Health Wonk Review: A healthcare policy, technology, and business blogs carnival

Joe Paduda, Matthew Holt, and others have started the Healthcare Policy, Business, Technology & “Non-clinical” Issues Carnival called Health Wonk Review. Here’s how Matthew described the new Carnival: Inspired by the Nick doing Grand Rounds, Joe Paduda at Managed Care Matters has put together the first bi-weekly edition of a compendium of the best of blogging about health care policy, business, technology and anything that isn’t really clinical in nature.

The EMR and HIPAA blog has posted additional information on “pod slurping”: Securing Your Desktops – Pod Slurping. He’s started a good discussion out there and we should join in to see if we can talk about policies health IT shops should put into place.

Wheelybop, A HIStalk reader, recently posed a question: Can you or your blogger network describe to me what vendors have to do to make their legacy products CCOW compliant and why some refuse to do so, what are pros/cons, etc. Would love a CCOW primer or be pointed to such. First, lets tackle the primer. The acronym CCOW stands for “Clinical Context Object Workgroup”, a reference to the standards committee within the HL7 group that developed the standard.

I got an email from a reader recently, asking: I have a quick question – I was wondering if there is a programming language that is viewed as ‘more secure’ for patient data compared with others? I am building a program to collect patient health info, and am in the very early stages of planning. I used Java previously that worked well for a very sophisticated algorithm to mine data, but this new application is very simple (basically a questionairre) and I have heard .

I wrote about “pod slurping” a few weeks ago but cNet News.com did a better job. CIOs of hospitals and healthcare IT managers need to pay attention to what they said: A U.S. security expert who devised an application that can fill an iPod with business-critical data in a matter of minutes is urging companies to address the very real threat of data theft. Abe Usher, a 10-year veteran of the security industry, created an application that runs on an iPod and can search corporate networks for files likely to contain business-critical data.

Walking around the exhibits with my customers and fellow bloggers at HIMSS this year I found that harmonization and iteroperability were two themes that most vendors were touting. Ubiquity of networks (through wireless technologies) will allow excellent location-based awareness and medical devices will be more and more connected. Given the connected nature of hundreds, perhaps thousands of network-centric devices in our hospitals, we’ll need to make sure that data can interoperate and that it’s harmonized (semantically as well as structurally).

TheServerSide discusses The J2EE Architecture of Brazilian Healthcare: In Brazil, every citizen has the right to full healthcare, from primary care to complex procedures as heart transplants, for free, any place in the country. With a population of 180 million people, information is the key to better distribute resources and provide better healthcare. Taking advantage of the Java based infrastructure of the Brazilian National Health Card, in 2003 a huge project was started aiming to build an integrated web based application to collect patient encounter information, to regulate complex procedures authorizations and to build an integrated patient scheduling system that would allow to schedule consultations and medical procedures in any health provider.

I just wanted to thank all of you that attended the meetup last night in San Diego. We had dozens of people coming in and out and everyone I talked to said they had a great time. Special thanks go to Will Wieder (CandidCIO) for coming up with the idea and to Tim Gee (Mr. Connectologist) and Neil Versel for making the venue arrangements. We had bloggers and readers from the healthcare policy, provider, financial, IT, infrastructure, media, and vendor communities represented.

If you’re working on federated security for multiple health IT systems, take a look at the new NIH caBIG (Cancer Grid) Security Architecture White Paper. I was one of the reviewers on the paper and it is quite well done. It demonstrates the complexity of securing a computing grid, multiple services & systems, and various organizations. And, it provides an evaluation report on various techniques so that you don’t have to do the work all over again in your own project.

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