The woes of the retail industry are well known, and are usually blamed on the impact of the Internet. Credit Suisse projects that 8,600 brick-and-mortar stores will close in 2017, which would beat the record set in 2008, at the height of the last recession. There are "zombie malls," full of empty stores but not yet shuttered. And then there's health care, where the retail business is booming. In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Christopher Mims set forth Three Hard Lessons the Internet is Teaching Traditional Stores. The lessons are: Data is King, Personalization + Automation = Profits, Legacy Tech Won't Cut It.
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3D Printed Microscopes to Boost Science in Developing Countries
Dr Richard Bowman from the Department of Physics, working with collaborators at the University of Cambridge and Tanzanian “digital blacksmiths” STICLab, wants to create much cheaper, open-source devices such as microscopes which can be used for disease diagnosis and scientific research. The three-year project, funded through the Global Challenges Research Fund, is testing and refining a prototype general purpose optical microscope made from mass produced lenses, a Raspberry Pi mini-computer and a 3D-printed plastic frame...
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4 Easy Ways to Work Toward a Zero Trust Security Model
There has been a lot of talk about zero trust networks lately, but little consensus about what they actually are. Similar to DevOps or software defined networking, that zero trust means something a little different to everyone is becoming clear. That said, there is one thing we can all agree on: The network cannot be trusted. At its core, zero trust is a security model. Any system operating in a way that completely removes trust from the underlying network is said to be conformant to the model. As you might imagine, there are many ways to accomplish this goal, some more robust than others. All zero trust implementations, however, rely on extensive authentication and authorization processes that can be sprinkled liberally throughout the infrastructure...
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Clicks-and-Mortar: Health Care's Future
Halamka Says "We Must Think and Act as One Planet"
Over the past few days, several journalists have asked me to comment about travel bans, immigration policy changes, and trends in isolationism. My opinions are my own and do not reflect any official position from my employer or my academic affiliation. Information Technology is global. We hire the best talent regardless of nationality, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, or race/ethnicity. Having worked in 75+ countries in my adult life, I can say that innovation crosses all boundaries and cultures. It’s just as likely that next big breakthrough will come from EMEA as it is from APAC. I cannot imagine restricting the flow of collaboration among academics and technology professionals from any country...
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How Technology Is Destroying Jobs
[...Erik] Brynjolfsson [...] and his collaborator and coauthor Andrew McAfee have been arguing for the last year and a half that impressive advances in computer technology—from improved industrial robotics to automated translation services—are largely behind the sluggish employment growth of the last 10 to 15 years. Read More »
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How to Use Libraries.io Data from Millions of Open Source Projects
What if we applied the techniques Google applied to index the internet back in 1998 to the world of open source software? That's exactly the thought Andrew Nesbitt had in 2014 which lead to the creation of Libraries.io, an open source project for indexing other open source projects. This month Libraries.io released metadata on over 25 million open source projects. You can download it right now from Zenodo, but what can you do with it? To understand what is contained within this dataset, I'll take a quick look at how it's collected. Everything in Libraries.io begins with package managers. We index project metadata from 33 package managers, filling in gaps from their source repositories where we can. We parse project manifests—a gemfile, package.json, or similar—that includes code from other projects and stores the links between them...
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Keeping Bread Fresh With POWERLINK And Linux
De la Ballina specializes in packaging industrially produced baked goods. When developing its latest generation of machines, the French company decided to implement an integrated automation solution. POWERLINK was the only network protocol that was up to the task. [...] Read More »
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Kubernetes Supports Container Management for HIT Infrastructure
Open source clouds, virtualization, and application management efforts are growing in healthcare as vendors are using tools that are meant to enhance deployment and management of applications. Kubernetes is one such tool that is becoming more popular in HIT infrastructure...
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On the Road
Over the past few months, I’ve been in England, China, Denmark, New Zealand, and Canada. Each of them is rethinking their healthcare IT strategy and is not entirely satisfied with past progress. I’m often asked by senior government officials to help harmonize IT strategy at the country level. That I can do. I’m also asked to discuss the US Presidential campaign, but that defies rational explanation. I frequently say that healthcare IT issues are the same all over the world. Here’s a few common observations..
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Open-Source Tool Enables Vendor-Neutral CT Does Archiving
Researchers in Boston have developed an automated radiation-exposure monitoring system that extracts detailed CT exposure data from image repositories. Thanks to optical character recognition (OCR) software, the open-source software scheme can gather data from virtually any CT scanner model, even older ones without DICOM-based dose displays. Read More »
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Testing 1-2-3: Open-Source Tools To Ensure Quality Applications
When the HealthCare.gov rollout did not quite go according to plan, much was made about the absence of “testing.” There have been myriad newspaper columns, cable talk show segments, even exchanges at congressional hearings dedicated to the topic. Though the attention is gratifying to a software guy like me, implicit in the discussion is the premise that testing is a monolithic activity to be performed once development is complete. Read More »
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The Biggest Mistake Doctors Make
Misdiagnoses are harmful and costly. But they're often preventable. [...] Such devastating errors lead to permanent damage or death for as many as 160,000 patients each year, according to researchers at Johns Hopkins University. Read More »
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The Rise of 'Technology-Enabled' Clinical Research Companies
Eric Hodgins, senior vice president, research and development technology solutions at QuintilesIMS, told us there are a number of dynamics “significantly transforming the industry and driving an increase in technology-enabled clinical research.” Notably, there are two macro trends: the pace of innovation in scientific research and the explosion of technological advancements...
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The Robots Are Coming...to Healthcare!
Ready or not, there are robots in your future. And some of them will be for health care. There has been growing concern that the rise of robots, along with artificial intelligence (AI), will create huge impacts on jobs. Within the last few months both McKinsey and PwC have issued white papers on the topic. The former found that nearly half of jobs have the potential to be automated (although most not totally), while the latter expects 38% of U.S. jobs at at high risk of automation within 20 years. Health care is not high on most lists of sectors whose jobs are soonest to be heavily impacted by robots, but it is on the list -- and it will happen...
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Top 3 blockchain-based healthcare companies to watch in 2017
Game theory is the science of strategy. A branch of mathematics and economics that explores strategic situations across multiple stakeholders with different goals, whose actions can affect one another. Pioneering companies are changing the game with blockchain technologies. The new game of consumer interactions redefines transparency, immutability and security across industries. Much progress has been made with game theory. John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern’s 1944 book Game Theory and Economic Behavior outlined classic game theory...
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