Miscellaneous Essays and Notes
These are general essays and notes; please feel free to send me your reactions, comments, or any other
associations they may trigger.
Opening Chapter
(co-authored with Rob Kolodner) in :
Person-Centered Health Records : Toward HealthePeople, by James E.
Demetriades (Editor), Robert M. Kolodner (Editor), Gary A. Christopherson
(Editor), Springer-Verlag, 2005
| HealthSpace (139kb) |
January, 1998 |
Some early thoughts on the notion of creating a
"space" rather than a "system" of health. |
| Some Applications of Complexity
Theory to Health Care (93kb) |
December, 1998 |
Discusses the concepts of Dee Hock's "Chaordic"
thinking to health care, as well as general complexity theory issues |
| Shared Meaning and Health
Informatics (70kb) |
January, 1999 |
Discusses some of the challenges of overspecific standards
efforts, as well as some of the underlying philosophies. |
| Concepts of the Data Vault (57kb) |
February, 1999 |
Introduces the notion of a personal data vault as a key
component of a personal health space per patient. |
| From Enterprise to
Person-Centric Health Information Systems(54kb) |
April, 1999 |
Discusses the shift from enterprise-based health care to
person-centric. |
| Health as a Medium (241kb) |
May, 1999 |
Portrays health as a medium, and many health problems as a
"failure to communicate." |
| Personalizing Health (107kb) |
June, 1999 |
Discusses the issues of personalization at several levels |
| Steps towards an Epidemic of Health
(95kb) |
July, 1999 |
Discusses some of the initial conditions required to create an
epidemic of health. |
| Design Patterns for Health
(461kb) |
August, 1999 |
Explores the application of architect/philosopher Christopher
Alexander's ideas to health |
| New Health and the New Economy
(67kb) |
October, 1999 |
Compares a new vision of health with the "New Rules of
the New Economy" book by Kevin Kelly |
| Rethinking Complexity (63kb) |
November, 1999 |
Discusses issues of complexity and how to circumvent them
using "space" metaphor. |
| Health and the Devil's Staircase
(45kb) |
January, 2000 |
Applies fractal thinking to health |
| Systemic Issues of Patient Safety
(208kb) |
March, 2000 |
Introduces a spectrum of scales to think about health, relates
this to the notion of patient safety. |
| Tipping an Epidemic of
Health (95kb) |
May, 2000 |
Discusses why the connectivity provided by the
Internet is on the verge of creating an epidemic of health |
| Ensembles and
Transformations (23kb) |
July, 2000 |
Introduces ensembles as communities of interest
which provide a context for transformations. |
| Health and Positive
Discourse (109kb) |
August, 2000 |
Examines notions of Appreciative Inquiry,
positive discourse, and optimism in light of Internet technology |
| Flipping from Negative
to Positive Discourse (25k) |
September, 2000 |
Examines the effects of negative discourse, how
naming a problem can make it worse, and examples of positive discourse. |
| Assumptions of the
Transactional Health Model |
October, 2000 |
Examines some of the assumptions of the
transactional model of health, such as linearity, the economics of
scarcity, and deficit discourse. |
| A Transformational
Notion of Health |
November, 2000 |
Discusses transformational concepts in health,
flipping assumptions of the above transformational model |
| New Perspectives
|
July, 2001 |
Discusses the inversion of
enterprise/person relationship, complementary currencies, and
HailStorm architecture(.pdf)
(html) |
| Towards a
language of Health (122K) |
Nov, 2001 |
Proposes Genos, a language which would
allow expression of health and genomic information for clinical use. (html)
(pdf) |
| Can Health Care
IT Adapt? (800K) |
Jan, 2002 |
Discusses issues for adaptation in our
information technology infrastructure, in light of prospective
advances in Genomics and Proteomics (html) |
| From Systems to
Spaces |
June, 2002 |
A space-based metaphor for patient health
information systems (htm) (pdf) |
Tom Munnecke