January 2010

On Jan 12, a federal advisory panel to the Health and Human Services Department began considering a framework today to update the Federal Health Information Technology Strategic Plan guiding adoption of electronic health records.

The updated plan is expected to be released by October. HHS initially created a strategic plan for health IT in June 2008 to cover the period through 2012. Under the economic stimulus law, HHS' Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT must update that plan. The Strategic Planning Workgroup began considering a nine-page framework in a meeting today. The workgroup will present its recommendations in the next several months to the HHS Health IT Policy Committee, which will forward recommendations by May to the HHS health IT national coordinator, who will release the updated plan by October, according to a schedule included in the draft update. By law, the updated plan must include a description of how policy developments will be coordinated among HHS officials, the Health IT Policy Committee and other committees and entities. It also must include benchmarks for the electronic exchange of health information, utilization of electronic health records and incorporation of security and privacy technologies, among other factors. The updated strategy must show how health IT will be used to improve care quality, reduce errors, improve public health and address special needs.

[Commentary] As the Senate works to craft a shield law, one crucial issue is determining who is a journalist. In other words, whose promises of confidentiality deserve protection? For me, it's always instructive to go back to the founders when addressing questions like these. Who did they have in mind when they drafted a 1st Amendment that wisely gave broad protection to "freedom of the press"? The answer surely includes pamphleteers such as Thomas Paine.

Throughout the revolutionary era, countless citizen-journalists like Paine, operating on street corners in Boston, New York and Philadelphia, informed the public, exposed and challenged corruption, and indeed inspired the American Revolution. That experience must inform whom we consider deserving of the shield. Today's critics miss the mark when they argue that unless we sharply limit who counts as a "covered person" under a shield law, then irresponsible bloggers, freelancers and others will claim protection they don't deserve. Though not all bloggers are potential candidates for a Pulitzer Prize -- indeed, some are terribly irresponsible -- as a group they are today's street-corner pamphleteers, protecting our freedom and strengthening our democracy. Their predecessors in the founding generation surely would have understood the dangers in allowing Congress, or the executive, to deny the law's protection to whole categories of journalists based simply on their employment status or the medium in which they work. We in government must not permit our aversion to criticism, or our hostility to a particular message, to dictate who's in and who's out.

A coordinated hacking campaign targeting Google, Adobe Systems, and more than 30 other companies raises serious concerns, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Tuesday.

Sec Clinton said that the U.S. government is taking the attack -- which Google said came from China -- very seriously. "We have been briefed by Google on these allegations, which raise very serious concerns and questions," she said. "We look to the Chinese government for an explanation." While attacks of this nature have hit the military, federal agencies, and government contractors in the past, Google is the first technology company to come forward and acknowledge it has been hit. Google apparently feels strongly that China is behind the attack because the company said Tuesday that the event helped convince the company that it "should review the feasibility of our business operations in China."

"China may throw Google out, and it will undoubtedly block Google.cn," said Danny O'Brien, an international coordinator at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group. There is also a concern that all Google services could be blocked in China if the company violates Chinese regulations by stopping its censorship of search results, said Shaun Rein, managing director of China Market Research Group in Shanghai. Offerings like Gmail, Google Docs, and Google hosting for businesses all have users in China and could be affected by a move to block the search giant's services. Chinese government censors constantly patrol the Internet for content deemed undesirable, including pornography and discussion of sensitive topics like corruption. They also block access across the country to popular U.S. Web sites including YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. Google is just one of a group of search engines including Microsoft's Bing and Yahoo China that remove certain results from their search engines targeted at the country.

Phil Bellaria, the Federal Communications Commission's director of scenario planning for the National Broadband Plan, suggests you take a chill pill.

He says broadcasters are lobbying against a "worst-case" scenario that is no longer under consideration -- if it ever was. The former Charter Communications executive says the spectrum reclamation plan currently being prepared for vetting by the FCC Commissioners would be voluntary and would not require any broadcaster to sell its spectrum to the government or give up the ability to transmit in high definition, multicast or mobile, at least initially. However, the FCC might have to look at the spectrum issue again later, depending on demand. Bellaria says that suggestions by broadcasters that the FCC or special interests are trying to take broadcasters' spectrum were off the mark. "The reality is that we are not trying to take spectrum from any individual broadcaster unless that broadcaster chooses to do it," he said.