Gov 2.0
The Direct Project has teeth, but it needs pseudonymity
How patient pseudonyms can inspire trust in the Direct Project's network.
Yesterday, Meaningful Use Stage 2 was released.
You can read the final rule here and you can read the announcement here.
As we read and parse the 900 or so pages of government-issued goodness, you can expect lots of commentary and discussion. Geek Doctor already has a summary and Motorcycle Guy can be expected to help us all parse the various health IT standards that have been newly blessed. Expect Brian Ahier to also be worth reading over the next couple of days.
I just wanted to highlight one thing about the newly released rules. As suspected, the actual use of the Direct Project will be a requirement. That means certified electronic health record (EHR) systems will have to implement it, and doctors and hospitals will have to exchange data with it. Awesome.
More importantly, this will be the first health IT interoperability standard with teeth. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will be setting up an interoperability test server. It will not be enough to say that you support Direct. People will have to prove it. I love it. This has been the problem with Health Level 7 et al for years. No central standard for testing always means an unreliable and weak standard. Make no mistake, this is a critical and important move from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC).
With new maps and apps, the case for open transit gets stronger
OpenPlans looks to improve transportation infrastructure with open data and open source code.
Earlier this year, the news broke that Apple would be dropping default support for transit in iOS 6. For people (like me) who use the iPhone to check transit routes and times when they travel, that would mean losing a key feature. It also has the potential to decrease the demand for open transit data from cities, which has open government advocates like Clay Johnson concerned about public transportation and iOS 6.
This summer, New York City-based non-profit Open Plans launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a new iPhone transit app to fill in the gap.
“From the public perspective, this campaign is about putting an important feature back on the iPhone,” wrote Kevin Webb, a principal at Open Plans, via email. “But for those of us in the open government community, this is about demonstrating why open data matters. There’s no reason why important civic infrastructure should get bound up in a fight between Apple and Google. And in communities with public GTFS, it won’t.”
Open Plans already had a head start in creating a patch for the problem: they’ve been working with transit agencies over the past few years to build OpenTripPlanner, an open source application that uses open transit data to help citizens make transit decisions.
Technical requirements for coordinating care in an Accountable Care Organization
Report from the field by Tony McCormick
The concept of an Accountable Care Organization (ACO) reflects modern hopes to improve medicine and cut costs in the health system. Tony McCormick, a pioneer in the integration of health care systems, describes what is needed on the ground to get doctors working together.
Highlights from the full video interview include:
- What an Accountable Care Organization is. [Discussed at the 00:19 mark]
- Biggest challenge in forming an ACO. [Discussed at the 01:23 mark]
- The various types of providers who need to exchange data. [Discussed at the 03:08 mark]
- Data formats and gaps in the market. [Discussed at the 03:58 mark]
- Uses for data in ACOs. [Discussed at the 5:39 mark]
- Problems with current Medicare funding and solutions through ACOs. [Discussed at the 7:50 mark]
You can view the entire conversation in the following video:
Five elements of reform that health providers would rather not hear about
Data as a platform, patient control, and partnerships are key
The quantum leap we need in patient care requires a complete overhaul of record-keeping and health IT. Leaders of the health care field know this and have been urging the changes on health care providers for years, but the providers are having trouble accepting the changes for several reasons.
What’s holding them back? Change certainly costs money, but the industry is already groaning its way through enormous paradigm shifts to meet current financial and regulatory climate, so the money might as well be directed to things that work. Training staff to handle patients differently is also difficult, but the staff on the floor of these institutions are experiencing burn-out and can be inspired by a new direction. The fundamental resistance seems to be expectations by health providers and their vendors about the control they need to conduct their business profitably.
Palo Alto looks to use open data to embrace ‘city as a platform’
Palo Alto CIO Jonathan Reichental talks about the city's vision for open data.
In the 21st century, one of the strategies cities around the world are embracing to improve services, increase accountability and stimulate economic activity is to publish open data online. The vision for New York City as a data platform earned wider attention last year, when the Big Apple’s first chief digital officer, Rachel Sterne, pitched the idea to the public.
This week, the city of Palo Alto in California joined over a dozen cities around the United States and globe when it launched its own open data platform. The platform includes an application programming interface (API) which enables direct access through a RESTful interface to open government data published in a JSON format. Datasets can also be embedded like YouTube videos, as below:
On email privacy, Twitter’s ToS and owning your own platform
The lesson from this week's #TwitterFail is that publishers of all sorts should own their own platform.
If you missed the news, Guy Adams, a journalist at the Independent newspaper in England, was suspended by Twitter after he tweeted the corporate email address of a NBC executive, Gary Zenkel. Zenkel is in charge of NBC’s Olympics coverage.
When I saw the news, I assumed that NBC had seen the tweet and filed an objection with Twitter about the email address being tweeted. The email address, after all, was shared with the exhortation to Adams’ followers to write to Zenkel about frustrations with NBC’s coverage of the Olympics, a number of which Jim Stogdill memorably expressed here at Radar and Heidi Moore compared to Wall Street’s hubris.
Today, Guy Adams published two more columns. The first shared his correspondence with Twitter, including a copy of a written statement from an NBC spokesman called Christopher McCloskey that indicated that NBC’s social media department was alerted to Adams’ tweet by Twitter.
The second column, which followed the @GuyAdams account being reinstated, indicated that NBC had withdrawn their original complaint. Adams tweeted the statement: “we have just received an update from the complainant retracting their original request. Therefore your account has been unsuspended.”
Since the account is back up, is the case over? A tempest in a Twitter teapot? Well, not so much. I see at least four different important issues here related to electronic privacy, Twitter’s terms of service, censorship and how many people think about social media and the Web.
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