Partners has a new blog on — jargon alert — clinical informatics. Might 
be worth checking out since the federal HIT effort is headed by Partners doc David Blumenthal. He recently brought Partners’ HIT boss on board to help out. For more on Dr. John Glaser, see BHN’s March interview.
The Partners site includes links, news and its own content. Today it leads with this slide show on clinical decision making, which comes from Dr. Blackford Middleton, chairman of the Partners/Harvard Center for Information Technology
He quotes Herbert A. Simon, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1978 for his research into group decision making.
“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”
(Sounds like it could apply to the Internet in general.)
Middleton also makes these points:
- Medical literature doubles every 19 years
- Doubles every 22 months for AIDS care
- 2 Million facts needed to practice
- Covell study of LA Internists: 2 unanswered clinical questions for every 3 patients. Forty percent were described as questions of fact, 44 percent were questions of medical opinion.
Boston Health News 