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Patent Trolls Are Now Crushing Parts Of The Developer Economy

Haydn Shaughnessy | Forbes | July 4, 2013

News that Boston University is suing Apple AAPL -0.59% over parts for the iPhone and iPad (the component in question is called “highly insulating monocrystalline gallium nitride thin films”), is one more dull thud of the patent lawyers’ dossier on the smartphone scene. [...] Read More »

Practice Fusion Invited Millions Of Patients To Write Reviews They May Not Realize Are Public. Some Are Explicit.

Kashmir Hill | Forbes Magazine | October 21, 2013

Medical records start-up Practice Fusion has attracted a whopping $134 million in venture capital thanks to its appealing business model: it offers 100,000 (and counting) medical types free, web-based patient  management services.  The doctors get for free something that’s usually quite expensive, while cashing in on $150 million (so far) in government incentives to adopt electronic health record technology.

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Questions About The FDA’s New Framework For Digital Health

Nathan G. Cortez, Nicolas Terry, and I. Glenn Cohen | Health Affairs Blog | August 16, 2017

In June 2017, the new Food and Drug Administration (FDA) commissioner Scott Gottlieb pre-announced his agency’s Digital Health Innovation Action Plan that indicates notable shifts in the agency’s approach to digital health technologies. This plan is an important step in FDA regulation of this area, a process that began in 2011 with a draft guidance, followed by significant congressional actions. The new changes should not be surprising, given critiques published by Gottlieb prior to re-joining the FDA...

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Reform Update: JAMA Study Suggests Money Alone May Not Be Enough To Improve Performance, Reduce Costs

Melanie Evans | ModernHealthcare.com | September 11, 2013

One goal of health reform, among many, is to break the industry's dependence on incentives for hospitals and doctors to do a high volume of business. Incentives for volume invite wasteful spending, of course, and also can be harmful if patients receive unnecessary care as a result. Read More »

Report Finds Health, Fitness Apps Lag in Privacy Polices Compared to Other Apps

Heather Mack | mobihealthnews | August 18, 2016

Health and fitness apps may potentially reveal data-enabled insights into the daily lives of those who use them, but what they sometimes fail to reveal are the ways they use the data collected on users. A recent study from the Future of Privacy Forumfound that -- compared with other apps in the iOS and Android marketplaces -- health and fitness apps lag in privacy policies, with about 60 percent offering such information compared to 76 percent of general apps...

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Resisting The Healthcare Consolidation Frenzy

Philip Betbeze | HealthLeaders Media | December 11, 2013

Merger and acquisition activity shows no signs of slowing, yet some hospital and health system leaders see independence as a viable strategy. Read More »

Senators Launch Probe Of Massive Data Breaches

Dustin Volz | Nextgov | February 4, 2014

Several senators repeated calls for legislation to ward off massive data thefts during a hearing Monday to review the vulnerability of the nation's digital-payment systems, the first in a trio of sessions this week examining the enormous breaches sustained recently at retailers around the country. Read More »

Strengthening Protection of Patient Medical Data

Adam Tanner | The Century Foundation | January 10, 2017

Americans seeking medical care expect a certain level of privacy. Indeed, the need for patient privacy is a principle dating back to antiquity, and is codified in U.S. law, most notably the Privacy Rule of the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which establishes standards that work toward protecting patient health information. But the world of information is rapidly changing, and in this environment, U.S. rules fall precariously short in protecting our medical data...

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Tech Rivalries Impede Digital Medical Record Sharing

Robert Pearmay | New York Times | May 26, 2015

Since President Obama took office, the federal government has poured more than $29 billion into health information technology and told doctors and hospitals to use electronic medical records or face financial penalties. But some tech companies, hospitals and laboratories are intentionally blocking the electronic exchange of health information because they fear that they will lose business if they share information on patients with competing providers, administration officials said. In addition, officials said, some sellers of health information technology try to “lock in” customers by making it difficult for them to switch to competing vendors.

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The White House Big Data Report: The Good, The Bad, And The Missing

Jeremy Gillula and Kurt Opsahl and Rainey Reitman | Electronic Frontier Foundation | May 4, 2014

Last week, the White House released its report on big data and its privacy implications, the result of a 90-day study commissioned by President Obama during his January 17 speech on NSA surveillance reforms. Now that we’ve had a chance to read the report we’d like to share our thoughts on what we liked, what we didn’t, and what we thought was missing...

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Top 5: Legal Issues In Open Source In 2014

David Perry | Opensource.com | December 23, 2014

The most-read articles this year on Opensource.com demonstrated a strong interest in the changing aspects of complicated issues. For example, the top two stories this year both relate to a complex series of cases involving a dispute between Versata and Aperiprise surrounding alleged violations of the GNU General Public License (GPL)...

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U.S. Regulator Urges Law To Force Disclosures By Data Brokers

Alina Selyukh | Reuters | May 27, 2014

Companies known as data brokers collect and sell information about "nearly all" U.S. consumers, drawing potentially harmful conclusions about them largely without their knowledge, U.S. regulators said on Tuesday. 

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What Does the Trump Presidency Imply for Healthcare and Healthcare IT?

Many organizations have asked me to comment on the impact of the Trump Presidency on Healthcare and Healthcare IT. I served the Bush administration for 4 years and the Obama administration for 6 years. I know that change in Washington happens incrementally. There is always an evolution, not a revolution, regardless of speechmaking hyperbole. What am I doing in Massachusetts? I’m staying the course, continuing my focus on social networking for healthcare, mobile, care management analytics, cloud, and security while leaving the strategic plan/budget as is...

Zombie Hospital Economics

David Dranove | The Health Care Blog | April 5, 2013

The Illinois hospital dinosaurs continue to defy evolution and prove that they are not extinct. I am talking about our health facilities planning board, which just turned down another Certificate of Need application for a new hospital, this time in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. The board justified the decision by stating that the new hospital would harm existing hospitals. Read More »