a moderate gift certificate, but I’m talking an even smaller amount of reward that you can build up and collected towards everyday things. The money from printing all those pieces of paper could go to pay for this instead.

Those guys in Minn. hauled away 20 shopping carts worth of stuff…but I bet the amount of paper if collected over a year would be staggeringly higher in value and amount. They are going to send this stuff to Cameroon??? I wonder what it will do to the prescription patterns of physicians there seeing their patients sporting all things pfizer, biogen, Eli Lilly, etc… :) …Sounds like a research project :)

-bijal

ps-I’m not a tree hugger (except literally, I am); I just hate waste…

Glass Houses and Stone Throwing

Comedian Dimitri Martin made an interesting point and joke with a phrase many neurologists use to assess a patients mental state and that I will surely overthink here. He said that the expression, “people in glass houses should’nt throw stones”, but the policy should be not to throw stones regardless…because throwing stones is just not cool, you could hurt someone. Except for one exception,he states, if you are trapped in a glass house, then throw a stone and get out!

I guess this applies metaphorically too…so I’ll throw a stone so I can get out of this glass house called my fortress of study’tude. I’ve spent more hours now studing for my RITE exam that when I close my eyes I see that old photo question of the fetus with cyclopia…scary stuff.

It made me rethink the concept of evaluation.

What follows are my thoughts as I say them but I contend that I am not an expert in the field…lord knows I’ve been on the losing end of many evaluations, even when I thought I was doing my best!

Which bring me to my point, should an honest self-assessment be weighed equally with an outside evaluation like a test or from a mentor whose job is to mold you with constructive critisms; not scold you with “this is what’s wrong with you, stupid.” I understand correcting what’s wrong is fundemental, but positive reinforcement is important to motivate someone to look beyond the good and correct the bad.

So, complement someone

…hey buddy, nice job throwing that stone

-bijal 

Doogie Howser, MD

I just heard that the first “indian-american” was elected Louisiana’s Governor. That’s very cool. I always knew that it would happen someday; I just didn’t think it would happen this soon. 

However, I’m a bit intrigued and puzzled by two things in this article and about Jindal. It states that he converted from Hindism to the Catholic faith as a teenager…I bet there’s an interesting story there as this is very rare in the indian community. The second thing that was interesting was that Jindal was picked to head the state health dept. for Louisiana at age 24…wow that’s quite young and quite an accomplishment!!! He’s the indian-american equivalent of Doogie Howser, but for politics rather than medicine.  

-bijal

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-01-14-louisiana_N.htm?csp=34

ps-and he kind of looks like my dad :)