The Future of Health Care

I’ve always had mixed feelings about doctors. In one hand I know that they’re there to help me if I have a problem with my body. On the other hand I’ve had nothing but bad help from every doctor I’ve ever visited, and if it wasn’t bad, it definitively was a waste of money and time.
Unfortunately I’m not a qualified doctor and I live in a country that will not provide even the most basic of medicines without a “doctors” prescription. But I’m also a dreamer and here’s a brief redaction of one of my dreams.
Maybe dream isn’t a good word for it, because it’s more of a conscious wish.

My dislike for doctors started when I was 13, up until then I had a generally very healthy life, no broken limbs, serious infections or operations. The worse were Chickenpox and Mumpes which were handed down to me by my older brother.
Anyway back to 13... I contracted the flu and made the mistake of seeing a Dr. The Dr. prescribed 500mg a Amoxicillin (yes I can remember the type) a week later I developed really bad flu and my tonsils had swollen up so much I couldn’t eat, or drinking without pain. I managed to crawl to the “Dr.” again and the idiot prescribed me yet more antibiotics, this time Amoxicillin and another type. My symptoms didn’t get any worse but they sure didn’t get any better until I completely stopped taking the antibiotics.
In all I was out of action for 7 weeks of a great Mediterranean summer. My tonsils never really recovered, so another Dr. thought they should be removed. Luckily I didn’t attended the surgery because I was eventually able to cure myself with 30mg of Potassium Chloride for a week.

Over the years, I’ve had other issues with “Drs” from wrong prescriptions for Conjunctivitis, to charging me $100 for a 2 second diagnosis, to a Dr not willing to prescribe a medicine that would have resolved sever inflammation from a fall.

What have I learned from Drs?
I’ve learned that they can harm you just as well as they can help. And according to research by Dr. Barbara Starfield of the Johns Hopkins School Public Health (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10904513?dopt=Abstract and http://faculty.jhsph.edu/?faculty_id=667); doctors are the 3rd leading cause of death in the US.
I now research my symptoms and diagnose myself. If I can’t find a legally available treatment I will go to a Dr and ask him to prescribe what I need. Needless to say I have been healthy since; apart from some broken vertebrae.

Get to your dream already!

My dream is MedNet.
What is MedNet? MedNet is an international medical information network. All consultancies, practices, surgeries, homeopathies, holistic centres, hospitals, dentist, pharmacies, etc are connected. The network contains a knowledge base of every medical procedure, medicine, herb, compound, allergy, virus, bacteria ever discovered by man.
How does it work? Numerous geographically dispersed connected databases with mankind’s medical knowledge. Health providers use a national registry system that references the knowledge.

Example:
In the USofA poorer individuals have a Medicaid number, this is a record in a database. Now say I got the Flu and decided to play Russian roulette by going to a Dr., I could log on to my national MedNet by entering my Medicaid number; I could then press a “I’m not feeling well button”, it would then ask me a couple of questions to determine how bad I'm feeling. Because I’m lazy and I want to see a Dr. I just click on “I don’t know” the system then looks for the nearest practice with an available slot or my usual Dr. and an appointment with Dr. Suresh Chandra is made.
With my Medicaid card I crawl over to the Dr. who then with my approval looks up my medical records. He proceeds to diagnose me and enters my symptoms. MedNet knows that the latest N1H1 influenza is going around in my area and also knows what’s been reported as the best treatment. The Dr. doesn’t like MedNet so he wasn’t paying attention when MedNet recommended a allergy cross referenced treatment and figured he knew that all I need is some Amoxicillin.
The Dr. can only prescribe medicines on MedNet so he goes to the “Treatment” tab and selects Amoxicillin... MedNet tells him that antibiotics are ineffective against Viral infections and could cause death. MedNet then reminds the Dr. that patients have reported that the most effective treatment has been a combination of 100mg Calcium Sulphate, 1gr Vitamin C and warm UV light daily.

I go to the nearest Chemist with my Medicaid card, the Chemist looks up my treatment record and gives it to me.

I go home and do the treatment. 5 days later I feel much better but I notice a wart on my foot, so I log on to MedNet; I get prompted to confirm efficacy of my previous treatment, I then try and arrange an appointment for my wart... this time I feel better so I enter my symptoms. MedNet concurs with my diagnosis and also notes other patients having contracted Human Papilloma virus soon after visiting Dr. Suresh’s practice. MedNet recommends a treatment of applying a 3cmx3cm piece of duct tape over the Wart for 14days and alerts the Department of Public Health of an outbreak of Human Papilloma virus at Dr. Suresh’s practice deferring all future appointments to the practice.


We already have similar systems available to the Tax Office and Road Authorities, I believe it’s much more appropriate to apply this technology to the health industry.
The 1st step is getting the knowledge in to databases, then getting the practices to connect securely and then letting the system grow organically.
Microsoft is still trialing HealthVault (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_HealthVault) and there are numerous other systems out there like Google Health and Indivo... these are fairly useless without integration with health providers. I believe access to accurate health information really needs to be a basic Human Right and our archaic health management systems need to embrace the 21 century. Some hospitals have HIT systems that allow digital sharing of patients records, but again they lack the integration.
I guess at the end of the day I would like to breath in to a device connected to MedNet and for the device to tell me every treatable problem I have. Like when your car goes for a service they plug the ECU (Electronic Control Unit) in and print out the fault codes.
I would also like my DNA sequence and possible hacks so I can make my beard grow to a defined length :).

Fraud on Wall St. and every other financial st.

BILL MOYERS JOURNAL | William K. Black | PBS

Redirect groups to a specific site or url

I created 2 web parts for aiding the redirection of users to specific area I would like to share with y'all.

1. Group Page Redirector; this has a group property, a URL and redirect once property. If you belong to the selected group it will redirect you to the specified URL. This can be handy if you want to show specific content to a group; like an announcement or terms and conditions. Just add more web parts for other groups.
2. SubSite Redirector; this doesn't any properties... it just checks which Sub Sites you have access to, and if you only have access to one it will redirect you to it.

They're both simple Web Parts with the source/project code and wsp. Also you can set them to Minimized and no Chrome, so that they're not visible.
Keywords: Sharepoint Redirect Redirector Web Part once Usage policy ToolPart[]

Item level permission checking web part

So you want to know what a specific user can and can't see in your SharePoint site?... well for that you'll need to perform an eye examination.

OK really you want to know what items/list/sites for which a specific user has access?
Well believe it or not you can't with the standard SharePoint tools, but it's a fairly simple exercise to create a web part that does, and to save time here's one I made before.

It's fairly simple... get the SPUser > Check what groups he/she belongs to > loop through all the lists > items then the sub sites...
I show an icon for SPBasePermissions instead of the usual Full Control, Contribute, ect. The tree goes down to items, but won't fetch them until you click on the list expand icon to aid performance.
Since I'm using SPUser it also works for forms authentication.
If you don't have permission to check permissions on an object you can set a web part property to show this or not.

In any event the whole project source is included, so feel free to play and recommend changes.

Keywords: Check User Permission Inherited Unique Access RenderPreText RenderPostText TreeNode PeopleEditor SPUser TreeView SPGroup HasUniqueRoleAssignments TreeNodePopulate

Moving your Windows Installer Directory

I mostly work with Virtual Machines and I like to pre-allocating the disk size. When I created my VM I figured 10GB would be enough for C:\ with Win2003 Server and a couple of SDK's and if I needed more I could always add another drive. I was wrong.

After 2 years my faithful Win2003 dev VM is out of space on C: and I can't shuffle any more files around.

My C:\windows\installer directory is >2GB so this is my prime candidate to move. Luckily there are always solutions to problems... no I'm not going to delete the directory, or change my registry to point to a new location.
I'm going to add a symbolic link from C:\windows\installer to F:\installer.

1. Download Junction from http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896768.aspx
2. Copy OR move C:\windows\installer to F:\installer
3. Delete all the files in C:\windows\installer
4. Close all your Explorer windows
5. Run > cmd> C:\junction C:\WINDOWS\Installer F:\installer

That should do it. I wrote a batch (run.bat) script to do the whole procedure.

@set src=C:\WINDOWS\Installer
@set trg=F:\Installer
::copy %src%\* %trg%
::detele %src%\*
move /y %src%\* %trg%
junction %src% %trg%
pause

This should work for most directories. The batch file should be in the same directory as junction.exe.

Unable to connect publishing blob caching.

01/27/2009 16:23:40.23
w3wp.exe (0x0114)
0x00E8
CMS
Publishing Cache
6p4o
Warning
Unable to connect publishing blob caching. Web.Config is not set up correctly. Cache is not valid. WebId is '1303494830', Url is 'http://vmmossdev:8088/_themes/myTheme/viewheadergrad_mt.gif'.

You may see the above warning in your event log, if the "BlobCache" configsection is declared without been defined... well I did, and I google and could find a single valid explanation.

The Fix: Just add a node in the node like...
<BlobCache location="C:\blobCache" path="\.(gif|jpg|png|css|js)$" maxSize="10" enabled="false" />

Visual Studio 2008 extensions for SharePoint 1.3 Jan 2009 CTP

So here I was checking to see if there was a new VS Extentions for WSS, and Google revealed a link to: VSeWSS 1.3 and now with x64 support... woohoo.

Yeah what ever, my life is sad... but it helps us all along the way to an x86 free world.