News

Finally, some good health care news: according to Accenture, half of digital health start-ups are going to fail within two years. No, really: that's the good news. Accenture projects that funding for digital start-ups is going to boom over the next few years, reaching $6.5b annually by 2017.  Their analysis categorized four key areas of funding from 2008 - 2013: infrastructure ($2.9b), treatment ($2.6b), engagement ($2.6b), and diagnosis ($2.1b).  They stress that the start-ups that will succeed will do so by combining capabilities across the four areas, such as by use of integrated Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud and Sensor technologies ("SMACS"). This boom shouldn't come as much of a surprise...

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EHR vendors are quick to say that the upcoming stage 3 Meaningful Use requirements are too burdensome, that they are too difficult to complete, and they are not necessary. (see this article for example). Many EHR vendors would say let market forces take over and the Health IT industry will heal itself. The big business interests of the Healthcare industry may cry wolf (and lobby hard) against the meaningful use program and its significant enhancements to the usability program because they don’t want to spend the extra time and money to provide a healthcare system that truly follows a safety-enhanced design philosophy.

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Two weeks ago the U.S. Food and Drug Administration advised hospitals not to use Hospira's Symbiq infusion system, concluding that a security vulnerability enables hackers to take remote control of the system. The agency issued the advisory some 10 days after the U.S. Department of Homeland Security warned of the vulnerability in the pump. My view is that this will be the first of many advisories. For years, manufacturers of medical devices depended on the “kindness of strangers” assuming that devices would never be targeted by bad actors.    EKG machines, IV pumps, and radiology workstations are all computers, often running un-patched old operating systems, ancient Java virtual machines, and old web servers that no one should currently have deployed in production.

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As you've surfed the web, you've surely come across many sites using embedded maps to display data. Humans are visual creatures, so presenting temperatures, crime statistics, or population densities on a map often makes quickly discerning patterns and spatial relationships easier than presenting the same facts as a boring table. Visualizations based on maps can be quite sophisticated and even show patterns across time as well as space; Maps Mania is one blog showcasing many great examples of online maps. But displaying data on an embedded map doesn't need to be a complicated affair. You can do it using open source tools. In this post, I offer some tips for getting started doing this...

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