If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there. If you don’t know where you are, you may already be there. Or you may not. – Alice in Wonderland
A great quote that comes from a presentation to the Prince Mahidol Award Conference in January by Dr Téa Collins. In her presentation entitled, ‘Measuring Health Systems Performance: Challenges and the need for more research’, Dr Collins set out the challenges that face researchers in estimating the impact of health systems, including the difficulty of establishing specific contribution of health systems to public health, the long-term nature of some clinical outcomes, and problems of collecting adequately robust data. You can download her slide presentation at the global forum for health website.
Tags: evidence-based policy, medicine
Wanted facts about that. I wrote it off as merely another expense, but I’m going to look at it once more.
Regrettably, for many cloud computing platforms the car example you provide doesn’t calculate. You may notice a vehicle as a means to an end, and all you worry about is getting there, then you need an application platform like Google’s AppEngine. Here you simply add an application, and it will be handled. If however you run ec2, you’re no longer stressing about hardware, but still about instances and virtual servers. Every one of them run OS’s that need to be maintained; it’s like taking taxi’s but still having to know everything about the taxi’s engines. I predict that in the foreseeable future we’ll move towards AppEngine like types or ‘managed clouds’.