Are Regional Health Information Organizations (RHIOs) Sustainable?

John Halamka reviews the recent history and future prospects for US RHIOs in - Are Regional Health Information Organizations (RHIOs) Sustainable?

2collab or not

Elsevier's new social web site 2collab is having a run out in time for Online. Here's what I found on brief inspection.

It looks modern but its value proposition isn't clear. To experienced social graph cruisers it doesn't offer anything not already available. To inexperienced users it will probably be mystifying. Bookmarks? (I have them) Groups? (what, more discussion) Tools? (what tools!) Tags? (name tags?)

I went over to the Groups section (a rather motley collection - what would the 'testing' group be about? The focus says it's about...testing) and opened Library and Information Science Research News. But there's no news. The first item in the default view is a book review in a 1980 journal of:

Information societies: Comparing the Japanese and American experiences by Alex S. Edelstein, John E. Bowes, and Sheldon M. Harsel International Communication Center, School of Communications, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, 1979, 298 pp

And when I try to read the review I see the point of 2collab - it's Web 2.0 lipstick on Science Direct and it will cost $30 to read this review. (As a search of Google indicates, sections of the book are freely available)

Bottom line - pre-populated with Science Direct content, 2collab will need to rapidly grow beyond its current state. But with a range of more mature tools already in use it's hard to see why it will grow - unless there is a free Science Direct subscription to everyone who contributes 100 or so links (hint hint). In comparison, Elsevier's WiserWiki looks a much more interesting proposition.

Internet Identity Workshop

Much as I like Virgin Atlantic, San Francisco and the railway out to Mountain View I won't be at the Internet Identity Workshop next week . But these Blogs, Photos, Video-loggers will be.

Enterprise 2.0 update

As this visual guide illustrates how Zoho Writer Goes Offline, this note provides an overview of the state of Enterprise 2.0

Computable Data Exchange, and The Sparse Information Model, by David C. Kibbe, MD MBA

Computable Data Exchange, and The Sparse Information Model, by David C. Kibbe, MD MBA
sets out an argument in favour of minimal data: "Very large numbers of potentially useful Health2.0 transactions and processes could be done using only a minimal set of data about a person's health, provided the data were electronically formatted in a quite standardized fashion and interpretable by large numbers of applications. In fact, what is most desirable most of the time is a way to keep the health data payload small, not large! Separating the signal from the noise is very important. Sparse information is sometimes very good, not always bad."

Personal Health Records in Wales

Emis is to supply white label software for pilot PHR
The Welsh Health IT programme is pushing ahead with a pragmatic approach to implementing a personal health record

Bosworth launches new Health 2.0 venture

Life after Google Health: Bosworth launches new Health 2.0 venture

Release 2.0 and the semantic web

Get it while you can - Release 2.0 has a sample issue that has coverage of the semantic web

How to Program Google Android

How to Program Google Android

Build your publication list in Facebook

If you have a Facebook profile this application lets you build a publication list from Medline.

Ross Mayfield at PARC - informal information architecture

Excellent talk on Enterprise 2.0 and the centrality of people (and some intersting comments on information architetcure) by Ross Mayfield at PARC a few nights ago.

The Potential for "Serverless" Healthcare Computing

LabSoft News: The Potential for "Serverless" Healthcare Computing:
"Healthcare IT has traditionally lagged about a decade behind computing in other corporate sectors. However, it seems to me inevitable that hospital EMRs, LISs, RISs, and other information systems will eventually run on rented servers rather than on hardware owned and managed by the hospitals themselves. In time, the potential cost savings will be irresistible. It also occurs to me, however, that hospital executives would never be able to tolerate using, say, an Amazon server farm or "computing cloud" because of the perception that healthcare computing is different than corporate computing or e-commerce."....

Dying at home

The BBC is highlighting the results of a pilot study in Lincolnshire which conclude that dying at home 'must be an option' Good news of course. But 'Hospice at Home' was evaluated nearly a decade ago (conflict of interest - by my wife) and seen to be effective. What strikes me is how slowly still the wheels of knowledge based change grind in the NHS.

Wiki world

Oracle has a Wiki

Microsoft's new Identity website...

has a small problem!

HL7

There is confusion at the heart of HL7

CureHunter's graph viewer

Alf Eaton comments on CureHunter's graph viewer

Microsoft switching SharePoint to claims-based authentication

Network World reports Microsoft switching SharePoint to claims-based authentication
An interesting move for us as we try to reconcile one part of Microsoft (Sharepoint) with another (Kim Cameron). From our point of view this is a step in the right direction. There is a lot invested in Sharepoint's current approach so the question is - when can we start with the new approach?

WiserWiki

WiserWiki: "This website was originally started with content from the “Textbook of Primary Care Medicine” (3rd Edition) by John Noble – a leading figure in primary care medicine. It is evolving to become a key source of authoritative, online medical information. Like most Wikis on the internet (such as Wikipedia), WiserWiki can be read by anyone who has internet access. However, unlike most Wikis, WiserWiki can only be edited by board certified doctors to ensure that the information is as trustworthy and reliable as possible. Doctors can also use WiserWiki as a valuable resource to collaborate with each other and to determine best practices by group consensus. We hope that you enjoy WiserWiki and find it useful."

OBI

The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations wiki
has an expired SSL certificate.

Ask vs Google

I needed to know 'By how much does wool shrink when its boiled?". I found a reasonable answer in the 4th item in Google. But having seen the recent Ask advertising campaign I thought I'd give it a try.

The AJAX enriched interface is nice. The results were interresting but didn't really answer the question. But the really buggy part was the 'narrow your search' feature. This tried to 'narrow' my search to things like the boiling point of water.

HealthSpace

House of Commons - Health - Sixth Report includes lots of interesting detail, including this on HealthSpace:

13. HealthSpace is an excellent addition to the SCR programme and has huge potential to improve the safety and efficiency of care by allowing patients to check the accuracy of their SCR and to access detailed information about their own health. In order to take fuller advantage of HealthSpace, we recommend that Connecting for Health:

• Trial the use of HealthSpace for patients, particularly those with long-term conditions, to record their own measurements of key health information;
• Ensure that HealthSpace allows patients to view audit trails, showing who has accessed their SCR record and under what circumstances, and offers mechanisms for investigating inappropriate access;
• Promote the use of HealthSpace, monitor levels of uptake, and ensure that there is equitable access across the country and that coercive access is prevented; and
• Commission an independent evaluation of HealthSpace once the system is widely available. (Paragraph 122)

14. We note that in France patients will own their national summary record. This approach gives patients more control over who can access their record and more opportunity to influence and take control of their own care. We therefore recommend that Connecting for Health consider a similar model for the SCR in England. (Paragraph 123)

BT DIgital Vault woes

not confidence inspiring....

Cerner to replace VistA?

This Cerner Corporation: News Release could make the beginning of the end for VistA, the US Veterans Administration Open Source EHR.

Social Design Best Practices

Free consultancy from Google. You'd pay $1000 for this from Gartner.

Microsoft 2.0 vs Microsoft 1.0

No signs yet of any internal tie-in between Microsoft's Consumer Engagement Reference Architecture and its HealthVault initiative. Looks like a microcosm of the in-house Microsoft 1.0 vs 2.0 struggle.

Amazon Prime

The process of transferring to Amazon Prime was one of the slickest I have experienced. I really appreciate it when a company takes time to get a process right. I'd trust Amazon to provide a full scale web identity service. An Amazon page can be composed from dozens of orchestrated web services - again it's a model and a standard to aspire to.

CAPTCHAs

This is the nicest CAPTCHA I've seen for a while, and I've seen a few.

gPhone

Techcrunch: gphone isn't a phone, it's a platform - it's mobile without the Windows.

Google Phone

Overview of Google Phone in the NY Times

Wi-fi for cameras

Eye-Fi: "The Eye-Fi Card is a wireless memory card. It automatically uploads pictures from your digital camera to your PC or Mac and to your favorite photo sharing, printing, blogging or social networking site."

Folksonomy and subject indexing compared

Tiffany Smith's paper on Measuring the Efficacy of a Folksonomy for Subject Analysis is highlighted here. The conclusion of the research based on Librarything seems to be that Folksonomy is pretty useful actually.

Mashup Case Study: Nestoria

For the average home hunting tecchie Nestoria is the best property search engine in the UK. This interview provides some insights into their approach and some tips on mashup building.

UK Open Social API forum

here

The empty corner

Analysis of Gartner's report on Team collaboration and social software says something about the market and also something about Gartner's methodology.

John Halamka likes OSX and Ubuntu

Life as a Healthcare CIO: "So, how would I rate these new features as a CIO? During all of my testing, Leopard booted, performed, suspended, restored, and shutdown without a hitch. Security of OS X is strong because of its Unix foundation. Interoperability of iChat and Spotlight across operating systems was excellent. As a technology user, I found the new GUI features easy to navigate without training. As with previous releases of Mac OS X, the operating system hides the complexity of Unix in a way that enhances my ability to focus on work rather than the OS. My only complaint is one that I've voiced before: I want to install Leopard on non-Apple hardware, so that I can have OS X support on my 12' road warrior Dell subnotebook. In the meantime, I'll continue running Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon, as it's the closest thing to Leopard that runs on a Dell. Steve Jobs - when's the subnotebook coming?"

Uk Government on Identity Management

William Heath speculates on the fate of the Crosby Review on Identity Management commissioned by HM Treasury.

Crreating helpful error messages

how not to....

Marc Andreessen on Open Social

Marc Andreessen Open Social: a new universe of social applications all over the web:
"This is very, very good for the web. Open Social is the kind of standard that web developers love, and can easily use. I think it will become a standard part of many developers' toolkits. It builds on HTML and Javascript, many people can support it, and it will be interoperable -- I know that because it already is interoperable for the partners in this week's launch. It's all good."

Widget platform

Launchpad - just released, claims to be a widget platform