Is it just me, or is anybody else worried that the more we try to mimic the human body's immune system the more problems we are creating for ourselves vis a vis antibiotic resistance? We are so bad with how we use antibiotics that we are inevitably going to create bugs that are resistant to most forms of antibiotics. I surely don't want to create a class of bugs that are resistant to the VERY WAY THAT OUR IMMUNE SYSTEM WORKS.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the case for Net Neutrality could easily be made by asking everyone opposed to it the following question:
"Do you support the ability for telephone companies to charge you different rates based on who you're calling instead of long distance charges?"
I would think it's a pretty obvious "no". We don't want the telephone company charging us different rates for calling Papa John's pizza instead of Domino's, right? We certainly don't want to get charged a different rate for calling one radio station over another (you know Clear Channel would want to work out some kind of deal).
Why does it seem logical to allow for broadband companies to pull this kind of stunt?
The attendance for E4 was at most 9,000 -- 18,000 was turnstile and take into consideration that you had to buy at least a 2 day pass. PAX had something like 14,000 concurrent attendees Saturday afternoon. Their turnstile was the afore mentioned 34K.
Keep in mind that PAX sold so many one day badges that they RAN OUT this year and had to make more. Their actual attendance was much closer to turnstile than E4's.
I can guarantee you that E4 included distributors, booth babes and maintenance people in their attendance numbers.
I've seen pictures of the whole show -- the main floor wasn't filled. They were about 30% empty and so they had a lot of movable expo-walls (those huge black pieces of fabric that are like 20 feet high) brought in to make it look more compact.
I know you have a right to get at your employee file, yes? Sounds like these jerks may try to dick him around a bit with it.
Another commenter mentioned that Texas is a right-to-work state. I've been told that non-competes and whatnot can be hard to enforce in right-to-work states, even had it existed.
I once told an old boss I was accepting an offer of employment elsewhere only to have a mutual acquaintance call up my wife to get the new location, call the new location and threaten them into not hiring me, and then want me to sign a contract saying I wasn't going to go anywhere. I quit right away.
1. Why the hell do people keep calling HIPAA HIPPA? There are two A's, not P's. 2. There are more lawsuits for "breeches of privacy" than from before HIPAA....I suppose the argument can be made that they're not "frivolous", but I just wanted to point this out. 3. Some Doctors do make too much money. I know of doctors worth over 100 MILLION. I can't see a big difference between what they did (the one I'm thinking about died a few years ago) and what my GP does. And when it takes a 2 MILLION dollar starting bonus just to get a crappy cardiologist in the door, well things might be out of wack. 4. HIPAA was passed in 1996...way before the Bush Administration was put into power. As you should know, March and October 2001 were important milestones for HIPAA, neither of which you can give the Bush Administration any credit over as far as fleshing out the framework. Sure, the BA had a lot of input into the rules by the April 2003 enactment of the Privacy portion, but the "framework", as you called it, had nothing to do with them. 5. Capping liability payouts does very little to nothing to keep insurance premiums down...insurance regulations are the only thing that keeps premiums down. When you cap liability payouts the insurance companies do not pass the savings onto the consumer, and this can be seen by analyzing the states that have passed liability caps. Now, don't get me wrong, I believe punitive damages should be capped and actual damages uncapped, but insurance companies say that unless you give them the power to determine actual damages they aren't going to be able to control costs and therefore don't pass the savings onto the consumer.
I know how awful it sounds, but think about it another way:
1. Everybody in the office was theoretically allowed to get to that patient data. 2. They NEEDED to share passwords because of how the insurance carriers set up their BBS. They only give one username/password combo out per company, but we had a dozen billers. 3. We worked in a locked office with security.
So...the information was supposed to be shared amongst the people in the office, but functionally needed to be stored somewhere because, well, "turnover". So our barrier between the patient data and the outside world was twofold:
1. Even if you had a username and password, would you know how to get my patient data off a greenscreen emulator by connecting to our AS/400 and using passthrough to get it from the government? 2. We were on an upper floor in a nondescript office building with locks.
Having been the HIPAA security officer for the Home Health division of the nation's largest protestant health organization, I can tell you we spent MILLIONS trying to be HIPAA compliant. We locked down servers and databases (encrypted data on secured databases on secured servers on secured networks). We instituted dual-factor authentication and physical security. We stressed our management application to its limits doing our best to ensure patient security and privacy.
But, again, its the individual workers who matter. Like the time I found out our billers couldn't remember their countless insurance company BBS passwords, so they had a nice spreadsheet they shared. I couldn't get rid of it, but at least I had them put it in their drawers.
Good grief? Sure, but that was HIPAA compliant.
So, please, geeks of the world, let's not bash an entire industry based on one article.
If a civilian has the docs, they can go after him, but there's no fourth amendment protections here. It'd take somebody in the administration classifying them to make them officially restricted.
Just cause AT&T doesn't want them out there doesn't mean squat.
Sure, if the government is subsidizing a system, but when a company or individual acquires or builds something for themselves, what right does someone else have to came and lay claim to your efforts?
Besides having business income taxes, Florida also has a tangible tax system, which says that all business must pay taxes based on their assets. So if you have 10 computers, a router and a switch, you already have to pay taxes SIMPLY BECAUSE YOU OWN THEM.
The Microsoft "representative" was an executive...and executives are empowered to make decisions for the company they are an executive of, no matter the time of day or whether or not they're in the office. Think about how many deals get made on golf courses, etc, and that'll give you an idea about when executives are able to conduct business.
you're also forgetting about the ratchet effect. prices are ratchetted up because of an increase in costs...but when costs go down, prices don't go down unless they are forced to go down.
cars don't get cheaper. they will always be more expensive. even in years when there is very little innovation, cars are still more expensive. why? even when costs go down, multinats would rather profit margins be up than pass any savings onto the consumer.
okay, cars might not be the best example...but you get what i mean. i have little faith that the price of local goods and services will drop below the cost of foreign made goods for quite some time...if ever. we started the PC craze, but we can't make cheaper PCs here... the only way that's going to happen is if lawyers disappear along with our quality of life.
Re:Religious Beliefs/Philosophy
on
Ask Neil Gaiman
·
· Score: 1
This isn't a troll...but unfortunately I can't find a link!
I've seen elsewhere that he's a Scientologist, or he WAS and had a falling out. His father, David, was a high ranking member of the church in England, and apparently he was brought up Scientologist.
But I can't say for certain he still follows those nuts.
Touche....but that's not where I was coming from. In the article it said "'validates the Army's belief in our security model.'", and that's what I have a hard time accepting.
Keith Hodson, a Microsoft spokesman, said the contract could help the Army reduce its costs and "validates the Army's belief in our security model."
What...are you FUCKING kidding? This is basically worst-case scenario when it comes to security. Anybody remember M$ offering their source to China? Hello, McFly?
The U.S. government is investing aggressively in technology as part of its war on terror and focus on national security.
Of course they are....everything comes back to 9/11, right?!
The six-year deal, which also involved a software reseller called Softmart that will get a commission
Somebody...find out which congressman/senator's wife/retired general has a major stake in Softmart. There's got to be collusion SOMEWHERE. This move is too boneheaded and expensive for this not to be an insider deal.
although....
Anybody know if any of these costs include all the immense testing, or paperwork, or the percentage that gets siphoned off for black projects?
I'm not being snide about that last one...a percentage of all projects goes into black projects..that's how they fund the Skunkworks, after all.
But say I'm a vegan, and I have the word "meat" on my page...and then Microsoft puts a smart-tag on that word taking the reader to a page about McDonalds....I would think that was a gross misappropriation of my words.
Bad example, maybe, but I think it illustrates my point.
Perhaps I'm a Mac evangelist, or something...
But it's not so much about what's displayed, as the fact that Microsoft is going to be adding CONTENT. Admittedly, it's through a link only, but it's a link where one didn't exist before, to content I don't approve of.
These people have a computer implated in the base of their necks that was pretty impressive. It might give everybody an idea of where one sci-fi author wanted his PDA to go.
http://channel.nytimes.com/2001/04/26/science/26DI NO.html
You want to end up at the NYTIMES story, even if you use the Yahoo link, cause it has a nifty picture.
Get it from the source: http://www.hcfa.gov/hipaa/hipaahm.htm
Anyway, HIPAA mandates the kind of security we (read: technophiles) think should go into an end-user type of application. It also mandates the generalization of a LOT of the medical informational industry. Right now there are no standard protocols, no standard formats, and expenses are high. HIPAA will lower costs by mandating protocols and standards. It will raise costs by mandating security procedures. However, the security procedures should be more of a fixed-cost, and not variable, like data transmission is currently, and so shouldn't raise prices extraordinarily.
Now, onto the best technology for a doctor's office. I'm a systems integrator for a medical billing software company. We're designed clinics before, around their billing and records needs. What we found, by asking the doctors and patients, is that the only information that needs to be readily available is the patient's medical information, and that's only so that the patient can get in and out in a timely manner.
Security needs to be the foundation of the technology used to setup the system, but the design needs to have the central idea that the patient needs to get in and get out, and wants their costs to be a minimum. Have their records online and accessible on the LAN, but not externally, because the patient doesn't care. The only patients that need access to their records are those involved in litigation, and there are currently procedures in place for that (I used to work for a medical records provider).
So, you want the patient's chart available throughout the LAN. You also want a charting/documentation package available at your fingertips. What a doctor does after he sees you is he diagnoses what you have, and writes that down. Some lady figures out what CPT/ICD codes that corresponds to, and you get billed for that. The doctor needs the ability to find the write code through a text search, preferably touch-pad, and preferably fast, while he's talking to the patient.
The nurses need access to an EMR package where they can touch-pad in the patient's vitals, and save if to their records to be looked at by the doctor.
The billing side of the office needs to have access to those ICD/CPT codes, because that's what's sent to the insurance companies on the health insurance claim form. So you're going to need to have a billing package (shameless plug: http://www.soft-aid.com ) that can interact with your charting/EMR software.
So that's what a doctor should design his clinic around. Everything else is just "bells and whistles".
Slashdot Mirror
Is it just me, or is anybody else worried that the more we try to mimic the human body's immune system the more problems we are creating for ourselves vis a vis antibiotic resistance? We are so bad with how we use antibiotics that we are inevitably going to create bugs that are resistant to most forms of antibiotics. I surely don't want to create a class of bugs that are resistant to the VERY WAY THAT OUR IMMUNE SYSTEM WORKS.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the case for Net Neutrality could easily be made by asking everyone opposed to it the following question:
"Do you support the ability for telephone companies to charge you different rates based on who you're calling instead of long distance charges?"
I would think it's a pretty obvious "no". We don't want the telephone company charging us different rates for calling Papa John's pizza instead of Domino's, right? We certainly don't want to get charged a different rate for calling one radio station over another (you know Clear Channel would want to work out some kind of deal).
Why does it seem logical to allow for broadband companies to pull this kind of stunt?
Seriously, like this is some kind of weird correlation. No shit Nobel prize winning papers would have excellent page ranks.
The attendance for E4 was at most 9,000 -- 18,000 was turnstile and take into consideration that you had to buy at least a 2 day pass. PAX had something like 14,000 concurrent attendees Saturday afternoon. Their turnstile was the afore mentioned 34K.
Keep in mind that PAX sold so many one day badges that they RAN OUT this year and had to make more. Their actual attendance was much closer to turnstile than E4's.
I can guarantee you that E4 included distributors, booth babes and maintenance people in their attendance numbers.
I've seen pictures of the whole show -- the main floor wasn't filled. They were about 30% empty and so they had a lot of movable expo-walls (those huge black pieces of fabric that are like 20 feet high) brought in to make it look more compact.
I know you have a right to get at your employee file, yes? Sounds like these jerks may try to dick him around a bit with it.
Another commenter mentioned that Texas is a right-to-work state. I've been told that non-competes and whatnot can be hard to enforce in right-to-work states, even had it existed.
I once told an old boss I was accepting an offer of employment elsewhere only to have a mutual acquaintance call up my wife to get the new location, call the new location and threaten them into not hiring me, and then want me to sign a contract saying I wasn't going to go anywhere. I quit right away.
1. Why the hell do people keep calling HIPAA HIPPA? There are two A's, not P's.
2. There are more lawsuits for "breeches of privacy" than from before HIPAA....I suppose the argument can be made that they're not "frivolous", but I just wanted to point this out.
3. Some Doctors do make too much money. I know of doctors worth over 100 MILLION. I can't see a big difference between what they did (the one I'm thinking about died a few years ago) and what my GP does. And when it takes a 2 MILLION dollar starting bonus just to get a crappy cardiologist in the door, well things might be out of wack.
4. HIPAA was passed in 1996...way before the Bush Administration was put into power. As you should know, March and October 2001 were important milestones for HIPAA, neither of which you can give the Bush Administration any credit over as far as fleshing out the framework. Sure, the BA had a lot of input into the rules by the April 2003 enactment of the Privacy portion, but the "framework", as you called it, had nothing to do with them.
5. Capping liability payouts does very little to nothing to keep insurance premiums down...insurance regulations are the only thing that keeps premiums down. When you cap liability payouts the insurance companies do not pass the savings onto the consumer, and this can be seen by analyzing the states that have passed liability caps. Now, don't get me wrong, I believe punitive damages should be capped and actual damages uncapped, but insurance companies say that unless you give them the power to determine actual damages they aren't going to be able to control costs and therefore don't pass the savings onto the consumer.
Names aren't Protected Health Information. You can call them out any time and not get in trouble.
I know how awful it sounds, but think about it another way:
1. Everybody in the office was theoretically allowed to get to that patient data.
2. They NEEDED to share passwords because of how the insurance carriers set up their BBS. They only give one username/password combo out per company, but we had a dozen billers.
3. We worked in a locked office with security.
So...the information was supposed to be shared amongst the people in the office, but functionally needed to be stored somewhere because, well, "turnover". So our barrier between the patient data and the outside world was twofold:
1. Even if you had a username and password, would you know how to get my patient data off a greenscreen emulator by connecting to our AS/400 and using passthrough to get it from the government?
2. We were on an upper floor in a nondescript office building with locks.
Having been the HIPAA security officer for the Home Health division of the nation's largest protestant health organization, I can tell you we spent MILLIONS trying to be HIPAA compliant. We locked down servers and databases (encrypted data on secured databases on secured servers on secured networks). We instituted dual-factor authentication and physical security. We stressed our management application to its limits doing our best to ensure patient security and privacy.
But, again, its the individual workers who matter. Like the time I found out our billers couldn't remember their countless insurance company BBS passwords, so they had a nice spreadsheet they shared. I couldn't get rid of it, but at least I had them put it in their drawers.
Good grief? Sure, but that was HIPAA compliant.
So, please, geeks of the world, let's not bash an entire industry based on one article.
So there are indeed some protections on these documents in that case....not to mention copyright, of course.
But all that means is that they'll stay sealed and part of the court case...they won't go public, but they won't be ignored.
If a civilian has the docs, they can go after him, but there's no fourth amendment protections here. It'd take somebody in the administration classifying them to make them officially restricted.
Just cause AT&T doesn't want them out there doesn't mean squat.
You, sir, are an idiot.
I just supervised an inventory or our computer equipment for "tangible tax" purposes.
You're right about it being ad valorem, though. You're just confused about what that means.
Sure, if the government is subsidizing a system, but when a company or individual acquires or builds something for themselves, what right does someone else have to came and lay claim to your efforts?
Besides having business income taxes, Florida also has a tangible tax system, which says that all business must pay taxes based on their assets. So if you have 10 computers, a router and a switch, you already have to pay taxes SIMPLY BECAUSE YOU OWN THEM.
Florida is king of the weird taxes.
The Microsoft "representative" was an executive...and executives are empowered to make decisions for the company they are an executive of, no matter the time of day or whether or not they're in the office. Think about how many deals get made on golf courses, etc, and that'll give you an idea about when executives are able to conduct business.
you're also forgetting about the ratchet effect. prices are ratchetted up because of an increase in costs...but when costs go down, prices don't go down unless they are forced to go down.
cars don't get cheaper. they will always be more expensive. even in years when there is very little innovation, cars are still more expensive. why? even when costs go down, multinats would rather profit margins be up than pass any savings onto the consumer.
okay, cars might not be the best example...but you get what i mean. i have little faith that the price of local goods and services will drop below the cost of foreign made goods for quite some time...if ever. we started the PC craze, but we can't make cheaper PCs here... the only way that's going to happen is if lawyers disappear along with our quality of life.
This isn't a troll...but unfortunately I can't find a link!
I've seen elsewhere that he's a Scientologist, or he WAS and had a falling out. His father, David, was a high ranking member of the church in England, and apparently he was brought up Scientologist.
But I can't say for certain he still follows those nuts.
Touche....but that's not where I was coming from. In the article it said "'validates the Army's belief in our security model.'", and that's what I have a hard time accepting.
What...are you FUCKING kidding? This is basically worst-case scenario when it comes to security. Anybody remember M$ offering their source to China? Hello, McFly?
The U.S. government is investing aggressively in technology as part of its war on terror and focus on national security.
Of course they are....everything comes back to 9/11, right?!
The six-year deal, which also involved a software reseller called Softmart that will get a commission
Somebody...find out which congressman/senator's wife/retired general has a major stake in Softmart. There's got to be collusion SOMEWHERE. This move is too boneheaded and expensive for this not to be an insider deal.
although....
Anybody know if any of these costs include all the immense testing, or paperwork, or the percentage that gets siphoned off for black projects?
I'm not being snide about that last one...a percentage of all projects goes into black projects..that's how they fund the Skunkworks, after all.
Patents are a tool for creating temporary, artificial monopolies.
With that said, aren't you glad Google might be able to stay on top and profitable, instead of having to resort to banner ad revenue, etc?
Bad example, maybe, but I think it illustrates my point.
Perhaps I'm a Mac evangelist, or something...
But it's not so much about what's displayed, as the fact that Microsoft is going to be adding CONTENT. Admittedly, it's through a link only, but it's a link where one didn't exist before, to content I don't approve of.
Unless their draconian licensing says their allowed to, which I don't think is enforcable, and might just force people away from using their products.
Hrm..
Check out Walter Jon William's 'Aristoi'.
These people have a computer implated in the base of their necks that was pretty impressive. It might give everybody an idea of where one sci-fi author wanted his PDA to go.
http://channel.nytimes.com/2001/04/26/science/26DI NO.html
You want to end up at the NYTIMES story, even if you use the Yahoo link, cause it has a nifty picture.
Anyway, HIPAA mandates the kind of security we (read: technophiles) think should go into an end-user type of application. It also mandates the generalization of a LOT of the medical informational industry. Right now there are no standard protocols, no standard formats, and expenses are high. HIPAA will lower costs by mandating protocols and standards. It will raise costs by mandating security procedures. However, the security procedures should be more of a fixed-cost, and not variable, like data transmission is currently, and so shouldn't raise prices extraordinarily.
Now, onto the best technology for a doctor's office. I'm a systems integrator for a medical billing software company. We're designed clinics before, around their billing and records needs. What we found, by asking the doctors and patients, is that the only information that needs to be readily available is the patient's medical information, and that's only so that the patient can get in and out in a timely manner.
Security needs to be the foundation of the technology used to setup the system, but the design needs to have the central idea that the patient needs to get in and get out, and wants their costs to be a minimum. Have their records online and accessible on the LAN, but not externally, because the patient doesn't care. The only patients that need access to their records are those involved in litigation, and there are currently procedures in place for that (I used to work for a medical records provider).
So, you want the patient's chart available throughout the LAN. You also want a charting/documentation package available at your fingertips. What a doctor does after he sees you is he diagnoses what you have, and writes that down. Some lady figures out what CPT/ICD codes that corresponds to, and you get billed for that. The doctor needs the ability to find the write code through a text search, preferably touch-pad, and preferably fast, while he's talking to the patient.
The nurses need access to an EMR package where they can touch-pad in the patient's vitals, and save if to their records to be looked at by the doctor.
The billing side of the office needs to have access to those ICD/CPT codes, because that's what's sent to the insurance companies on the health insurance claim form. So you're going to need to have a billing package (shameless plug: http://www.soft-aid.com ) that can interact with your charting/EMR software.
So that's what a doctor should design his clinic around. Everything else is just "bells and whistles".
tachyon@SPAM-ME-NOT.tampabay.rr.com