09 February 2008

Week 34 - Lots of talking and reading about EHR...

I've had to explain my grant to a few more officials like the Chief Technology Officer of the Dept. of Health and Human Services and CSC Chief Medical Officer when asking for what I thought would be readily available data. What is the digital data footprint of human health maintenance from conception through post-mortem? Really a pre-natal to post grave question that no one seems to have asked or answered. Amazing! Granted, I am talking about 100+ years of data, half of which would not be natively captured or created in a digital format if one uses the records of the recently perished centenarians opposed to estimates of recently born humans who will become centenarians. Moreover, the term "health maintenance" is suppose to imply the fees for services and goods when you are sick or ill thru the time you are declared well or healthly. Ideally, I would include the fees for services and goods that comprise the choices humans make to reach optimal health and fitness too! I am waiting for an answer from the DHHS CTO and CSC CMO. My guess is the 100 years of data volume is between 100 - 500 GB, depending on the type of illnesses and treatments received. The enumerated list of data generating events should total no more than 500 and there should be no more than 1,000 instances for any given data generating event (500,000 = 500 x 1000 or 1 MB/event on average).

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