Following up on an article about rising enrollments in computer science this past Saturday, The New York Times has just published a fabulous Room for Debate essay series titled “Computer Science’s ‘Sputnik Moment’?“: Computer science is a hot major again. It had been in the doldrums after the dot-com bust a decade ago, but with the social media gold rush and the success of “The Social Network,” computer science departments are transforming themselves to meet the demand. At Harvard, the size of the introductory computer science class has nearly quadrupled in five years.   The spike has raised hopes of a ripple effect throughout the American education system — so much so […]

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has issued several solicitations in recent weeks focused on health information technology R&D. AHRQ appears to be taking a fairly broad view of health IT: Health IT is broadly defined as the use of information and communication technology in health care to support the delivery of patient or population care or to support patient self-management.  Health IT can support patient care related activities such as order communications, results reporting, care planning and clinical or health documentation (Shortliffe EH and JJ Cimino, “Biomedical Informatics: Computer Applications in Health Care and Biomedicine.” Third Edition. 2006).  […]