I’m an anaesthetist with a long-term interest in computer systems. Having completed my specialist anaesthetic training almost three years ago now I’ve accumulated some study leave. So I’m taking the opportunity to pick up the old interest.
I’ve always held the view that computers could be of tremendous assistance to health-care workers, but that getting the best out computers was going to require significant efforts by cross-trained doctors. That is, the world needed doctors who understand what computers can and cannot do and who can bridge the divide between clinical and IT complexities.
I tried for a while to be one of those doctors but then, to be honest, I gave up. It was too hard, I couldn’t get anyone to listen to me and I felt I was unlikely to actually make any difference if I couldn’t convince anybody that I had some insights to offer. Maybe, in reality, I didn’t actually have any useful insights or maybe I wasn’t capable of explaining myself. Maybe I needed to do what I did: go away and ‘get a real job’, then come back to it. Maybe I was right all along, but I was too young and too impatient for people to take seriously. We'll never know, but here we are.
I’ve been interested in computers since I was about 13, and at the age of 15 convinced my father to buy me an Apple ][+ with 48k of RAM. I wrote a version of PacMan my little sister used to play. I maintained an interest in computers through medical school and wrote a practice management package for Dad in Applesoft basic. We only had 140K floppy discs, and I wrote machine code calls to DOS to do direct disk sector I/O. After a few years we got a "IBM clone" and I re-wrote the system in dBase II, then dBase III.
After a few years as a Resident Medical Officer I travelled to the UK. I spent about a year loitering about Britain as a locum Anaesthetic SHO in the mid 1990’s I got a job working for the UK NHS Executive Information Management Group.
There I worked with Read James on version 3 of the “Read Codes”, joining on the tail effort of what was probably one of the biggest medical knowledge engineering efforts ever attempted, constructing a huge and unwieldy semantic network of over 300 000 terms. We learnt a few lessons, the biggest one being that these things are hard! I published a few papers in peer-reviewed journal while I was there some of which I've just discovered are now free on the web (eg 1, 2).
I came home to Brisbane with the intent of continuing in informatics as a legitimate medical speciality. After a few years trying I sadly concluded that although I thought having professional medical informaticians was a good idea, it seemed to be a seriously difficult career choice. As a career all it seemed to promise was little respect and less tenure.
I briefly tried a sideways approach into informatics through medical administration, along the way completing an MBA. But I soon decided if I was going to have a “real job”, then the one that suited me best was anaesthesia.
Over the last decade, in the gaps between anaesthetic training and family-making, I've maintained an interest in programming as hobby, most recently writing in PHP, MySQL, AJAX. I've also watched with interest as the Internet has exploded and every second person on the bus has gone on-line while commuting.
So coming back to informatics after a bit of a break, hopefully a blog will allow me to organise my thoughts.
I’ve always held the view that computers could be of tremendous assistance to health-care workers, but that getting the best out computers was going to require significant efforts by cross-trained doctors. That is, the world needed doctors who understand what computers can and cannot do and who can bridge the divide between clinical and IT complexities.
I tried for a while to be one of those doctors but then, to be honest, I gave up. It was too hard, I couldn’t get anyone to listen to me and I felt I was unlikely to actually make any difference if I couldn’t convince anybody that I had some insights to offer. Maybe, in reality, I didn’t actually have any useful insights or maybe I wasn’t capable of explaining myself. Maybe I needed to do what I did: go away and ‘get a real job’, then come back to it. Maybe I was right all along, but I was too young and too impatient for people to take seriously. We'll never know, but here we are.
I’ve been interested in computers since I was about 13, and at the age of 15 convinced my father to buy me an Apple ][+ with 48k of RAM. I wrote a version of PacMan my little sister used to play. I maintained an interest in computers through medical school and wrote a practice management package for Dad in Applesoft basic. We only had 140K floppy discs, and I wrote machine code calls to DOS to do direct disk sector I/O. After a few years we got a "IBM clone" and I re-wrote the system in dBase II, then dBase III.
After a few years as a Resident Medical Officer I travelled to the UK. I spent about a year loitering about Britain as a locum Anaesthetic SHO in the mid 1990’s I got a job working for the UK NHS Executive Information Management Group.
There I worked with Read James on version 3 of the “Read Codes”, joining on the tail effort of what was probably one of the biggest medical knowledge engineering efforts ever attempted, constructing a huge and unwieldy semantic network of over 300 000 terms. We learnt a few lessons, the biggest one being that these things are hard! I published a few papers in peer-reviewed journal while I was there some of which I've just discovered are now free on the web (eg 1, 2).
I came home to Brisbane with the intent of continuing in informatics as a legitimate medical speciality. After a few years trying I sadly concluded that although I thought having professional medical informaticians was a good idea, it seemed to be a seriously difficult career choice. As a career all it seemed to promise was little respect and less tenure.
I briefly tried a sideways approach into informatics through medical administration, along the way completing an MBA. But I soon decided if I was going to have a “real job”, then the one that suited me best was anaesthesia.
Over the last decade, in the gaps between anaesthetic training and family-making, I've maintained an interest in programming as hobby, most recently writing in PHP, MySQL, AJAX. I've also watched with interest as the Internet has exploded and every second person on the bus has gone on-line while commuting.
So coming back to informatics after a bit of a break, hopefully a blog will allow me to organise my thoughts.
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