Again, in the last week, I have come across a few reports and news items which are worth passing on.
These include first:
NHS database awaits legal diagnosis
A recent EU court judgment could scupper the £6bn NHS patient database, says Jonn Elledge
Government IT projects have a pretty poor reputation. They turn up late, cost twice as much you expect, and don't work when they arrive. But the NHS looks set to go one better. Legal experts are warning that its £6bn database could actually breach your human rights.
The idea of the database sounds sensible enough. Each patient will have a single record, detailing their medical history, allergies and any medication they're on. Doctors should thus have all the information they need to treat them, whether they're in Plymouth or Penrith.
It's a nice theory, but critics are fretting about data security. Tens of thousands of NHS staff will have access to the database. It would only take a couple of them to create data losses of tabloid headline proportions. "The real test will be whether Leo Blair's vaccination records ever go on," says healthcare IT expert Richard Gunn. "Because 30 seconds later the papers will know whether he had the MMR."
Now campaigners say a judgment from the European Court threatens the entire project. The ruling concerned a Finnish nurse who lost her job after colleagues discovered she was HIV positive. The hospital argued that, by punishing those who'd misused her records, it had done all it could to protect her. Nonsense, the court replied. Instead it demanded measures which "exclude any possibility" of a breach occurring in the first place.
Much more here:
This is an interesting, if slightly alarmist analysis, on the possible fate of the UKs proposed Shared EHR. It is important proponents of similar systems watch all this carefully.
Second we have:
SNOMED CT Gets an Upgrade
HDM Breaking News, August 11, 2008
The International Health Terminology Standards Development Organization in Copenhagen, Denmark, has released its second enhancement this year of the SNOMED CT clinical terminology.
The system offers a comprehensive database of standard medical terms and concepts that can be embedded in electronic health records systems.
More here:
The full article offers a listing of the changes.
The full press release is found here:
Third we have:
Even free software has copyrights: judge
August 15, 2008 - 11:14AM
In a crucial win for the free software movement, a US federal appeals court has ruled that even software developers who give away the programming code for their works can sue for copyright infringement if someone misappropriates that material.
The decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C., helps clarify a murky area of the law concerning how much control programmers can exert over their intellectual property once it's been released for free into the so-called "open source" software community.
People are free to use that material in their own products, but they must credit the original authors of the programming code and release their modifications into the wild as well, a cycle that's critical for free software to continue improving.
Because the code was given away for free, thorny questions emerge when a violation has been discovered and someone is found to have shoved the code into their own for-profit products without giving anything back, in the form of attribution and disclosure of the alterations they made.
More here:
This is a very good decision in my view as it makes sure that ‘open source’ software cannot be just appropriated without complying with the license under which it is made public. The open source movement is an important balancing force to the commercial software industry and helps keep those interests much more honest and indeed innovative.
Fourth we have:
People Turn to Internet for Health Info When Stakes High, Connection Fast
by Susannah Fox
The Internet is changing the way Americans engage with information, whether they are choosing a president or making health care decisions. Two major drivers for this change are broadband adoption and personal motivation.
First, an update: The Pew Internet Project estimates that between 75% and 80% of Internet users have looked online for health information. We get slightly different results for the size of the e-patient population depending on our survey strategy, but these results are close enough to make us confident we have the right contours of this group. Our estimate is also in line with Harris Interactive's latest data on health information seekers (81% of Internet users; 66% of all adults).
We got the 75% reading in our October-December 2007 national phone survey, which included 2,054 adults ages 18 and older, including 500 cell phone users. In this survey we asked: "Do you ever use the Internet to look for health or medical information?"
In surveys we conducted between 2003-2007 (and plan to repeat in coming months), respondents were prompted with questions about specific health topics, such as diet, drugs or alternative treatments, yielding a consistently higher estimate (80%) for the percentage of Internet users who seek health information online in 2003, 2004 and 2006.
More here:
Interesting article showing the importance of broadband in making information – especially health information – available to the public.
Fifth we have:
Cervical cancer vaccine boost
- Nick Miller
- August 11, 2008
MELBOURNE is about to become the centre of efforts to vaccinate young Australian women against cervical cancer, with the opening today of the National Human Papillomavirus Register.
The register will record all HPV vaccinations from councils, schools, GPs and nurses around the country.
Since July last year the vaccine, which protects women against some strains of the virus responsible for most cervical cancer, has been fully subsidised by the Commonwealth for girls and young women.
The register will monitor the success of the vaccination program, and assess its impact on cancer rates. It will also issue reminders to women and girls who have missed part of their three-dose vaccination schedule.
The register shares its Carlton headquarters with the Victorian Cytology Service, which has analysed Pap test results since 1989.
The $23.5 million project has already started collecting data from GPs, and will now start uploading data from state school vaccination programs.
More here:
http://www.theage.com.au/national/cervical-cancer-vaccine-boost-20080810-3t2n.html
This is a good announcement, but one is really forced to wonder why this was not established as the program, rather than a year later?
Sixth we have:
Mainframe here to stay, survey says
IT's planned use for the mainframe as a computing platform continues to grow, BMC survey finds.
Denise Dubie (Network World) 14/08/2008 09:34:00
The future looks bright for the mainframe as a majority of IT managers report they will continue to use the systems for legacy applications and start moving new workloads that could benefit from the mainframe's availability and scalability onto the platform.
In its annual survey of 1,100 mainframe users, management software maker BMC discovered that IT's planned use for the mainframe as a computing platform continues to grow. For instance, 65 percent of respondents said the mainframe platform will continue to grow and attract new workloads in their environment, compared with 52 percent of respondents who said the same in the 2007 survey. Thirty percent said that the mainframe will continue as a viable long-term platform, but restricted to legacy workloads. And 4 percent indicated mainframe users should consider an exit strategy in the next five years. Fewer organizations surveyed this year also plan to eliminate their mainframe environment in the short term. According to BMC's findings, 59 percent of respondents said they would be ridding themselves of the mainframe in less than three years, compared with 74 percent in 2007. Thirty-six percent said they would work toward removing mainframes in three to six years and 6 percent expected to keep mainframes in house for more than six years.
More here:
http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php?id=24684117&eid=-255
It is fascinating machines of this type continue to prosper 50 plus years after the first ones appeared. The first “real” one – the IBM Model 360 appeared as far back as 1964!
The history of all this is pointed to here:
http://www.beagle-ears.com/lars/engineer/comphist/ibm360.htm
and here:
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/mainframe/mainframe_PR360.html
The original announcement with the pictures etc makes fun reading so far down the track.
Last we have our slightly technical note for the week:
Two different views on technical trends for the next few years.
Report: Cloud computing poised for enterprise adoption
Cloud computing, green IT and social-computing platforms will reach broad enterprise adoption in the next few years, Gartner says.
Elizabeth Montalbano (IDG News Service) 12/08/2008 08:32:25
Gartner has named cloud computing, green IT and social-computing platforms among technologies that are poised to reach broad enterprise adoption in the next two to five years.
The report "Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2008" by Gartner Vice President and Fellow Jackie Fenn and other analysts, also cited video telepresence, which utilizes high-end videoconferencing systems to provide remote conference participants with the feeling that they are in the same room, and microblogging popularized by the Internet application Twitter as being on the brink of widespread adoption among enterprises.
All of these technologies are at the peak of what the report calls their "hype cycle," a term Gartner began using in 1995 to describe the human response to technology -- from overenthusiasm at the beginning, through a period of disillusionment with the technology, to an eventual understanding of the technology's relevance and role in a market or domain.
Gartner uses the hype-cycle assessment to advise IT managers about when they should begin to adopt certain technologies that are getting a lot of attention but whose value to the enterprise is not yet known, according to the report. IT professionals generally have a better understanding of how to implement technologies at the peak of their hype cycle in a few years, once the initial excitement about them dies down.
The impact of technologies that are at the peak of their hype cycle in 2008 will differ depending on the technology, according to the report.
Cloud computing, defined by Gartner as "a style of computing where massively scalable IT-enabled capabilities are delivered 'as a service' to external customers using Internet technologies," in particular should have "transformational impact" on the enterprise, according to the report. This means the technology will change the way the IT industry "looks at user and vendor relationships," Fenn wrote.
More here:
http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php?id=1561926085&eid=-180
and from Forrester
The future of IT: No big bangs, information everywhere
Posted by Mike Ricciuti
There's plenty of technological innovation headed to the enterprise in the coming years, but don't expect any new game changers on the order of Internet or ERP, according to a new report.
Instead, existing technologies like service-oriented architectures and mobile will combine with component business applications and social networking to form what Forrester Research analyst Bobby Cameron calls "IT everywhere."
Information technology is at the beginning of a "new 16-year cycle of innovation and growth that follows the previous cycle of networked computing for enterprise applications and the Internet," Cameron writes in the report, which debuted on Wednesday.
Cameron identifies several technologies that are already in place but will gather steam in the coming years, such as X Internet--the explosion in RFID and other devices--SOA, business-process management, and mobile.
There will be some new acronyms joining the technology mix: dynamic business applications (and architectures) (DBA) that build on SOA and are far more flexible and easier to adapt than older technologies; master data management (MDM), which seeks to improve the quality of data that businesses use; and information workplace (IW), the notion of delivering information through available technologies.
More here:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10017210-92.html?tag=nl.e433
It is re-assuring that broadly the pundits have similar views as to what will be important!
The impact of ‘cloud computing’ on privacy makes interesting reading.
Cloud computing may 'threaten' privacy
August 11, 2008 - 1:38PM
A US military computer science professor has warned that a trend to push software into the "clouds" exacerbates privacy risks as people trust information to the Internet.
Websites routinely capture data that can reveal pictures of users' lives, US military academy professor Greg Conti told an audience at the annual DefCon hackers gathering in Las Vegas.
The danger is being heightened by a growing Internet trend toward "cloud computing," software being offered online with applications hosted on outside computers instead of programs being installed on people's machines.
A common example of the practice is Web-based email services such as those offered by Google and Yahoo.
The world of cloud computing is expanding to include software for documents, accounting, spread sheets, photo editing and more.
"With cloud computer looming on the horizon it is important for us all to think of the privacy threats there as well," Conti said.
"The tool resides with someone else and the data is stored somewhere else. Generally, that is a bad idea."
More here:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/web/cloud-computing-may-threaten-privacy/2008/08/11/1218306734865.html
More next week.
David.
