October 2009

EU May Take Germany To Court Over Digital Frequency Licenses

The European Commission may take legal action against the German telecoms regulator over concerns its planned auction of digital frequency licenses may harm competition, the commission's telecoms spokesman Martin Selmayr said Tuesday. The commission "is deeply concerned" about the Bundesnetzagentur's decision to ignore the commission's advice on how to ensure fair competition in allocating digital frequency in Germany, Selmayr said. If the commission finds European Union laws aren't respected by the German plan it "will not shy away from enforcing the E.U.'s competition and single market rules in this important context," Selmayr added.

MIT project leads to programs that help health workers, farmers in developing countries

It's an unlikely medical device: a sleek smartphone more suited to a nightclub than a rural health clinic. But it's loaded with software that allows health workers in the remote northernmost Philippines province of Batanes to dramatically reduce the time it takes to get X-rays to a radiologist - and to get a diagnosis for a patient being tested for tuberculosis. The software, created by a nonprofit organization called Moca, is one of nearly two dozen cellphone-based projects that have sprung from NextLab, a course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It's taught by Jhonatan Rotberg, who was sent to MIT by Telmex, one of Latin America's largest telecommunications companies, to bring cellular technology to the "90 percent of people" who fall outside of the marketing plans of most phone companies. Talking about his Telmex job, Rotberg made a peak with his hands. "We were dealing with the very top of the pyramid," he said as he sat in his office at MIT. "We spent most of our time trying to sell more phones and products to the middle class and the upper middle class." So three years ago, funded by a grant from Mexican investor Carlos Slim's foundation, Telmex sent Rotberg to MIT to research methods for using cellphones to help "the resource-constrained countries, aka developing countries, aka low-income countries." And when Rotberg settled into his research and teaching position at the Media Lab, he made a discovery: The same device that powers teenage texting in the United States can be adapted to help farmers in Mexico and illiterate women in India.

Where will healthcare IT find the techies?

If the implementation of electronic health records matches the hype, it will revolutionize healthcare delivery in the United States. The new generation of electronic health records will be expensive and very complex, requiring the people who run them to possess strong critical-thinking skills and a hybrid set of abilities and experiences from the clinical, business, and IT sectors. Where will we find them? It's not clear how many people will be needed to make HIT run effectively. Some studies have estimated that between 10,000 and 15,000 new HIT workers will be needed, but those estimates were made before the federal government in February committed nearly $20 billion to HIT implementation in the stimulus package. David Hunt, MD, CMO in the federal Office of HIT Adoption, says the flood of HIT funding could make the workforce shortage issue more acute in the short-term, as hospitals and other healthcare organizations struggle to make the 2011 deadline to meet the as-yet undefined "meaningful use" requirements for HIT.

Blumenthal: Standards development key to healthcare reform

Standards development is at the heart of healthcare reform, according to David Blumenthal, MD, National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. "Congress may not know it or realize it, but you all are very much at the center" of making health reform happen, he told members of the HIT Standards Committee during a Wednesday workshop. "Health infrastructure is assumed will be present and functioning when needed. That is a very, very tall order and one we are committed to doing our best to put into place." Blumenthal said the National Health Information Network, designed to allow providers to share information for the efficient care of patients, is in the spotlight as Congress moves forward with health reform legislation. President Barack Obama has pledged $50 billion toward healthcare IT advancement over the next five years, with $20 billion already committed under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009(ARRA), passed in February. Congress is calling for an open-source resource for providers to establish interoperability under the NHIN, Blumenthal said. "This is a public resource, whose broadest use is our goal," he added.

Chopra seeks outside advice on health IT standards

On Wednesday, the Health Information Technology Standards Committee said it would bring together experts from outside the healthcare field to share ideas about best ways to apply new workflow and information sharing standards across organizations. Aneesh Chopra, the White House's chief technology officer and chairman of the panel's newly formed standards implementation group, said he wants to mine the lessons of other industries in using information handling standards successfully and then apply them broadly to healthcare. "There is an interest in how other industries have adopted standards, and I think we're going to take that feedback to heart," Chopra said after the meeting. The panel will host a hearing on Oct. 29 to share best practices, Chopra said. Additionally, Chopra will open a two-week online forum to seek feedback from a wider audience on a series of structured questions and information posts on standards usage. The implementation workgroup will report on its findings at the next standards committee meeting Nov. 19

Investigative reporting in the Web era

[Commentary] We used to be able to count on robust metropolitan dailies to provide a steady flow of journalism intended to shine a spotlight on abuse of power and failure to uphold the public interest, and by so doing to give the public the information needed to produce positive change. Now, while many newspapers continue to do as much of it as they can, the destruction of the business model they once depended on and the resultant shrinkage and even shuttering of newspapers around the country are robbing the American people of an important bulwark of our democracy. This change, of course, is just one of the many effects of a revolution in the way we get our news and information, caused by the dazzling rise of the Internet. This revolution has transformed the typical large and mid-size metro newspaper from a hugely profitable quasi monopoly turning out a must-have product for vast swaths of society, into an at-best break-even business with the dismal prospect of flattening or shrinking revenues. Newspapers are in the position of producing, at legacy expense, a product that is liked but considered not needed by college graduates over the age of 40—while increasingly ignored by everyone else. At the same time, however, it's important to remember that this revolution has also brought many, many positives to society already, with many more likely to come in the future.

[Steiger is editor-in-chief of ProPublica]

AT&T Attacks Google Voice Again — This Time With Nuns

[Commentary] AT&T countered Google's claims that it's blocking Google Voice calls to rural areas because they're directed to free conference call lines and sex hotlines engaged in the dubious practice of so-called traffic pumping by trotting out a convent of Benedictine Nuns who apparently can't receive, or make, Google Voice calls, either. That's hardball. The AT&T filing sets out to prove that Google is indeed more than the mere collection of Internet applications it says it is, but also that even if it were an "information service," it would still be under the FCC's jurisdiction and subject to any potential Network Neutrality rules that forbid discriminating against any type of traffic.

Redesigning the FCC's Website

Mock-ups of a possible redesign of the Federal Communications Commission's website. What made the FCC redesign different from the Sunlight Foundation's previous efforts to show how federal sites can be easier to access was the dense content. "Most visitors find it difficult to understand the vast majority of the content for good reason: it can be highly-technical and the FCC's operations are foreign to most people," the group said in a blog post. Click here to read a detailed summary of the changes Sunlight proposes, plus screenshots of its FCC mock up.

National Center on Disability & Journalism finds home at Cronkite School

The Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University is providing the first university home for the National Center on Disability & Journalism, which provides resources for journalists covering people with disabilities.

The center announced new members to its national advisory board of journalists and disability experts:

Jennifer LaFleur, director of computer-assisted reporting for ProPublica, a nonprofit news organization that produces journalism in the public interest;

Steve Doig, Knight Chair in Journalism at the Cronkite School and a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter;

Suzanne Robitaille, founder and editor-in-chief of Abledbody.com, a consumer Web site that covers disability news and assistive technology;

Nan Connolly, former business editor with Knight Ridder who teaches news reporting at the Nicholson School of Communication, University of Central Florida;

Beth Haller, professor of journalism/new media at Towson University in Maryland and former co-editor of the Society for Disability Studies' scholarly journal "Disability Studies;" and

Greg Smith, book author and host and producer of the nationally syndicated radio program "On A Roll - Talk Radio on Life & Disability."

The school also announced a new research Ph.D. program. It targets mid-career media professionals who want to work in education or sharpen skills and return to the media consulting professions. The Cronkite Ph.D. comes with a new orientation. The program is designed to retool the career professional. The program is different from most in several ways. It is a mentoring program matching the students' needs with faculty expertise, essentially providing an individually tailored program of study. The intent of the new Ph.D. is to immerse the student in the activities of original research. The degree is based in the study of philosophy, theory, differing scientific methodologies, and critical thinking. People with media experience are expected to bring divergent topical interests and will work with faculty mentors researching and developing those interests. They also bring a vibrancy into both the undergraduate and graduate classrooms as well as an enthusiasm for advanced learning. The new program is interdisciplinary, requiring complementary course work outside of the Cronkite School as a part of the student's program of study. A Ph.D. in addition to professional experience provides a mid-career professional a balanced base for careers in either education or the related business research professions.

Mobile Telemedicine Helps Patients In Transit

Telemedicine gear often helps patients and clinicians connect with remote physicians, but for the most part, those interactions typically take place from "fixed" locations, such as a home or office within another medical facility. However, a new telemedicine configuration developed with clinicians from Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center is linking patients in ambulances with remote medical specialists. "This is telemedicine on-the-go," said Dr. Hamilton Schwartz, who came up with an idea for using high-resolution video and other telemedicine gear, such as digital stethoscopes, for pediatric patients -- including sick premature infants -- while these children are in transit to Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center (CCHMC) from other area hospitals. In pediatric healthcare, especially cases involving critically ill children, care often needs to be delivered while the patient is being moved from one facility to another. But emergency or intensive care specialists at the destination hospital can get a head start in delivering care to those sick patient if the clinicians can remotely examine and observe the patient prior and during to transit, said Schwartz.

Benton

Search