So why remove the most useful slide
in the whole presentation—the summary—and replace it with a content-free alternative showing perhaps a word
or two. Is your audience so dense it cannot hear you say “Thank you” or ask for
questions unless they’re on the screen?
Do you think the audience will forget to
say something? Or is the problem with
you, the presenter? Would you yourself
forget to ask for questions if the slide
wasn’t on the screen in front of you?
Technical presentations should be
held to a higher standard of information content and knowledge transfer
than a sales pitch. My advice: Remove
the “Thank You” and “Questions”
slides, and leave up your “Conclusions”
and “Summary” as long as possible.
michael Wolfe, hillsboro, or
laboratory at age three. He was born in
1934, and the University of Cambridge
Computer Laboratory was founded (as
the Mathematical Laboratory) in 1937.
The source of the error is apparently
Milner’s official obituary, which noted
he “held the first established Chair in
Computer Science at the University of
Cambridge.” Translation to American:
He held the first endowed professorship. In Britain, the word “Chair” refers
to a professorship and should not be
confused with “Head of Department.”
Lawrence c. Paulson,
Cambridge, england
for electronic health Records,
Don’t ignore Vista
Why did Stephen V. Cantrill’s article
“Computers in Patient Care: The Promise and the Challenge” (Sept. 2010) say
nothing about the Veterans Health
Information Systems and Technology
Architecture (VistA) used for decades
throughout the U.S. Department of
Veterans Affairs (VA) medical system
for its patients’ electronic medical records? With 153 medical centers and
1,400 points of care, the VA in 2008 delivered care to 5. 5 million people, registering 60 million visits (http://www1.
va.gov/opa/publications/factsheets/
fs_department_of_veterans_affairs.pdf).
In his book The Best Care Anywhere
( http://p3books.com/bestcareanywhere)
Phillip Longman documented VistA’s
role in delivering care with better out-
comes than national averages to a pop-
ulation less healthy than national aver-
ages at a cost that has risen more slowly
than national averages. Included was a
long list of references (more than 100
in the 2010 second edition), yet Cantrill
wrote “Although grand claims are of-
ten made about the potential improve-
ments in the quality of care, decreases
in cost, and so on, these are very diffi-
cult to demonstrate in a rigorous, sci-
entific fashion.”
Public-domain VistA also general-
izes well outside the VA. For example,
it has been deployed in the U.S. Indian
Health Service, with additional func-
tionality, including pediatrics. Speak-
ing at the 2010 O’Reilly Open Source
Convention ( http://www.oscon.com/
oscon2010/public/schedule/detail/15255),
David Whiles, CIO of Midland Memo-
rial Hospital, Midland, TX, described
his hospital’s deployment of VistA and
how it has since seen a reduction in
mortality rates of about two per month,
as well as a dramatic 88% decrease in
central-line infections entering at cath-
eter sites ( http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=ExoF_Tq14WY). Mean-
while, the country of Jordan (http://ehs.
com.jo) is piloting an open source soft-
ware stack deployment of VistA to pro-
vide electronic health records within
its national public health care system.
author’s Response:
I appreciate Bhaskar’s comments about
the VA’s VistA medical information system
and applaud his efforts to generate a
workable system in the public domain, but
he misunderstood the intent of my article. It
was not to be a comparison of good vs. bad
or best vs. worst, but rather a discussion
of many of the endemic issues that have
plagued developers in the field since the
1960s. For example, MUMPS, the language
on which VistA is based, was developed in
the early 1970s for medical applications;
VistA achieved general distribution in the
VA in the late 1990s, almost 30 years later.
Why so long? I tried to address some of
these issues in the article. Also, VistA does
not represent an integrated approach, but
rather an interfaced approach with several
proprietary subsystems.
stephen V. cantrill, m.D., denver
correction
Tom Geller’s news story “Beyond the
Smart Grid” (June 2010) should have
cited Froehlich, J. Larson, E., Campbell, T., Haggerty, C., Fogarty, J., and
Patel, S. “HydroSense: Infrastructure-Mediated Single-Point Sensing of
Whole-Home Water Activity in
Proceedings of UbiComp 2009 (Orlando, FL,
Sept. 30–Oct. 3, 2009) instead of Patel,
S.N., Reynolds, M.S., and Abowd, G.D.
“Detecting Human Movement By Differential Air Pressure Sensing in HVAC
System Ductwork: An Exploration in
Infrastructure-Mediated Sensing” in
Proceedings of Pervasive 2008, the Sixth
International Conference on Pervasive
Computing (Sydney, Australia, May 19–
22, 2008). We apologize for this error.
Communications welcomes your opinion. to submit a
Letter to the editor, please limit your comments to 500
words or less and send to letters@cacm.acm.org.
© 2010 acm 0001-0782/10/1100 $10.00
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correction
The tribute “Robin Milner: The Elegant
Pragmatist” by Leah Hoffmann (June
2010) requires a small correction. It
said Milner “served as the first chair
of the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory.” For all his many
gifts, however, Milner was not precocious enough to have run a university
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