U.S. Seen As Among Health IT Leaders

Conn, Joseph. "U.S. Seen As Among Health IT Leaders." Modern Healthcare, February 15, 2012.

From the article: "The U.S. appears to be holding its own in healthcare information technology use and adoption by physicians compared with physicians in Australia, Canada, England, France, Germany, Singapore and Spain, according to a study released by Reston, Va.-based consultant Accenture. … According to a side-by-side comparison of “progress” in the U.S. and the six other countries toward what the consultant defined as six “dynamics of connected health,” the U.S. ranked ahead of the other nations surveyed in 10 metrics, behind in 11, and equal to the others in 21."  Read more

See Also

Making the Case for Connected Health, prepared by Accenture, 2012.

Google Must Remember Our Right To Be Forgotten

Falkenrath, Richard. "Google Must Remember Our Right To Be Forgotten." The Financial Times, February 15, 2012.

From the opinion: "Last month the European Commission proposed adding a new “right to be forgotten” to privacy law. This deceptively simple idea is a ticking time-bomb in the booming internet economy. It is also essential – both for Europeans and Americans – to protect personal privacy in the age of pervasive social media and cloud computing…. Google, by gaining the consent of its users in the form of a quick tick, has secured the power to build an electronic surveillance apparatus that far exceeds anything the Bush administration tried to do. A right to be forgotten would make the counterterrorism mission harder. My support for it, however, comes from my recent experience as a parent…. Establishing such a right would, however, impose uneven economic costs. Companies that depend on monetising user data, such as Google and Facebook, would be badly hit. Old-fashioned technology companies – those that charge for hardware, software or services – would suffer less. We can expect lobbying from both sides. The debate will be rich with irony because so many of the new companies posture as paladins of liberty and social progress."  Read more

Gawande's Rx to Change Docs From 'Cowboys to Pit Crews'

Mosquera, Mary. "Gawande's Rx to Change Docs From 'Cowboys to Pit Crews'." Government Health IT, February 9, 2012.

From the article: "In his research, Gawande has found that many of the healthcare organizations with the best results are among the least expensive, and the most successful behave like systems, for example like the parts that make up a car. Changing from cowboys to pit crews will take three key skills that don’t exist right now except in small pockets: Recognize success and failure through the use of data. Current data can’t supply how many people had a heart attack last year or last month and what their survival rates are. If it could, physicians could pinpoint where the problems are; Devise solutions by thinking like other fields that are high risk and high failure. A well-designed checklist is the simplest way to get teams to work together. For example, a Boeing engineer helped develop a flight-deck type checklist for surgery, which Gawande tested in eight locations, with an average 35 percent reduction in complications and 47 percent reduction in death. Since then, VA has adopted it and has reduced deaths by 18 percent.; Overcome the culture of resistance among physicians by making solutions simple enough to be implemented and accelerated." Read more

PHRs Will Need More Than Data to Flourish

"PHRs Will Need More Than Data to Flourish." Government Health IT, February 13, 2012.

From the article: “A bit slow on the uptake, perhaps, but the business model for Personal Health Records is taking off. And the venture capital seeded in 2011 – an amount ranking second only to the vast health information management category – is set to yield new products and bolster existing ones. But will they really be ready for patients?... As attractive as the PHR market may be to investors, PHR providers will need to offer new services around their wares that improve health delivery in order to engage patients and physicians – which will ultimately determine their success of failure.”  Read more

Canada Wants Warrantless Internet Spying, Says Critics Support Child Porn

Lee, Timothy B. "Canada Wants Warrantless Internet Spying, Says Critics Support Child Porn." ars technica, February 14, 2012.

From the article: "Canada's conservative government has re-introduced an Internet surveillance bill that would allow the government to obtain information about Internet subscribers—without a warrant. The legislation would require service providers to provide law enforcement with IP addresses, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, and other information on demand. The bill would also "require ISPs and cellular phone companies to install equipment for real-time surveillance and create new police powers designed to obtain access to the surveillance data." Members of the opposition have vowed to fight the legislation. More than 80,000 people have signed an online petition opposing the bill."  Read more

See Also
Schmidt, Sarah. "Critics Take Aim at Harper's Online Surveillance Bill." Post Media News, February 15, 2012.

Senators Introduce New Cybersecurity Bill

Mills, Elinor. "Senators Introduce New Cybersecurity Bill." CNet News, February 14, 2012.

From the article: "The Cybersecurity Act of 2012 calls for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to assess risks and vulnerabilities of computer systems running at critical infrastructure sites such as power companies and electricity and water utilities and to work with the operators to develop security standards that they would be required to meet.

The DHS would determine which companies fit the definition of critical infrastructure as defined by systems "whose disruption from a cyber attack would cause mass death, evacuation, or major damage to the economy, national security, or daily life." Companies would have the right to appeal the designation, under the measure introduced by Sens. John D. (Jay) Rockefeller IV, (D-West Virginia), Joe Lieberman (I-Connecticut), Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Dianne Feinstein (D-California)…There also are provisions for information sharing between the government and the private sector that maintain civil liberties. And DHS would consolidate its cybersecurity programs into a National Center for Cybersecurity and Communications office."  Read more

See Also
Lieberman, Collins, Rockefeller, Feinstein Offer Bipartisan, Comprehensive Bill to Secure Fed and Critical Private Sector Cyber Systems. Press release by the U.S. Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs, February 14, 2012.

Rosenzweig, Paul. "Information Sharing and the Cybersecurity Act of 2012." Lawfare Blog, February 14, 2012.

The Machines Are Talking a Lot

Bergstein, Brian. "The Machines Are Talking a Lot." Technology Review, February 14, 2012.

From the article: "Cisco estimates that the amount of data that was ferried to and from mobile devices last year was eight times greater than the data on all of the Internet in 2000. Global mobile data traffic is expected to see an 18-fold increase between 2011 and 2016. Not surprisingly, video is a big reason: Cisco expects there to be 7.6 exabytes of data flowing to mobile devices every month in 2016, about 70 percent of the total of 10.8 exabytes of data per month. …But you might be surprised by the second-leading source of the expected surge in traffic. It won't come from people, but from machine-to-machine communications, or "M2M." Think of sensors in cars and in appliances, surveillance cameras, smart electric meters, and devices still to come, monitoring the world and reporting to each other and to centralized computers what they're detecting." Read more

See Also
Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2011–2016, prepared by Cisco, February 14, 2012.

The Case Against Letting the United Nations Govern the Internet

Brito, Jerry. "The Case Against Letting the United Nations Govern the Internet." TIME, February 13, 2012.

From the article: "As the Internet has grown and spread across the globe, however, emerging powers such as Brazil, Russia, India and China have begun to frequently and forcefully question why the U.S. should have outsized influence over how the Internet is run. They suggest, instead, that Internet governance should be handled by the United Nations. Last year, for example, Vladimir Putin met with the head of the International Telecommunication Union – the U.N. body now hosting treaty negotiations – and made no bones about how Russia saw things…. Along with China, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, Russia later introduced a U.N. General Assembly resolution proposing a “code of conduct” for global information security."  Read more

The Future of High-Tech Health Care — and the Challenge

Steve Lohr, February 13, 2012. "The Future of High-Tech Health Care — and the Challenge." The New York Times Bits Blog.

From the blog: "The notion that a technology like Watson, if unbiased, is going to reduce health care spending significantly seems misguided. But such technologies can make a useful difference if the right economic incentives are in place. And that, of course, is what the drift toward “accountable care organizations” is about. That is, a system in which doctors, hospitals and insurers are paid for helping people live healthier lives.

If that happens, the nation’s health care bill won’t necessarily fall. People living healthier and presumably longer lives will be consuming health care services for more years. But at least the money would be spent more wisely."  Read more

See Also
Singularity University. "FutureMed."

90% of Consumers Worry About Online Privacy

Palmer, Alex. "Report: 90% of Consumers Worry About Online Privacy." Direct Marketing News, February 10, 2012.

From the article: "Ninety percent of U.S. adults worry about online privacy, while 41% do not trust most companies with their personal data, according to a Feb. 13 survey from TRUSTe. The report, the Consumer Confidence Edition, is the first installment of a quarterly index from the privacy management company.

Of the 90% of consumers who worry about their online privacy, 23% report “always” worrying while 21% say they are “frequently” worried. Of the 41% that disagreed with the statement “I trust most companies with my personal information online,” 12% strongly disagreed."  Read more

See Also
TRUSTe. "TRUSTe Privacy Index."

The Right to Be Forgotten

Rosen, Jeffrey. "The Right to Be Forgotten." 64 Stanford Law Review Online 88, February 13, 2012.

From the article: "At the end of January, the European Commissioner for Justice, Fundamental Rights, and Citizenship, Viviane Reding, announced the European Commission’s proposal to create a sweeping new privacy right—the “right to be forgotten.” The right, which has been hotly debated in Europe for the past few years, has finally been codified as part of a broad new proposed data protection regulation. Although Reding depicted the new right as a modest expansion of existing data privacy rights, in fact it represents the biggest threat to free speech on the Internet in the coming decade. The right to be forgotten could make Facebook and Google, for example, liable for up to two percent of their global income if they fail to remove photos that people post about themselves and later regret, even if the photos have been widely distributed already. Unless the right is defined more precisely when it is promulgated over the next year or so, it could precipitate a dramatic clash between European and American conceptions of the proper balance between privacy and free speech, leading to a far less open Internet.’" Read more

See Also

"The Privacy Paradox: Privacy and Its Conflicting Values." Stanford Law Review Online, The Symposium Issue, February 2, 2012.

The Age of Big Data

Lohr, Steve. "The Age of Big Data." The New York Times, February 11, 2012.

From the article: "Welcome to the Age of Big Data. The new megarich of Silicon Valley, first at Google and now Facebook, are masters at harnessing the data of the Web — online searches, posts and messages — with Internet advertising. At the World Economic Forum last month in Davos, Switzerland, Big Data was a marquee topic. A report by the forum, “Big Data, Big Impact,” declared data a new class of economic asset, like currency or gold…. Data is tamed and understood using computer and mathematical models. These models, like metaphors in literature, are explanatory simplifications. They are useful for understanding, but they have their limits. A model might spot a correlation and draw a statistical inference that is unfair or discriminatory, based on online searches, affecting the products, bank loans and health insurance a person is offered, privacy advocates warn.

Despite the caveats, there seems to be no turning back. Data is in the driver’s seat. It’s there, it’s useful and it’s valuable, even hip."  Read more

See Also
Big Data, Big Impact: New Possibilities for International Development, prepared by the World Economic Forum, 2012.

15 Years On, President Clinton's 5 Principles for Internet Policy Remain the Perfect Paradigm

Thierer, Adam. "15 Years On, President Clinton's 5 Principles for Internet Policy Remain the Perfect Paradigm." Forbes, February 12, 2012.

From the article: "What principles should guide Internet policy? Fifteen years ago, the Clinton Administration proposed a paradigm for how cyberspace should be governed that remains the most succinct articulation of a pro-liberty, market-oriented vision for cyberspace ever penned. It recommended that we rely on civil society, contractual negotiations, voluntary agreements, and ongoing marketplace experiments to solve information age problems. In essence, they were recommending a high-tech Hippocratic oath: First, do no harm (to the Internet).

Unfortunately, most governments across the globe—including ours here in the U.S.—are increasingly taking a very different approach. …Can we recommit ourselves to President Clinton’s principles for Net governance and renew the push for cyber-liberty? Many will say it’s an exercise in futility because lawmakers—prodded by regulatory activists, academics, and special interests—will continue to clamor for more and more intervention to solve all those pet issues."  Read more

Cloud Computing and the Looming Global Privacy Battle

Chertoff, Michael. "Cloud Computing and the Looming Global Privacy Battle." The Washington Post, February 9, 2012.

From the opinion: "A grave threat is said to be stalking Europe. No, it isn't the financial crisis and the potential demise of the euro. It's the "rapacious" U.S. approach to privacy — which portends, for those engaged in the development of cloud architecture, a coming "clash" of privacy laws. According to Viviane Reding, the European Union's justice commissioner, cloud-based companies that collect personal data are violating fundamental human rights…. Simply put, the fundamental question about international Internet governance over the next decade is going to be whose law dictates control — and the Europeans are making a bold play to say that the answer is “Europe’s.”  Read more

FDA’s Assault on Mobile Technologies

White, Joel. "FDA’s Assault on Mobile Technologies." The Washington Times, February 7, 2012.

From the opinion: "Mobile technology has the potential to improve all aspects of our lives, and in many cases, it is already doing so. From getting step-by-step directions when we’re lost to playing video games when we’re bored, there are apps for every facet of life - including your health care…All of this innovation and growth in mobile medical applications could come to a screeching halt if the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) moves forward with its proposed regulation of mobile medical applications. The FDA continues to explore options to regulate mobile medical applications as medical devices under the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, particularly around adverse-event and patient-safety reporting. At this formative stage of emerging mobile medical applications, complicated and expensive new regulatory structures through the FDA would dampen prospects for future lifesaving innovations."  Read more

Commerce Recommends Industry Lead Internet ID Board

Sternstein, Aliya. "Commerce Recommends Industry Lead Internet ID Board." Nextgov, February 8, 2012.

From the article: "The Commerce Department plans to initiate a government-funded steering board that eventually would be privatized to build a global system for safekeeping online identities. Under recommendations released on Wednesday, private sector officials would lead the committee in cooperation with, but independent of, the government. After about two years, the body would need to be self-sustaining, Commerce officials said. … Some critics of the overall approach, called the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace, have argued that a government-run credentialing initiative could morph into a national ID system for tracking citizens."  Read more

See Also
Recommendations for Establishing an Identity Ecosystem Governance Structure, prepared by the Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology, February 2012.

Preparing for Precision Medicine

Mirnezami, M.R.C.S., R., Nicholson, Ph.D.,J. and Darzi, M.D., A. "Preparing for Precision Medicine." The New England Journal of Medicine 2012; 366:489-491, February 9, 2012.

From the opinion: "Ultimately, precision medicine should ensure that patients get the right treatment at the right dose at the right time, with minimum ill consequences and maximum efficacy. But it will change how medicine is practiced and taught and how health care is delivered and financed. It will change the way research and development are financed and regulated. It will deeply affect public trust and the nature of the patient–clinician relationship, and it will require unprecedented collaboration among health care stakeholders.Undoubtedly, significant challenges lie ahead, though none are insurmountable. Yet expectations must be realistic: precision medicine will happen neither automatically nor overnight."  Read more

Google Paying Users to Track 100% of Their Web Usage Via Little Black Box

Johnston, Casey. "Google Paying Users to Track 100% of Their Web Usage Via Little Black Box." ars technica, February 8, 2012.

From the article: "Google is working to collect information about Internet users that it can't get from just monitoring its own browser, services, and Android devices. The company has set up a new program called Screenwise, which offers money to users who install a black box on their home network to "measure Internet use." A smaller amount of money will go to those who install a browser extension on their computers that will do the same thing."  Read more

See Also

Google. "Help Us Make Google Better."

Meaningful Use in Year Two and Beyond: Informing the Efforts of RECs

Harle, Christopher and Nir Menachemi. "Meaningful Use in Year Two and Beyond: Informing the Efforts of RECs." iHealthBeat, February 6, 2012.

From the opinion: "According to CMS, in 2011, 29,344 eligible professionals received a total of $570,350,910 in incentive payments through either the Medicare or Medicaid incentive programs. …Of note in the CMS statistics is that nearly 173,000 providers registered for the program, indicating far more interest than actual participation thus far. This is not necessarily surprising given the many known obstacles to successful EHR adoption. The well-documented barriers extend beyond the commonly cited financial obstacles that the meaningful use program tries to address. The non-financial barriers include time and information constraints, environmental and organizational factors, as well as social and psychological obstacles. Therefore, an important policy question is how can these non-monetary barriers be overcome as the meaningful use program evolves?" Read more

See Also

Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. "Medicare Providers That Have Been Paid Via the EHR Program for Eligible Providers."

No Easy Answers on Twitter's New Censorship Policy

Marks, Joseph. "No Easy Answers on Twitter's New Censorship Policy." Nextgov, February 7, 2012.

From the article: "Experts were split Tuesday on whether Twitter's new policy to allow country-specific censorship represents a fundamental failure to protect free speech, or is simply the price of doing business globally. Meg Roggensack, a senior adviser at Human Rights First, said Twitter effectively had sided with repressive governments rather than activists and citizens….Roggensack was speaking at a panel discussion on global Internet freedom sponsored by the Media Access Project, a nonprofit law firm and advocacy group that supports freedom of expression online. David Sullivan, policy director for the Global Network Initiative, disagreed. He said the social media company was making an inevitable compromise by agreeing to remove or prohibit information only in response to an official government request or court order and to clearly note when information had been removed."  Read more

See Also
Heim, Anne. "Worried About Possible Restrictions on Twitter?  Here's How to Get Around Them." The Next Web, January 27, 2012.

Health Information Exchanges and Megachange

Friedman, Allan A. and Darrel M. West. Health Information Exchanges and Megachange, prepared for the Brookings Institution, February 8, 2012.

From the Editor's note: "In this paper, we analyze state health information exchanges (HIEs) as an example of what MITRE researcher John Piescik calls “megachange” challenges. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, HIEs are “efforts to rapidly build capacity for exchanging health information across the health care system both within and across states.” This includes insurance information for those without coverage and clinical and medical data in order to connect health care providers and payers. The goals are to increase the flow of information across relevant organizations and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the health care system…. Briefly, we find that state health information exchanges have made progress in establishing organizational frameworks, building technology-based connections, and bringing relevant groups to the table for discussion.  However, barriers remain in terms of governance, financing, and policy vision.  Many states and localities have experienced difficulties in producing consensus on strategies and approaches, and identifying consistent revenue streams.  Some question whether the state level is the proper unit for HIEs given natural marketplaces centering on localities or regions.  Until those problems are overcome, it will be impossible for HIEs to achieve their full potential."  Read full report

See Also
The Brookings Institution. "Policy Megachange and Health Information Exchanges."

Sharing Homeland Security Information

Cacas, Max. "Sharing Homeland Security Information." Signal Magazine, February 2012.

From the article: "The Department of Homeland Security is adapting intelligence community tools to facilitate information sharing among its diverse elements. These include social media-based successes as well as information fusion centers across the nation. In the effort to secure the U.S. homeland, one of the most vital tools is information, and getting it to the people who can make the best use of it in a timely manner is absolutely critical. That would be a tall order for any one government agency, but the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in particular faces unique challenges….Interoperability among those diverse organizations is challenging enough, but the DHS also must be able to exchange information where appropriate with local municipalities. And, it must not violate laws that establish firewalls between military operations and domestic law enforcement.”  Read more

India, Brazil Could Decide Future of Free Internet

Corbin, Kenneth. "India, Brazil Could Decide Future of Free Internet." PC World, February 8, 2012.

From the article: "With so much attention focused on online censorship in highly restrictive countries such as China, Iran and Syria, the discussion of global Internet freedom often has tended to exclude the large class of more moderate nations with rapidly growing online populations with only a rudimentary set of laws and policies for the Web…But for Bob Boorstin, Google's director of corporate and policy communications, the greater uncertainty, both for U.S. businesses looking to new markets overseas and global Internet users, is found in the countries that have neither made forceful affirmations of online freedom nor implemented rigid, state-sanctioned censorship frameworks…Just this week, word surfaced that Google and Facebook had each taken down certain content on their domains in India to comply with a court ruling that upheld a lawsuit against a larger group of Internet companies seeking mechanisms to block sensitive religious material."  Read more

See Also

Gokhale, Ketaki and Pratap Patnaik. "Google Removes Content in India Deemed Objectionable After Civil Lawsuit." Bloomberg, February 7, 2012.

A Therapist in Your Pocket

Paul, Marla. "A Therapist in Your Pocket." Northwestern University News Center, February 7, 2012.

From the article: “It’s the future of therapy at a new Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine center where scientists are inventing web-based, mobile and virtual technologies to treat depression and other mood disorders. The phone and similar projects bypass traditional weekly therapy sessions for novel approaches that provide immediate support and access to a much larger population. Also in the works at the National Institutes of Health-funded center: a virtual human therapist who will work with teens to prevent depression; a medicine bottle that reminds you to take antidepressant medication and tells your doctor if the dosage needs adjusting; a web-based social network to help cancer survivors relieve sadness and stress… The goal is for the center to become a national resource, offering a library of intervention technologies that will be available to other researchers."  Read more

See Also
Northwestern University. "Center for Behavioral Intervention Technologies."

Disruptions: Facebook Users Ask, ‘Where’s Our Cut?’

Nick Bilton, February 5, 2012., "Disruptions: Facebook Users Ask, ‘Where’s Our Cut?’" The New York Times Bits Blog.

From the blog: "Jaron Lanier, one of the deepest thinkers on the impacts of technology on society and an “innovator in residence” at the Annenberg School at the University of Southern California, worries about companies like Facebook and Twitter not paying their users while the people lucky enough to work for them become rich from free user-generated content. Mr. Lanier says that as more money flows to those who build these networks, society distorts and divides. Those without the skills needed in this new economy — other than to tweet and post pictures — can fall further behind economically."  Read more