Computing in Surgical Pathology

grover
groverak@fhs.mcmaster.ca

I am happy to use the internet but I am not happy that the corporate structure today requires that everything be reinvented. Perhaps in a couple of years Medline will be able to go back further as the supercomputers get smarter.
Cheers



On Wed Dec 9, mjcoma wrote
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>Dear Dr. Grover:

>We envy, in a good sense, your lecture and comprehension capacity with so many abundant and disperse data gathered in the majority of the articles in this congress. Thanks also for your devoted interest in all of them.

>To answer your questions:
>The medical confidentiality subject on the Internet is broadly developed in another article in this symposium (0315 Confidentiality of Clinical Information using IRC and other Resources. In
>www.mcmaster.ca/inabis98/coma/chaponick0315/index.html)
>and in another article developed by us and published in another congress (Coma MJ, Peña H. Quo vadis Telemedicina?. In: bio.hgy.es/neurocon/congreso-1/conferencias/int-neuro-coma.html).

>Briefly, the Internet needs major mechanisms that will assure confidentiality, up to the point where nowadays it is a serious problem that has made the creation of databases with patient information a desisting factor between different organizations on the Internet. Technicians, on the other hand, assure that database creation will take place shortly thanks to the availability of
>powerful encryption mechanisms.

>2.- The second question has many shades to be adequately answered.
>We all know the case of Mendel, whose studies on the Mirabilis jalapa (Four O'Clock, Dondiego de Noche) were rescued decades after being published...in a journal in his religious community. Maybe in a few years we will also be able to observe the same: what does not appear on Internet databases such as Medline, Embase, etc will "still be unknown or unpublished", and previous bibliography would have the same credibility as the occidental civilization has had about many traditional medical therapeutic resources from other cultures,
>which are orally transmitted from one generation to the next.

>Could it be regrettable?.. Maybe, but it also has positive issues: for example, no one will be able to doze off in his or her professional career, just by the fact of having written a great resume many years ago. When several of the authors present here went to school, pocket calculators, statistics, personal computers, etc, didn't exist... Would it be logical that the kids nowadays use
>slide-rulers, logarithmic tables or try to divide 5 digit numbers without any help? or would electronic facilitation and empowerment be the sensible way to go?
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