It has become an article of faith in some health policy circles over the past 20 years that the "solution" for our health care system's woes is to make us better health care consumers -- the so-called consumer-driven movement. After all, we've known for at least forty years that increased cost-sharing does influence how much health care we consume, so, in theory, higher deductibles and coinsurance, plus better cost/quality information, should give us the right incentives to shop. Most health care professionals are equally convinced patients aren't, and are never going to be, "consumers" in any meaningful sense. Health care is too scary, relies on too much specialized information, and is too often "consumed" at times when we are least able to make thoughtful decisions...
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Microsoft, Amazon, Google, IBM, Oracle, and Salesforce Issue Joint Statement Making Commitment to Open Source Healthcare Interoperability
Interoperability is an overlapping set of technical and policy challenges, from data access to common data models to information exchange to workflow integration – and these challenges often pose a barrier to healthcare innovation. Microsoft has been engaged for many years on developing best practices for interoperability across industries. Today, as health IT community leaders get together at the CMS Blue Button 2.0 Developer Conference here in Washington, DC, we’re pleased to announce that Microsoft has joined with Amazon, Google, IBM, Oracle, and Salesforce in support of healthcare interoperability...
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NASA and OpenStack Not Lost in Space — or in the Cloud
A couple of weeks ago, just before GigaOM Structure (the cloud equivalent of short Indian Wedding), Twitter and the headlines rang out with the news that NASA, home of the space program, the Apollo moonshot, the International Space Station, and the space shuttles, was retiring yet another of its signature innovations: OpenStack. Read More »
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Netflix And YouTube Make Up Majority Of US Internet Traffic, New Report Shows
Peer-to-peer file sharing has declined and Amazon and Hulu struggle to win receding American attention spans Read More »
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New Research Estimates Value of Removing DRM Locks
My co-authors and I at the University of Glasgow are investigating how restrictions on interoperability imposed by Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems might impact the market for goods. We are doing this as part of a larger project to better understand the economics of DRM and to figure out what changes would likely occur if the laws were reformed. Our recent working paper is titled ‘How much do consumers value interoperability: Evidence from the price of DVD players’...
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New Research Shows Attackers Turning to Encrypted Cyber Attacks During Pandemic
Zscaler, Inc...today released its 2020 State of Encrypted Attacks report, published by the Zscaler ThreatLabZ team. The threat research reveals the emerging techniques and impacted industries behind a 260-percent spike in attacks using encrypted channels to bypass legacy security controls. The report provides guidance on how IT and security leaders can protect their enterprise from the rising trend of encrypted threats, based on insight sourced from over 6.6 billion encrypted threats across the Zscaler™ cloud from January through September 2020 over encrypted channels. To download and read, see the 2020 State of Encrypted Attacks.
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NIH Bets Big Bucks On Big Data
The National Institutes of Health plans to invest up to $96 million over four years to put big data to work solving persistent health riddles, the agency said Monday. Read More »
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Numbers Don't Lie: Patent Trolls Are A Plague
Recent research supports view that patent troll activity is rising -- costing America a fortune in wasted legal fees and lost jobs Read More »
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Open Source Databases Keep Chipping Away At Oracle’s Empire
The three fastest growing databases of 2014 were all open source, according to a new report from DB-Engines, a site that tracks popularity in the rapidly changing database marketplace...
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Open Source Goes Corporate: Can Open Healthcare Be Far Behind?
If you aren't in IT, you may have missed the news that IBM is acquiring Red Hat, a leader in the open source Linux movement, or that, a couple days prior, Microsoft closed on its acquisition of GitHub, a leader in open source software development. Earlier this year Salesforce acquired Mulesoft, and Cloudera and Hortonworks merged; all were other open source leaders. I must confess, I had never heard of some of these companies, but I'm starting to believe what MarketWatch said following the IBM announcement: "open source has truly arrived." What exactly that means, especially for healthcare, I'm not sure, but it's worth exploring. IBM is paying $34b for Red Hat.
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Open Source Software Is More Secure Than You Think
[...] Open source is growing in the enterprise, but oftentimes when people think of open source, they are concerned about the potential security issues. But, those security concerns are merely myths. So, what is the reality when it comes to open source software security? Read More »
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Open Source: The Antidote for “Too Big to Fail”
If you look at the evolution of the IT landscape over the past 30 years, you see two distinct trends: the continued growth of the IT dinosaurs (mainframe computing and mainframe wannabes like Sun) and the emergence of highly modular, adaptable systems, which, by their very process of evolution, not only best suit the current needs, but plant the seeds for the next computer revolution. Read More »
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OpenID Connect May Usher In A New Era Of Federated Online Identity
OpenID Connect is designed to replace username/password authentication. The protocol, in use by Google and others, may solve governments' needs to authenticate users accessing digital services...
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Patients Are Not Consumers...But Who Is?
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Promoting Earthquake Readiness
In Oregon, Washington State and California, an early warning system helps citizens and officials better prepare for and respond to earthquakes. In the early morning hours on August 24, 2014, scientists at UC Berkeley received a “ShakeAlert” – an alarm providing warning of a pending earthquake. Five seconds later, the city of Napa felt a magnitude 6.0 earthquake. That five-second warning was an early success for a broader goal: the creation of an earthquake early warning system that can communicate the size, extent and timing of imminent earthquakes on the West Coast...
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Q&A: Moving From A PCMH To A 'Medical Neighborhood' Via Direct
Sharing medical records between different vendors' EHRs is one of the meaningful use Stage 2 measures that some folks would like to see yanked – but not MedAllies' Holly Miller, MD, or John Blair, MD. Read More »
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