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FCC Eyes New Spectrum For Wi-Fi-Type Service

Bob Brewin | Nextgov | November 4, 2013

The Federal Communications Commission has kicked off a process to determine whether or not Globalstar Inc., which provides satellite phone service, can use a portion of its spectrum to offer terrestrial Wi-Fi-type service in the United States.

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FCC Proves Yet Again That It’s Out To Kill Net Neutrality

Art Brodsky | Wired | May 15, 2014

...FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, despite weeks of backlash, still wants to allow Internet Service Providers like Comcast and Verizon to “offer” different levels of service to internet companies, although he refused to call them a “fast lane” and a “slow lane” and refused to recognize how those arrangements up the food chain affect consumers and a neutral internet...

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FDA Issues RFQ for Large Scale EHR Study - Wants to Leverage VA's Open Source VistA EHR and Database for Research

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) yesterday issued a Request for Quotation (RFQ) for a large-scale electronic health record (EHR) system. This RFQ is very important as the objective is to develop a platform to support a critical project by the FDA's Division of Bioinformatics and Biostatistics (DBB) "to conduct research to assess the safety and surveillance of FDA regulated products through the FDA adverse event reporting systems..." Adverse drug reactions are one of the leading causes of death in the US, thus finding which drugs cause negative interactions is of vital importance. The project requires "use of the large electronic medical record (EMR) system..." The project is going to leverage the largest, most comprehensive, and clinically relevant medical records database, that of the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).

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France Probes App Stores Over “Lock-In,” Confirms Raid On Apple

Jeff John Roberts | GigaOM | July 1, 2013

French competition authorities confirmed to GigaOM they are reviewing the app stores of Apple, Google and Amazon for possible antitrust violations. The agency also said it conducted a raid on Apple last week. Read More »

Google Cloud Shut Down This Guy's Business — But Now He's a Fan for Life

Julie Bort | Business Insider | August 26, 2016

On Monday, Fred Trotter, CEO of a healthcare startup called DocGraph, came into work only to discover that his cloud computing provider, Google, had effectively shut down his company, sending him and his team into a panic. DocGraph, through its sister company, CareSet, sells Medicare data and analysis to help improve patient care and track the effectiveness of drugs. It not only stores its data with Google, but also relies on Google's machine learning service, Tensorflow, to help it with the analysis...

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Google Is Waging A Financial War Of Attrition To Win The Cloud

Christopher Mims | Quartz | April 25, 2014

Google is fighting a war on multiple fronts—against Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and others—and is outspending them all in the one area that will be critical to winning the future: the cloud.  Google’s April 17 earnings report revealed that the company spent $2.35 billion on infrastructure, which for Google means its data centers and all the IT gear that go in them.

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Google, Facebook, Amazon Warn FCC Rules Pose 'Grave Threat To The Internet'

Brendan Sasso | Nextgov.com | May 8, 2014

The world's largest technology companies are coming out in force against the Federal Communications Commission's proposed regulations of Internet access.  In a letter to the FCC Wednesday, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Twitter, Yahoo, Netflix, and dozens of other companies warned that the FCC's plan to allow Internet service providers to charge websites for faster service in some cases "represents a grave threat to the Internet."

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Google, Facebook, Amazon: Algorithms Will Soon Rule Our Lives So We'd Better Understand How They Work

Jamie Bartlett | The Telegraph | March 28, 2014

One of the most interesting announcements in last week's Budget – well, for me at least, as someone who has no savings and doesn’t play bingo or drink much – was the new Alan Turing Institute: £220 million of government support will be invested into "big data and algorithm" research.

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Halamka on "The Dark Side of E-commerce"

As I mentioned in a recent post, Amazon has focused on the convenience of the customer instead of the convenience of their business. Yesterday’s New York Times highlighted the trend for the hotel industry to do the same. In my post, I lamented that some industries including old school industrial companies and healthcare have not widely adopted customer focused technologies. To their credit, Marvin Windows followed up with me and promised to accelerate their automation efforts. I was impressed. However, all is not completely rosy in the transformation from brick and mortar to e-commerce...

Halamka Outlines the Pillars of Beth Israel's IT Strategic Plan

Communicating the IT strategic plan is one of the primary responsibilities of a CIO. Most importantly, the IT strategic plan should be seen as an enterprise wide activity and not just an IT centric exercise.  IT should be an enabler for the strategy of the business and every IT tactic should tie back to a high priority of the business. In 2016, the BIDMC IT strategic plan has five pillars that align with quality, safety and efficiency imperatives (instead of Meaningful Use, ICD10, and the Affordable Care Act as was the case 2013-2015). The pillars are:

Halamka's 2016 Predictions for Health IT

As the year ends and we archive the accomplishments and challenges of 2015, it’s time to think about the year ahead.  Will innovative products and services be social, mobile, analytics, and cloud (SMAC)?  Will wearables take off?  Will clinicians be replaced by Watson?   Here are my predictions...Apps will layer on top of transactional systems empowered by FHIR...a better approach is crowdsourcing among clinicians that will result in value-added apps that connect to underlying EHRs via the protocols suggested in the Argonaut Project (FHIR/OAuth/REST). One of our clinicians has already authored a vendor neutral DICOM viewer for images, a patient controlled telehealth app for connecting home devices, and a secure clinical photography upload that bypasses the iPhone camera roll. That’s the future.

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Halamka's Cautionary Tale for Healthcare

During my CIO career, I’ve worked on a few Harvard Business School case studies and I’ve had the “joy” of presenting my failures to Harvard Business school students for over a decade. I enjoy telling stories and inevitably the cases I teach are about turning lemons into lemonade. In this post, I’d like to tell a story about a recent experience with Marvin Windows and lessons learned that apply to healthcare...

Halamka's Reflections on US Health IT Policy Trajectory

I’m in China this week, meeting with government, academia, and industry leaders in Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Beijing, Shanghai,  and Suzhou. The twelve hour time difference means that I can work a day in China, followed by a day in Boston. For the next 7 days, I’ll truly be living on both sides of the planet. I recently delivered this policy update about the key developments in healthcare IT policy and sentiment over the past 90 days. I’ve not written a specific summary of the recently released Quality Patient Program proposed rule which provides the detailed regulatory guidance for implementation of MACRA/MIPS, but here’s the excellent 26 page synopsis created by CMS which provides an overview of the 1058 page rule...

Health Care's Kodak Moment

For those of us of a certain age, a "Kodak moment" connotes a special event that should be captured by a photo, presumably on Kodak film.  For younger generations,  the term probably doesn't mean anything, because they don't know what Kodak is and have never seen film.  That's why, for some, "Kodak moment" has come to suggest a turning point when big companies and even entire industries can become obsolete. Health care could soon be at such a point. Anthony Jenkins, a former CEO of Barclay's, recently warned that banks could face a Kodak moment soon...

Health IT For Consumers Could Transform Health Care

Doug Firby | Troy Media | October 25, 2012

Some of the great innovators in retailing in the past decade emerged as giants because they recognized that consumers prefer the convenience of electronic delivery. Read More »