Dear Madam/Sir,
We are glad to announce the following seminar:
MedGemma and HAI-DEF: A family of open models
by Andrew Sellergren, Software Engineer & Researcher at Google.
Save the date:
Thursday, April 16, 2026 - 4:30 PM (CEST)
Aula Pitagora - MT11 (Cubo 30B), Unical
Hybrid Format / Live Streaming
Link: https://dub.sh/medgemma2026
See also: https://goo.gle/medgemma
My source: francesco.calimeri AT unical.it
My partner and I both received a letter today from our respective GPs. An invitation for a 'FREE LUNG HEALTH CHECK'.
Overleaf is an information sheet in landscape about the health check, plus three more sides of A4, similarly formatted - inviting trifold presentation.
After the 'Re. ......' an opening sentence asks: 'Have you ever been a smoker?'
Suddenly, I was dragged backwards through his-tory (some things don't change); not one history, but several:
My personal and life experience and not just since my teens . . . | The letter states: **If you have never smoked, you are not eligible for this service** |
My mother and father smoked when I was a child and my siblings. They got the message early 1980s. 'Society' smoked back then! Once old enough, I refused to go to the corner shop. Into the 1990s, patients, smoking (some chain-smoking) on admission, long-stay and other clinical areas. As a community mental health nurse, I learned diplomatic and health promoting skills when in the car, giving a patient a lift to hospital. And, when visiting their home where I was, of course, usually, a guest. |
I wondered what has happened to the GP's records? To the primary care clinical record ? The custodians of my health record, that they should need to ask that question? Or, does confidentiality tie some bureaucratic knots? Where is 'integrated care' and its driver 'clinical informatics'? The letter included the NHS Number. Don't get me wrong, I/we appreciate the obvious effort here, even if the chronology is confusing, or, speaks of afterthought? The letters are dated 19/06/2025. I must admit I haven't accessed my GP record, checking it for accuracy. If anything, this is a prompt to do so. And seek a general medical. |
Online event organised by British Computer Society (BCS)
*** Agenda (UK time) ***
18:30 - Meeting opens
Welcome and Introductions
18:40 - Hand-over to speaker
19:30 - Questions
20:30 - End
Scope of workshop
This is to support you in putting together your application for the FEDIP application and the workshop will focus on:
- What level you should apply for
- How to work with the Standard
- How to map your evidence
- Putting together context
- Preparing your evidence in the best way
- What the assessors will look for
BCS-SGAI, the British Computer Society Specialist Group on Artificial Intelligence was founded in June 1980. Its mission is: "To foster achievement, capability and awareness in both business and research in Artificial Intelligence, and to promote the interests of the related community". It is one of Europe's longest established groups working to support the community of artificial intelligence developers and users and is the organiser of one of the longest running annual series of AI conferences in Europe: the AI-20xx series.
In England, 189 out of 208 (91%) hospital trusts are using electronic health records (EHRs) bringing opportunities and challenges and for Artificial Intelligence (AI). In the morning, there will be a session about EHRs with speakers from UK (animal health records), France (European Health Data Space infrastructure for the use and exchange of EHRs), and Spain (personal health records). Before lunch break, there will be a brief 101 hands-on tutorial about Neuro-Symbolic AI with short exercises. In the afternoon, there will be a session about clinical decision support, exemplifying the use of AI-based healthcare technologies. Come along if you are interested in AI and its potential in healthcare.
There will be Certificates of Attendance for those who register and attend the event.
We hope that you will come and join us, and that you enjoy this new offering from the BCS SGAI.
Dr. Mercedes Arguello Casteleiro (BCS SGAI)*
This a.m. I heard on BBC R4 Today 07.41.30... news (and interesting discussion) -
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0029rg4
- of an exhibition in Manchester that may be of interest, if you're local, but it is also accessible online:
https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/media-centre/news-and-blogs/2025/04/come-and-visit-manchester-s-latest-exhibition-our-lives-our-privacy-to-celebrate-the-ico-s-40th-anniversary/
'A digital exhibition featuring 40 items that tells the tale of how privacy has been at the centre of some of the biggest events and milestones we remember over the past four decades was launched last Autumn, but now a physical exhibition has come to Manchester.
Our Lives, Our Privacy
From 2 April to 30 June, we will be displaying the exhibition at Manchester Central Library in the first-floor exhibition space. Members of the public are welcome to pop in and see the items that have shaped our lives and our privacy.The ‘Our Lives, Our Privacy’ exhibition highlights poignant events in history including the launch of social media, the News of the World phone hacking scandal and the Covid 19 pandemic to name a few. It also looks at technological advancements like smart devices and raising questions about the future, including how accurate the episodes of ‘Black Mirror’ really are.'
(https://aiih.cc/lthc/) in the International Conference on AI in Healthcare (AIiH), 8-10 September 2025, Jesus College, University of Cambridge.
We would like to accept both full length papers (12 pages plus references) and short abstracts (up to 5 pages including references) for special sessions. Submission guideline can be found here, including paper templates in both Word and LaTeX: https://aiih.cc/paper-submission/
The accepted full papers and abstracts will be published in the Springer LNCS volumes.
Full Paper submission deadline: Friday 11 April 2025
Abstract submission deadline: Monday 30 June 2024
We are looking forward to meeting you.
Best wishes
Shang-Ming Zhou
Professor in e-Health | Faculty of Health | University of Plymouth | PL4 8AA | UK.
Email : shangming.zhou AT plymouth.ac.uk; smzhou AT ieee.org
https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/staff/shang-ming-zhou
https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/research/centre-for-health-technology
Friday 8 November, 9:30am GMT – onwards
BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, Ground Floor, 25 Copthall Avenue, London EC2R 7BP
Join BCS SGAI in London for an engaging full-day event featuring a line up of exciting talks. Attendees will have the opportunity to participate in a hands-on tutorial on low-code/no-code AI and Certificates of Attendance will be provided.
* Speakers & Agenda
https://www.bcs.org/events-calendar/2024/november/ai-for-one-health-and-planetary-health-where-are-we-artificial-intelligence-sg/
* Invitation for Free Registration
https://ArtificialIntelligence081124.eventbrite.co.uk
100% Discount Code: AIHealth24Committee
Dear Readers of Learning Health Systems,
You may view the complete Supplement online at:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/23796146/2024/8/S1
Guest Editors for the 2024 Supplement were:
, , ,
The LHS/AH Supplement is the result of a collaboration and memo of understanding between Learning Health Systems (University of Michigan), AcademyHealth, and John Wiley & Sons.
***********************************************************
Guest Commentary
, , ,
May 27, 2024
Experience Report
Leveraging data to support health equity in an integrated delivery and finance system
Jane Kogan, Joan Eichner, Hyagriv Simhan, Erin Dalton, Alex Jutca, Beth Quinn, Jennifer Chaney, Anna Patterson, Donna Keyser
April 15, 2024
"The fault lies not with the IT experts but with ourselves as clinicians. If we do not tell them what we want, how can they come up with the answers? ... There is a case for evaluating every IT solution available now and scrapping some of them". p.8.
'Coroners have warned the NHS on dozens of occasions that its record-keeping is so poor that patient's lives are at risk, an investigation by The Times has found. ...
Coroners have issued 62 warnings since 2013 in which they identified failings in record-keeping that could lead to the deaths of other patients.' ...
'Simon Eccles, of NHSX, which is responsible for improving digitalisation, said that all of England should be covered by digital records by 2024 so staff could access the information needed to provide patients with the best possible care.'Greenwood, G. Lost notes and illegible records 'risking lives of NHS patients'. The Times, October 2. 2019. p.16.
The contrast here within health care is quite stark, we can distinguish between scraps of paper in two ways ...
John ---- Atul |
"The story of modern medicine is the story of our human struggle with complexity. Technology will, without question, continually increase our ability to make diagnoses, to peer more deeply inside the body and the brain, to offer more treatments. It will help us document it all—but not necessarily to make sense of it all. Technology inevitably produces more noise and new uncertainties.
Perhaps a computer could have alerted me to the possibility of a genetic disorder in John Cameron, based on his history of skin lesions and the finding of high calcium. But our systems are forever generating alerts about possible connections—to the point of signal fatigue. Just ordering medications and lab tests triggers dozens of alerts each day, most of them irrelevant, and all in need of human reviewing and sorting. There are more surprises, not fewer. The volume of knowledge and capability increases faster than any individual can manage—and faster than our technologies can make manageable for us. We ultimately need systems that make the right care simpler for both patients and professionals, not more complicated. And they must do so in ways that strengthen our human connections, instead of weakening them." |
| Cameron ---- Gawande
"I had more time for his questions now, and I let him ask them. When we were done and I was about to get off the phone, I paused. I asked him if he’d noticed, during our office visit, how much time I’d spent on the computer.
“Yes, absolutely,” he said. He added, “I’ve been in your situation. I knew you were just trying to find the information you needed. I was actually trying not to talk too much, because I knew you were in a hurry, but I needed you to look the information up. I wanted you to be able to do that. I didn’t want to push you too far.” It was painful to hear. Forced to choose between having the right technical answer and a more human interaction, Cameron picked having the right technical answer." |
mental health problems affect
Self-employed, single
No previous history of MH problems
PURPOSE#Psychology - Counselling |
12.5 million adults - 1 in 4
PROCESSES (automated?)* 'Life cover' Insurer access to GP record - deemed high-risk 500,000 people affected by |
Untimely death of a parent Mother killed by drug-using driver Refused IVF treatment PRACTICE | insurance company POLICIES driver jailed Voided application for life cover (figures) suggest insurers reject up to 625,000 people a year By law ins. companies cannot discriminate |
Clinical integration (mental health) through person-centred care of someone's health and wellbeing
| building blocks 1. Electronic health records, Functional integration (data, information) Uni-professional education
Clinical integration (physical health) through person-centred care of someone's health and wellbeing
|
through the active engagement of
service users as partners in care Act-ions - Practice
[RRR] social change
[ My obs.: Health literacy
- need for a generic framework -
for health education arbitration -
as there is a sociopolitical dispute]
Professional
| through the active engagement of service users as partners in care 2. Budgetary processes, 3. Governance structures [RRR] political change (inc. policies, professional bodies...) Organisational & Systemic integration
integration
Normative integration |
People probably look at Hodges' model and see something that is simplistic. There is a great power, however, in the scenarios that the structure of Hodges' model can readily encompass. Not just in the hospital, but across all care contexts.
"Where is the great value promised by the transition to EHR [Electronic Health Record]? Where is the huge surplus from all those lives saved? Without an actor who can find it, and deploy it to shift the doctors into surplus, nothing will happen.
If the ecosystem* includes just the five traditional players, EHR will remain an academic dream. The answer, then, requires introducing a new player - an aggregator. Because the odds of mistakes are so low, the benefits of EHR are invisible to the individual patient. They become material only when we aggregate outcomes over a large enough number of patients. We need to find an actor whose surplus is affected by patients not as individuals but as a group, and who is able to both capture and distribute this benefit; insurers, health-care systems, and governments all fit the bill. And the larger the group, the larger the surplus." p.130.
In their editorial Ponte, Somerville and Adams (2016) focus on the US nursing care situation and contrast with the UK experience from the outset:
As the U.S. health system moves toward value-based care, chief nursing officers (CNOs) are pressured as never before to demonstrate nursing’s contributions to improving the cost, quality, and efficiency of care, key elements of the value equation. The shift from fee-for-service to value-based care and reimbursement has been made possible through the implementation of electronic health records (EHRs), and the emergence of Big Data analytics, in which payers and healthcare organizations mine the streams of data produced by clinical and administrative systems to understand and evaluate care inputs, processes, and outcomes (Westra, Clancy, et al., 2015).The contrast is implicit and is not the purpose of the editorial: Assuring the Capture of Standardized Nursing Data: A Call to Action for Chief Nursing Officers. From a still summery Lancashire the above really does seem a continent away, if not a world. It should not be this way. Questions of value for money, the quality of nursing care and outcomes are also central here and digital aspirations are ongoing: NHS Digital.
Ensuring that standardized, encoded nursing data are captured in EHRs is critical if nursing is to realize the potential of big data analytics. Having nursing data available for analysis will allow us to gain a better understanding of nursing practice, demonstrate nursing’s contributions to patient care and outcomes, and facilitate evidence-based practice and nursing research. Indeed, we will no longer be driving blind. Rather, we will be driving smart.Somewhere in this big data lies person centered, holistic and integrated care. This needs to be transformed to self-care. Can these incremental positive changes be captured (once debated and defined)? Will nurses be empowered with access to this data: the big, little and what lies between? Where are the analysts? Who makes the decisions based on this data? Is transparency assured?
Mike Miliard Editor of Healthcare IT News posted an item:
Should more types of health data figure into electronic health records?
On the one hand, the Institute of Medicine put out a call for doing just that on the grounds that behavioral and social data can benefit population health practices to ultimately improve the care of individual patients. For physicians who already complain that EHRs are burdensome and distract from care delivery, on the other hand, the idea of making electronic records more complex, perhaps even cluttered, will inevitably be unwelcome news. ...
| educational attainment, stress, depression | physical activity, stress |
social isolation, intimate partner violence (for women of reproductive age) | financial resource strain, neighborhood median household income |
| Health Literacy, Accessibility | Measures (health literacy, patient engagement, health and well-being, clinical outcomes) |
Cultural Diversity, Languages, Carer
|
Internationalization
'Meaningful Use', Standards, Legislation, Policy |
When I was at HC2004 or 2005 I was given a copy of the Medical Informatics Yearbook 2003 from the British Computer Society - Nursing Specialist Group stand. Within this volume of key papers for the year April 2001 - March 2002 I found the following:
Kim MI, Johnson KB. Personal Health Records: Evaluation of Functionality and Utility. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. 2002. Mar-Apr; 9(2):171-180. Selected for inclusion in the IMIA 2003 Yearbook of Medical Informatics.The paper identified candidate Personal Health Records [PHRs], then developed criteria examining the entry and display of data elements necessary for the PHRs to serve as adequate representations of information. Then in the final third phase a selected group of PHRs were assessed for their functionality and utility (p.370). Of the 12 PHRs assessed I thought it would be interesting to check their current status (this was a quick visit to the published domains).
Web Site
|
Record
|
URL
|
Findings
|
|---|---|---|---|
| Dr. I-Net | My Medical Record | www.drinet.com/ | A good start! Still operational domain redirects from original www.aboutmyhealth.com Continues to offer a PHR. |
| HealthCompass: | Lifelong Health Record | www.healthcompassnet.com | While there are several site using 'Health Compass' the original version was not obvious. |
| MedicalEdge | Medical Register | www.medicaledge.com/ | Domain currently offers support to physicians, so a PHR may be part of a package? |
| MedicalRecord.com | Your Medical Record | www.medicalrecord.com | This now appears to be a directory to electronic medical records. |
| MedicData | MedicData | www.medicdata.com/ | This does not appear to offer a PHR and the homepage is 'under construction'. It looks like the domain may have a new owner. |
| Medscape AboutMyHealth | Personal Health Record | www.aboutmyhealth.com/ | Now leads to GE Healthcare. |
| myhealthnotes.com | Personal Health Manager | www.myhealthnotes.com/ | Server not found. |
| PersonalMD | My Medical Records | www.personalmd.com | Retired - leads to: www.eheandme.com/personalmd_announcement.html |
| TheDailyApple | Health Records | www.thedailyapple.com/ | Social networking is vital to well-being but no PHR here. |
| VistaLink | Health Profile | vistalink.com | Domain for sale. |
| WebMD | WebMD | www.webmd.com/ | Very much alive and kicking commercially, but my health record / PHR not in immediately in evidence. |
| Wellmed.com | Health Record | www.wellmed.com | This site leads to http://www.webmdhealthservices.com/ |
I came across this post by Molly Merrill, Associate Editor and thought I could add some comments.
I'm usually wary of posts of the list of ... and top 5, top 10 variety. You see much of social media is cordial - not the concentrate form - but the dilute as observed in many of the comments. Anyway ....
You can read the original full text for each of the five on Healthcare IT News, here are some additional thoughts:
1. EMRs are bad for “bedside manner".
They can be BAD it all depends on usability, engagement, attitude, requirement, the overall environment and the extent to which the EMR is considered in all its socio-technical glory. Whatever the research does show item #2 admits the qualitative differences that exist in the marketplace - some EMRs are easier-to-use. If we expand the engagement beyond the professionals then the bedside equation demands the patient is factored in.
With the right care philosophy and conceptual framework (#h2cm?) e-health records of all varieties (EHR, PHR, EMR, Summary ....) can also support a positive, person centered bedside manner - transforming it to one that chomps at the bit ;-) to become a community based manner.
The security of electronic records cannot be assured. Data on devices that is not encrypted - is an open door, especially when those devices are portable. (If the use of encryption leads to complacency then I am uneasy.) Disciplinary measures may follow, but they are not a remedy. The human link in the chain aside - electronic records can be security assured to international standards. Far better than paper records and the photographs (anybody?) of paper hospital files sitting at the side of a corridor and other horror stories.
 |
| Brian E. Hodges - c/o Brian's family. |
Born in Liverpool, NW England, UK.
Community Mental Health Nurse NHS, Part-time Lecturer,
Researcher Nursing & Technology Enhanced Learning
Registered Nurse - Mental Health & General
Community Psychiatric Nursing (Cert.) MMU
PG Cert. Ed.
BA(Joint Hons.) Computing and Philosophy - BIHE - Bolton
PG(Dip.) Collaboration on Psychosocial Education [COPE] Univ. Man.
MRES. e-Research and Technology Enhanced Learning, Lancaster Univ.
Live and work in NW England - seeking a global perspective.
The views expressed on W2tQ are entirely my own, unless stated otherwise.
Comments are disabled.
If you would like to get in touch please e-mail me at
h2cmng AT yahoo.co.uk
orcid.org/0000-0002-0192-8965
