January 2010

The Health and Human Services Department on Dec 30 set preliminary terms dictating who will and will not get billions of dollars in stimulus funds for buying electronic health records systems. One proposed rule outlines criteria for the e-health records incentive program, including the core concept of "meaningful use" of e-records technology. Medical professionals who make "meaningful use" of e-records by 2011 or 2012 will be eligible for up to $44,000 in Medicare payments spread out over five years. The proposal would define "meaningful EHR user" as a medical professional or hospital that complies with specific measures, including the use of a certified technology in ways that improve the quality and safety of health care delivery, reduce health care disparities, engage patients and families, enhance care coordination, improve public health and ensure privacy and security protections. The rule would phase in the specific measures, based on the present state of technological capabilities and providers' practice experience. HHS officials will demand stricter and more extensive criteria for demonstrating meaningful use over time, as technologies and providers' expertise advance. David Blumenthal, HHS national coordinator for health IT, said in an e-mail update to the public, "Great care was taken in the development of these criteria, with input from the public and federal advisory committees every step of the way." The resulting standards and certification criteria are organized into four categories:

1. Content Exchange Standards (i.e., standards used to share clinical information such as clinical summaries, prescriptions, and structured electronic documents);
2. Vocabulary Standards (i.e., standard nomenclature used to describe clinical problems and procedures, medications, and allergies);
3. Transport Standards (i.e., standards used to establish the communication protocol between systems); and
4. Privacy and Security Standards (e.g., authentication, access control, transmission security/encryption) which relate to and span across all of the other types of standards."

(12/31)

On January 1, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy launched Phase Three of the Public Access Policy Forum. The forum asks scientists, primary and secondary publishers, librarians, universities, researchers, students, and the public to help OSTP understand when and how research articles - funded by taxpayers but with value added by scholarly publishers - should be made freely available on the Internet. The discussion turns to questions of management. Phase Three will run through Thursday, January 7, 2010. Between now and then, OSTP would like for you to address the following questions:

• Compliance. What features does a public access policy need to ensure compliance? Should this vary across agencies?
• Evaluation. How should an agency determine whether a public access policy is successful? What measures could agencies use to gauge whether there is increased return on federal investment gained by expanded access?
• Roles. How might a public private partnership promote robust management of a public access policy? Are there examples already in use that may serve as models? What is the best role for the Federal government?

Google sponsored a University of Maryland/Joan Ganz Cooney Center study on children and keyword searching. The research was aimed at discerning the differences between how children and adults search and identify the barriers children face when trying to retrieve information. When considering children, search engines had long focused on filtering out explicit material from results. But now, because increasing numbers of children are using search as a starting point for homework, exploration or entertainment, more engineers are looking to children for guidance on how to improve their tools. Search engines are typically developed to be easy for everyone to use. Google, for example, uses the Arial typeface because it considers it more legible than other typefaces. But advocates for children and researchers say that more can be done technologically to make it easier for young people to retrieve information. What is at stake, they say, are the means to succeed in a new digital age.

(12/25)

Commercial radio, like many other media, is in serious trouble. The prevailing view at the Chicago Independent Radio Project is that traditional radio has created its own problems: beholden to advertisers, disconnected from the community and increasingly out of reach for all but a few, well-connected artists. Chirp — a fledgling, non-commercial, online radio station set to begin next month — will try to be everything Big Radio is not: independent, intensely local and musically adventurous. The decision to be online made sense, and not only because it allowed organizers to bypass the Federal Communications Commission. Unlike terrestrial stations, many of which are hemorrhaging listeners to alternative technologies, the online-only radio audience is growing at a rapid clip. The 42 million listeners in 2009 were a 44 percent jump from the 29 million in 2007, according to Arbitron, the media research firm. As news of the project spread, volunteers emerged — as did small-scale individual donors, which have made up the bulk of the station's financial base. They have also received support from several foundations, including the MacArthur Foundation. (12/26)