Metadata and meaningful use

The healthcare industry will find out soon if ONC intends to include metadata requirements in stage 2 of the meaningful use program. Many feel it is too soon. But given metadata's potential to support health information exchange, the expanded and standardized use of metadata tagging in healthcare is ultimately a matter of when, not if.     

Health as a meaningful social practice

The pursuit of health has become a highly valued activity in modern and contemporary life, commanding enormous resources and generating an expansive professionalization and commercialization along with attendant goods, services and knowledge. Health has also become a focal, signifying practice. As a 'key word', health is constructed in relation to social structures and experience and systematically articulated with other meanings and practices. Although the cogency of health as a practical concept is largely a product of the enormous influence of modern medicine, medical conceptions have never been able to contain the irrepressible proliferation of meanings associated with health. The meaningful - and ideological - practices of health can be illustrated by comparing three periods in American culture: (1) the late 19th and early 20th century; (2) the 1970s and 1980s; and (3) the first years of the 21st century.