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Healthcare, Technology and Government 2.0 ~ I find interesting stuff on the Internet and aggregate it here

Firefox 3.5 passes IE 7?

From the Sunday Times:

"According to new data which I’ve verified from several sources say that Mozilla’s Firefox version 3.5 has successfully surpassed Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 in the global browser market.

The current stats on browser market share stands at, Firefox 3.5 with 21.93% of the market, edging past IE7’s 21.2% share. That said, Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8 still collectively hold over 55% of the pie.

Meanwhile, the older versions of Firefox specifically versions 2.0 and 3.0 make up a mere 1% and 9% of browser usage, Safari with 3% and Opera accounting for less than 1%. “Other” browsers account for 9% of the market -- much of which is presumably Google Chrome."

via sundaytimes.lk

 

Perservering Public Health in tough budget times

To continue to be able to provide critical public health services in the face of budget cuts of about $15 million, the Multnomah County Health Department had only once choice: to evolve.

Under the leadership of Lillian Shirley, the department has persevered amid severe financial constraints by capitalizing upon technology and staff capabilities and finding new ways to help people before they get sick in the first place.

The department has consolidated responsibilities, trained staff to work in new ways , and created new systems to help prevent costly and debilitating illnesses such as asthma and tuberculosis.

For example, the HIV/Viral Hepatitis Community Program and STD prevention were separate programs; now they’re now merged. STD clinic workers—not RNs—take and screen blood samples. The department discovered this improved patient compliance and allowed its clinic to treat more patients, more quickly.

The Environmental Health Division’s Healthy Homes project now has trained staffers conduct home visits to identify asthma triggers such as dust and roaches, as well as to show patients and their families how to contain the triggers. Over time, this reduces the disease’s burden and cost.

In part because of this improved efficiency and flexibility, the department was able to respond to the H1N1 outbreak by reassigning available staff and creating new positions to meet the community’s new health care needs.

“The health department is resilient,” says Shirley, Multnomah County’s health director and vice president of the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO).

The need to become more efficient has required Shirley and her team to make tough decisions. For the current fiscal year 2009-2010, the department’s budget was slashed from $151 million to $136 million, forcing it to cut 50 positions. And Shirley says her budget director recently warned that planning for new cuts could come sooner than expected, as the budget cycle beginning July 1, 2010, may have a shortfall. But she is up to the challenge.

“We have to really think about how we spend those dollars for the public and that’s part of our public trust,” Shirley says. “We’ve demonstrated we can survive and grow no matter how challenging our times.”

Among the health department’s other changes:

  • Initiatives aimed at addressing health promotion, health equity and health analysis are now part of a single unit.
  • In the Clinical Services department, everyone works to the full capacity of their training. Since July, certified technicians, rather than nurses, have distributed medications through the department’s prison pharmacy.
  • Innovations include a new approach to directed observational therapy for tuberculosis. Previously nurses or aides made regular home visits to observe patients taking their medicine and to ensure completion of the regimen. Now, health aides are able to observe patients via a videophone system set up in both the patient’s home and at the public health department offices. As a result department is saving $160,000, says Arlene Warren, R.N., program manager of the county’s Communicable Diseases Services.
 View a slideshow of a family receiving help at home to prevent asthma emergencies in a young child.

via rwjf.org

Design vs. Dyslexia

UC is employing its design research capabilities to create a 21st century electronic toolkit to speed learning for children with dyslexia. UC digital designer Renee Seward will present her innovative project at two upcoming conferences.

Reading and retaining information. That’s the challenge faced by the one in five children who have some form of dyslexia.

Overcoming that challenge could soon become easier for educators and children thanks to  pioneering design research from the University of Cincinnati’s internationally ranked College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning (DAAP).

In this video, UC's Renee Seward demonstrates and explains some of her concepts.

Renee Seward, UC assistant professor of digital design, will present her innovative electronic project, titled “Reading by Design: Visualizing Phonemic Sound for Dyslexic Readers 9-11 Years Old,” at the Southwest International Reading Association Regional Conference in Oklahoma City, Okla., on Feb. 5, 2010.

She will likewise present her research project during the March 2010 International Technology, Education and Development Conference in Valencia, Spain. (In Spain, Seward is scheduled to be a virtual presenter.)

In developing this toolkit to help educators more effectively assist children with dyslexia, Seward has developed an online tool that creatively employs sight, sound and physical movement to increase the reading and retention abilities of children aged 9 to 11 who have dyslexia. (A separate portion of the project employs physical tools and employs touch to aid educators and children.)

The project was inspired by the struggles of a friend’s child to read.


HOW “READING BY DESIGN” WORKS
“In my work,” said Seward, “I want to deemphasize the 26 letters of the alphabet and emphasize the 44 common sounds of the English language. I do so by helping educators employ children’s senses, from the visual to the kinesthetic.”

The key, she added, is knowing that dyslexia is not rooted in problems with visual perception. It’s rooted in memory. Individuals with dyslexia have difficulty recalling and making a quick connection between a sound and the letter representing that sound.

“The child is able to read the letter ‘b.’ He or she is unable to quickly recall that we associate that symbol with the sound, ‘buh.’ That’s dyslexia in a nutshell.”

So, in the toolkit she is developing, Seward begins with the smallest units of sound and helps children associate them with letter forms. With the touch of a mouse, a teacher working with a child can scroll over the letter “p,” and the “p” will then morph to display  common items associated with the “puh” sound: (peach, peppermint, pie, pea and piano).

The “Reading by Design” toolkit has a number of other activities:

  • Sound elements and creative visuals working in concert to reinforce reading retention and recall (SEE VIDEO ABOVE).
  • Common sounds – like the “ooohing” of a crowd following a great basketball play (along with the visual of a basketball player making that play) – depict and reinforce the connections between visual vowel combinations like “oo” and “ew” and their appropriate phonemic sound.
  • Horizontal lengthening of words with long vowels to denote that vowel and the silent “e” (in words like “note”). The child can experience the lengthening word with a sweep of the mouse to the right, thus integrating movement into memory. (SEE VIDEO ABOVE).
  • Also, when moving the mouse over long vowels, the cursor will not move up or down, only in a horizontal lengthening of the vowel to the right – in order to visualize the phonemic value of that vowel. Again, the rightward sweep of the mouse also incorporates the child’s arm movement into memory formation and retention.
  • Silent letters appropriately take on a shadow form or repel the mouse.
  • A cursor that moves just like a finger following the text (common to how most children read during their early years).

TESTING THE TOOLKIT
Seward likens her project to a parent holding a child’s bike as the child learns to ride. Little by little, the parent is able to forego providing complete support and moves to an occasional steadying hand until, ultimately, the child is riding under his or her own power.

She explained, “This electronic toolkit is a scaffold that can be built upon and then taken away.”

Seward continues developing the project and is in the process of writing a grant application in cooperation with Allison Breit-Smith, UC assistant professor of teacher education, and Beth O’Brien, assistant professor of educational studies, in order to begin user testing.

In developing the project, Seward has worked with the following specialists in order to obtain feedback:

  • Susan Colberg, associate professor of visual communication design, University of Alberta.
  • Educational psychologist Nilda Cosco, education specialist, North Carolina State University.
  • Educational researcher Peggy Coyne, research scientist at the Center for Applied Technology, Boston, Mass.
  • Joy Sykes Leonard, doctoral student, Carnegie Mellon University.
  • Fletcher Academy, private school in Fletcher, N.C., specializing in teaching dyslexic children and those with ADHD.
via uc.edu

Hacker Attacks Targeting Healthcare Organizations Doubled in 4th Quarter

SecureWorks®, Inc., a leading global provider of information security services protecting 2,700 clients worldwide, reported today that attempted hacker attacks launched at its healthcare clients doubled in the fourth quarter of 2009.  Attempted attacks increased from an average of 6,500 per healthcare client per day in the first nine months of 2009 to an average of 13,400 per client per day in the last three months of 2009.  Attempted attacks against other types of organizations, protected by SecureWorks, did not increase in the fourth quarter.  

"From October through December of 2009, we blocked hundreds of SQL Injection and Butterfly/Mariposa Bot malware attacks launched at our healthcare clients. These attempted attacks were responsible for the increase in our attack statistics," said Hunter King, security researcher with SecureWorks' Counter Threat Unit(SM) (CTU).

In the Fall of 2009, SecureWorks and the security community began tracking a new wave of attacks involving the latest version of the Butterfly/Mariposa Bot malware, according to King. If a computer is infected with the Butterfly malware, it can be used to steal data stored by the victim's browser (including passwords), launch Distributed Denial of Service attacks, spread via USB devices or peer to peer, and download additional malware onto the infected computer.

SQL Injection attacks target vulnerabilities in organizations' web applications. "We also saw a resurgence of SQL Injection attacks beginning in October," continued King. "They were being launched at legitimate websites so as to spread the Gumblar Trojan. Although SQL Injection is a well known attack technique, we continue to read news reports where it has been used successfully by cyber criminals to steal sensitive data," said King. One of the most recent cases reported involved American citizen Albert Gonzalez who was charged, along with two unnamed Russians, with the theft of 130 million credit card numbers using SQL Injection.

Factors Contributing to Healthcare Attacks

  1. Valuable Data Stores – Healthcare organizations often store valuable data such as a patient's Social Security number, insurance and/or financial account data, birth date, name, billing address, and phone, making them a desirable target to cyber criminals.
  2. Large Attack Landscape – Because of the nature of their business, healthcare organizations have large attack surfaces. Healthcare entities have to provide access to many external networks and web applications so as to stay connected with their patients, employees, insurers and business partners.  This increases their risk to cyber attacks.

"In order for healthcare organizations to effectively protect their sensitive patient data, they should consider employing a defense-in-depth strategy. This approach involves implementing multiple layers of protection to shield the organization from current and emerging threats," said Jon Ramsey, CTO for SecureWorks.  

SecureWorks has outlined a set of information security guidelines to assist the healthcare industry in protecting their patient data from cyber attacks and other data breaches. Adopting these security measures will also assist organizations in demonstrating their adherence to the HIPAA regulations and the requirements outlined in the new Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act.

The HITECH Act has extended the HIPAA regulations to apply not only to healthcare providers, insurers and healthcare clearinghouses, but also to business associates that are handling personal information about patient health, as well as other protected information, including name, social security number, address and insurance account numbers. These associates must adhere to the Security Safeguards Rules outlined by HIPAA. The HITECH Act has also added a data-breach notification requirement and increased penalties for violation of the HIPAA rules.

via SecureWorks.com

Radiation Safety Falls Behind - Video

Radiation Safety Falls Behind
As medical radiation technology advances, a patchwork of regulations does not always protect patients from radiation injury.

Serious radiation injuries are still infrequent, and the new equipment is undeniably successful in diagnosing and fighting disease. But the technology introduces its own risks: it has created new avenues for error in software and operation, and those mistakes can be more difficult to detect. As a result, a single error that becomes embedded in a treatment plan can be repeated in multiple radiation sessions.

Many of these mistakes could have been caught had basic checking protocols been followed, accident reports show. But there is also a growing realization among those who work with this new technology that some safety procedures are outdated.

via video.nytimes.com

 

Health IT Policy Committee Audio & Mtg Materials - 1/13

via healthit.hhs.gov

 

February HIT Policy & Standards Workgroup Meetings

The HIT Policy Committee Workgroups will hold the following public meetings during February 2010: 

February 3rd Privacy & Security Policy Workgroup, 3 to 4:30 p.m./Eastern Time
February 9th Strategic Plan Workgroup, 9 to 12 p.m./Eastern Time
February 11th Adoption/Certification Workgroup, 2 to 5 p.m./Eastern Time
February 12th Meaningful Use Workgroup, 11 to 1 p.m./Eastern Time;
February 16th NHIN Workgroup, 10 to 2 p.m./Eastern Time;
February 19th Privacy & Security Policy Workgroup, 2 to 4 p.m./Eastern Time
February 26th Strategic Plan Workgroup, 9 to 12 p.m./Eastern Time

The HIT Standards Committee Workgroups will hold the following public meetings during February 2010: 

February 18th Privacy & Security Workgroup, 10 a.m. to 12 p.m./Eastern Time
February 23rd Clinical Operations Vocabulary Workgroup 9 a.m. to 4 p.m./Eastern Time