What are the most important pieces of professional advice you’ve ever received? I remember one of mine clearly: It was in late 2004, and my colleague Bill told me that it was “time to have an idea.” I had hired in as the first employee…
Climate change is real, human activity is driving it, it’s an emergency. We need to slam the brakes on carbon emissions right now to have any hope of a smaller scale catastrophe. That’s the choice. Doing nothing or putting it off is a crime against…
We are living through an uncomfortable period in the practice of medicine. The dialogue between patient and physician is critically underserved, both in terms of tools for patients and physicians, and also in terms of the data context where that conversation takes place. This is…
People regularly ask, “how’s that consulting thing going?” It’s a fair question, and I don’t mind answering. The short answer is that it’s going better than I ever expected. Conditions were basically perfect when I created my LLC in 2013: I had been employed by…
A few days ago, one of my professional contacts shared a list titled “rules for sons” on LinkedIn. It was filled with advice like, “the man at a BBQ grill is the closest thing to a king,” and “carry two handkerchiefs. The one in your…
Let me start off by agreeing that yes, the network is slow. I’ve moved a fair amount of data over the years. Even when it’s only a terabyte or two, the network always seems uncomfortably slow. We never seem to get the performance we sketched…
Biology is weird. The data are weird, not least because models evolve rapidly. Today’s textbook headline is tomorrow’s “in some cases,” and next year’s “we used to think.” It can be hard for non-biologists, particularly tech/math/algorithm/data science/machine learning/AI folks, to really internalize the level of…
In my previous blog post, I talked about the fact that medical records are a dumpster fire from a scientific data perspective. Apparently this resonated for people. This post begins to sketch some ideas for how we might start to correct the problem at its…
I posted a quick tweet this morning about the state of data in health care. Over the years, I’ve worked with at least half a dozen projects where earnest, intelligent, diligent folks have tried to unlock the potential stored in mid to large scale batches…
About eleven years ago, in January of 2008, the New England Journal of Medicine published a perspective piece on direct to consumer genetic tests, “Letting the Genome out of the Bottle, Will We Get Our Wish.” The article begins by describing an “overweight” patient who…