As someone who works in healthcare, I've discovered that providing good care is entirely about information. If we don't know someone's drug allergies, medical history, and can't effectively communicate between departments, patient safety is impacted. Turning away patients may actually save lives if a hospital is unable to provide communication and medical background for a patient.

When I'm unable to get to the network for some reason, I feel extra stupid as a developer. I can't search for code examples on Google, migrate code to staging servers, and so on. Healthcare is similar, with providers not being as effective as if they had their full EMR at their fingertips.

Turning away patients results in loss of income, so they're basically losing money in order to improve the safety of their patients.

This one seemed to work pretty well at finding my wife, anyway.

The average for light trucks would rise from 24 mpg to 26.2 mpg.

It appears SUVs will continue to have pretty horrible gas mileage.

Weird. I work in IT in HealthCare and I haven't heard of EPIC before. Moving to browser-based systems is becoming more common, though most EMRs still have terminal-based technology behind the scenes.

One of the challenges of EMRs is that there are so many of them and each have different strengths and weaknesses. Our current EMR is primarily designed for the hospital setting and the clinic add-on isn't as great.

Billing is one of those things that seems a necessary evil to many healthcare providers. It's an annoying distraction to caring for a patient, but it's how insurance companies reimburse you, so it must be done. Barring a complete overhaul of the heathcare system, I think you'll see billing as a big part of every EMR.

We had a reporter try to do this after a school shooting. They were caught and I'm not sure if charges were filed.

Everyone wears badge photos at our hospital and if you wandered into a patient area without one and no one recognized you, security would likely be called.

You make a good point that simply making charts digital is not enough. A good system detects errors, supports reporting after-the fact, and allows for good auditing. Our healthcare system has had an EMR for nearly a decade, and I've had a chance to see the growing pains and thrills over that time. Here are a few benefits that come to mind.

Auditing. I help an audit team look at who's pulling up whose records. With paper, this would be nearly impossible, but with electronic records it's quite easy to see that user X is pulling up the medical records of their ex-wife or the visiting famous person. Though this has been hard for some, I think it's made our organization much more respectful of a patient's privacy.

Moves. We moved our hospital recently and I got to write the system that tracked each patient as they went through the various staging areas to their new bed across town. Our EMR made this like tracking packages in FedEx and it worked great.

Widespread Communication. On a more practical note, this is the big one. It used to be very difficult to move charts and images around town or even to other cities. Now people anywhere in the sprawling healthcare system can see the latest on your medical condition.

Reporting. We have a massive data warehouse that lets us see the effect of our various health improvement efforts and gives us the ability to more accurately report quality data (e.g. are we giving asprin to everyone who comes in with chest pain?). Evidence based medicine is big in our organization, and it requires good data to support it.

Fixing Errors Before They Happen. This is the most challenging one, and I think we're still in our infancy. I helped make a lab cross-reference system whose purpose is to make sure nurses know what lab a doctor really ordered. If they ordered something vaguely cryptic, they can key in the lab name and it will give them the different names in different electronic systems, in addition to hand-entered names that some doctors use.

EMRs alone aren't going to improve healthcare greatly, but they open up a lot of other options that most certainly will.

I recently put together a Mindstorm NTX based robot that's controlled from a web page. It's been lots of fun, and it even has its own blog (which I'm specifically not posting so hordes of Slashdot users don't try to drive it around terrorizing my daughter).

My son and I joked about making it do something useful and buying a URL called "cleanmyroom.com" where total strangers will go around cleaning up your room. In this case, I'd go for "mowmylawn.com". It's like Tom Sawyer charging money to whitewash a fence.

I'm on my second kid and already I'm losing my hair and feel tired all the time. Unfortunately every time I ask my wife for some adult stem cell action, she turns me down.

Actually, we IE users are spoofing our user agent to make it seem like we're Firefox whenever we visit Slashdot.

I've got a reputation as a nerd to uphold, after all.

I think this already exists in the form of "Skype Darts". Essentially you set up Skype at two locations, focusing the webcam on a dart board. Each player then tosses the dart in an attempt to score points.

What's great is that the billions of physics calculations needed to perform accurate dart-throwing (taking into account wind resistance, muscle fatigue, and other factors), are outsourced to the external site. In this way, "Reality" is able to accurately simulate the dart game, down to the molecular level. This is all streamed to the other player in real-time, with very little lag.

As an ex-biology teacher, one of my professor's pet peeves was that there was no single "scientific method". There are a some general approaches and a lot of techniques, but no single, official approach.

For example, it may be that doing double-blind studies are often a great idea, but we regularly accept studies without it as being scientifically valid. I'm actually partial to the "guess and check" method for solving lots of problems. Different problems work better with different methods.

Well, I guess that explains why that's how they'll say damn in the future.

It turns out they didn't use viruses, but instead transposons to get their genetic code in a cell. The catch is that transposons (aka jumping genes) are mutagenic. They did use a certain enzyme in mouse cells to remove them, but it's still possible they caused damage to the DNA. If it can be safely removed, that's great, but I'd be a little nervous about this approach.

It may be possible to achieve the same approach using raw strands of RNA that never modifies the DNA, but I'm sure smarter people than me may know reasons why that's difficult.

This was a common misconception until recently. You can read about it here.