Two points on the above: first that only mentions operating system software. One could argue that even supported Microsoft OS confers greater risk that unsupported, well, anything else. Actually, I'm not sure what the counter-argument would be against that. Also, if risk is the primary motivator here, then OSS like Linux simply needs to have someone keeping up with the patches to make it secure. The letter of this wouldn't apply to other OSS applications.
The second point is that this doesn't need to be fixed until 2005. NT itself should be gone by them. It does raise a much uglier issue of the gov't mandating by law that your organization spend money on upgrades, and the lockdown that vendors then have over any organization. If you think Microsoft is evil, then they could use HIPAA to force every healthcare system to upgrade to 2003 server just by cutting support for their old products. Most other people wouldn't care, but healthcare would be held hostage.
Lastly, you quote something from a HCFA regulation. I honestly couldn't find this mentioned anywhere in the actual final security standard. Searches for 'vendor' and 'support' didn't expose any section that seemed to mention anything that looks like the above. If you could point out the actual location that would be a big help (I'm not being argumentative, I'm actually interested here, because I hadn't seen that before anywhere).
I don't think you're looking at the full scope of the OSS option here and how it relates to HIPAA. Nothing in HIPAA that I've ever seen mandates "vendor supported software," which is good because a lot of healthcare IT products are homegrown. HIPAA could care less if you have support for your software or not, but what it does care about is privacy, and the security necessary to protect that privacy. One aspect of that is that *if* you have a vendor, you need them to agree to be HIPAA-compliant. In many cases (like laundry services) this means simply a statement that no PHI is transmitted, therefore they are HIPAA-compliant. *If* that vendor also has access to PHI, or you ship PHI outside of your institution, then you also need something in your contract to address that.
Now, if the system was an OSS system, there are two options: first is you went through a vendor who is supplying the service for it. In that case, the above applies. The second is that you downloaded it from sourceforge or elsewhere and installed and ran it yourself. In this case, because you have no vendor, there is no HIPAA issue. Just to reiterate, HIPAA only involves the transmission of data (PHI) between your institution and another institution/vendor.
Now, I think what you are suggesting is a situation where you download it and run it yourself, and yet have no intention of supporting it yourself. While I suppose someone is stupid enough to do this, I can't imagine this happening in any legitimate healthcare institution anywhere in the US, and not for HIPAA reasons. To install and run software that you have no knowledge of and no support for in a healthcare institution would be negligent, and I doubt you could even get it off the ground. This is simply a non-issue.
Lastly, just to make the point, a lot of hospitals are using Windows NT and Linux as their servers. Neither of these have vendor-provided service, but that doesn't make us non-HIPAA-compliant.
...probably more so than most drugs or vitamins you can find out there. Of course, it also makes you stink, and there's the nasty side effects of direct cardiotoxicity.
These studies should not be slashdotted, they provide such a narrow perspective on some medical minutiae that, without the proper contextual info, and the references to the other (probably dozens) of studies on the exact same topic that showed either no effect or conflicting effects, leads consumers to make assumptions that they shouldn't be making, and that could seriously injure them. This one is probably safe, but have you done your research?
In my opinion, Evolution is one of the primary contenders (if not the primary contender) for an Outlook-replacement. It's been mentioned here in multiple threads before that Outlook, especially the calendar, is the primary reason an Outlook-based enterprise remains on Outlook and doesn't switch to something else. Evolution could change that.
However, there are significant barriers to a change of that nature. On top of the already significant change to a Linux desktop is the fact that the actual applications people use (i.e. Outlook primarily, with some Word and Excel thrown in) also change. Now, there are perfectly adequate replacements for Word and Excel and most other Windows applications. The Outlook Calendar has no such enterprise-level replacement.
My suggestion would be to emulate Outlook as closely as possible without breaking any laws in order to lower the barrier to Linux and Evolution adoption in an enterprise. Once you actually have a market share, then start tweaking things. The first few enterprises to make the leap are really sticking their necks out to make a change to the Calendar, you need to make it as easy as possible for them to do so. Don't make a totally new GUI and make it harder.
That all being said, however, the screenshots of the GUI are not all that different from the Outlook view currently. They're pretty different from Outlook 2003, though, so having the two options in there would be a good idea. Better yet, make the GUI configurable with three presets ("Outlook 2000 style", "Outlook 2003 style", "Evolution style") so it's easy for an enterprise to set them all up for whatever their users are used to.
There is also a good deal of information on using mitochondrial DNA to track this information, which comes down through the women only (the men pass mitochondria along with sperm, but it gets left behind with the "shell" and only the regular DNA is used for fertilization). This mitochondrial DNA is very stable and you can track human spread over very long periods of time. The Y-chromosome, which isn't quite as stable and mutates, can be used to track migrations over a shorter span of time.
I've actually contacted the company mentioned in the article (museumtour) to let them know that I have prior art. Frames were around before that time, and I actually was translating old Hypercard programs into web pages (and maintaining their look and feel) while using frames. They responded that they were evaluating their legal options and I haven't heard from them since.
SBC is really sticking their neck out, and is using their legal slush fund to try and wrangle something they shouldn't have in the first place. At some point our pathetic patent office should really stop being newsworthy...
Re:From personal experience
on
Complications
·
· Score: 1
Insurance companies don't always pay what they are billed, in fact they often pay far less than that, at a number that they determine to be an appropriate cost.
This causes hospitals and doctors to bill more, hoping to recoup the money they lose to some insurers from another insurer, and from covering people with no insurance who don't pay.
This causes insurers to raise their rates to cover these additional costs and the ever-spiraling costs of litigation.
This causes more and more people to become uninsured or underinsured.
This causes fewer people to receive preventative medicine that might keep them from getting a very acute, very expensive illness, or from going to see their doctor early on rather than too late.
The reference you refer to is To Err is Human, a report put out by the Institute of Medicine, which estimates that between 44,000-98,000 people die every year from medical errors. Slightly over half of these were considered to be "preventable." The link to the full text of the report is here.
My first recommendation would be for them to contact the EFF and have them look over whatever letter they got for it. If they simply got a nicely worded letter, they can nicely ignore it and wait for an actual cease and desist before even worrying about this.
I don't think Phoenix BIOS has a leg to stand on because of one simple thing, they have to prove that the other party's use of their trademark could potentially cause confusion in the marketplace. Nobody with a brain is going to go looking for a BIOS and try and install the Phoenix browser on their chip, and likewise they won't try and check out the latest slashdot headline with a BIOS, so I think it would be an easy task for a lawyer to prove that the marketplace for the two products is not the same, and therefore no potential confusion.
Of course, as someone pointed out, in a legal system where you have to pay your lawyer tax any time you want to defend yourself, lots of stupid things happen because people can't afford to defend themselves. Donate to the EFF this holiday season, and buy yourself some freedom for years to come.
This is generally a bad idea, although it's used in some really serious infections if it's required (like endocarditis) if the antibiotics have a synergistic effect.
Contrary to what is apparently popular belief, antibiotics are not all nice and can be taken whenever you feel like it. Antibiotics can cause some of the most hideous allergic-type responses of anything on earth (like Stevens-Johnson syndrome) that are often fatal. This is pretty rare but not as rare as we'd like, and there's no way to predict when it will happen, since it can happen to you even if you've taken that medication before without a problem.
The real answer to this lies with the consumer. Don't come to the doctor and want antibiotics. In the majority of cases of upper respiratory infections, diarrhea, and other problems, antibiotics are useless. It's the subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) demands for antibiotics that make docs give antibiotics to patients in the first place rather than spend another 10 minutes explaining to a progressively more angry patient why the doctor won't "give them something to make them feel better."
Slashdot Mirror
Two points on the above: first that only mentions operating system software. One could argue that even supported Microsoft OS confers greater risk that unsupported, well, anything else. Actually, I'm not sure what the counter-argument would be against that. Also, if risk is the primary motivator here, then OSS like Linux simply needs to have someone keeping up with the patches to make it secure. The letter of this wouldn't apply to other OSS applications.
The second point is that this doesn't need to be fixed until 2005. NT itself should be gone by them. It does raise a much uglier issue of the gov't mandating by law that your organization spend money on upgrades, and the lockdown that vendors then have over any organization. If you think Microsoft is evil, then they could use HIPAA to force every healthcare system to upgrade to 2003 server just by cutting support for their old products. Most other people wouldn't care, but healthcare would be held hostage.
Lastly, you quote something from a HCFA regulation. I honestly couldn't find this mentioned anywhere in the actual final security standard. Searches for 'vendor' and 'support' didn't expose any section that seemed to mention anything that looks like the above. If you could point out the actual location that would be a big help (I'm not being argumentative, I'm actually interested here, because I hadn't seen that before anywhere).
I don't think you're looking at the full scope of the OSS option here and how it relates to HIPAA. Nothing in HIPAA that I've ever seen mandates "vendor supported software," which is good because a lot of healthcare IT products are homegrown. HIPAA could care less if you have support for your software or not, but what it does care about is privacy, and the security necessary to protect that privacy. One aspect of that is that *if* you have a vendor, you need them to agree to be HIPAA-compliant. In many cases (like laundry services) this means simply a statement that no PHI is transmitted, therefore they are HIPAA-compliant. *If* that vendor also has access to PHI, or you ship PHI outside of your institution, then you also need something in your contract to address that.
Now, if the system was an OSS system, there are two options: first is you went through a vendor who is supplying the service for it. In that case, the above applies. The second is that you downloaded it from sourceforge or elsewhere and installed and ran it yourself. In this case, because you have no vendor, there is no HIPAA issue. Just to reiterate, HIPAA only involves the transmission of data (PHI) between your institution and another institution/vendor.
Now, I think what you are suggesting is a situation where you download it and run it yourself, and yet have no intention of supporting it yourself. While I suppose someone is stupid enough to do this, I can't imagine this happening in any legitimate healthcare institution anywhere in the US, and not for HIPAA reasons. To install and run software that you have no knowledge of and no support for in a healthcare institution would be negligent, and I doubt you could even get it off the ground. This is simply a non-issue.
Lastly, just to make the point, a lot of hospitals are using Windows NT and Linux as their servers. Neither of these have vendor-provided service, but that doesn't make us non-HIPAA-compliant.
These studies should not be slashdotted, they provide such a narrow perspective on some medical minutiae that, without the proper contextual info, and the references to the other (probably dozens) of studies on the exact same topic that showed either no effect or conflicting effects, leads consumers to make assumptions that they shouldn't be making, and that could seriously injure them. This one is probably safe, but have you done your research?
In my opinion, Evolution is one of the primary contenders (if not the primary contender) for an Outlook-replacement. It's been mentioned here in multiple threads before that Outlook, especially the calendar, is the primary reason an Outlook-based enterprise remains on Outlook and doesn't switch to something else. Evolution could change that.
However, there are significant barriers to a change of that nature. On top of the already significant change to a Linux desktop is the fact that the actual applications people use (i.e. Outlook primarily, with some Word and Excel thrown in) also change. Now, there are perfectly adequate replacements for Word and Excel and most other Windows applications. The Outlook Calendar has no such enterprise-level replacement.
My suggestion would be to emulate Outlook as closely as possible without breaking any laws in order to lower the barrier to Linux and Evolution adoption in an enterprise. Once you actually have a market share, then start tweaking things. The first few enterprises to make the leap are really sticking their necks out to make a change to the Calendar, you need to make it as easy as possible for them to do so. Don't make a totally new GUI and make it harder.
That all being said, however, the screenshots of the GUI are not all that different from the Outlook view currently. They're pretty different from Outlook 2003, though, so having the two options in there would be a good idea. Better yet, make the GUI configurable with three presets ("Outlook 2000 style", "Outlook 2003 style", "Evolution style") so it's easy for an enterprise to set them all up for whatever their users are used to.
There is also a good deal of information on using mitochondrial DNA to track this information, which comes down through the women only (the men pass mitochondria along with sperm, but it gets left behind with the "shell" and only the regular DNA is used for fertilization). This mitochondrial DNA is very stable and you can track human spread over very long periods of time. The Y-chromosome, which isn't quite as stable and mutates, can be used to track migrations over a shorter span of time.
I've actually contacted the company mentioned in the article (museumtour) to let them know that I have prior art. Frames were around before that time, and I actually was translating old Hypercard programs into web pages (and maintaining their look and feel) while using frames. They responded that they were evaluating their legal options and I haven't heard from them since.
SBC is really sticking their neck out, and is using their legal slush fund to try and wrangle something they shouldn't have in the first place. At some point our pathetic patent office should really stop being newsworthy...
Insurance companies don't always pay what they are billed, in fact they often pay far less than that, at a number that they determine to be an appropriate cost.
This causes hospitals and doctors to bill more, hoping to recoup the money they lose to some insurers from another insurer, and from covering people with no insurance who don't pay.
This causes insurers to raise their rates to cover these additional costs and the ever-spiraling costs of litigation.
This causes more and more people to become uninsured or underinsured.
This causes fewer people to receive preventative medicine that might keep them from getting a very acute, very expensive illness, or from going to see their doctor early on rather than too late.
See above.
The reference you refer to is To Err is Human, a report put out by the Institute of Medicine, which estimates that between 44,000-98,000 people die every year from medical errors. Slightly over half of these were considered to be "preventable." The link to the full text of the report is here.
My first recommendation would be for them to contact the EFF and have them look over whatever letter they got for it. If they simply got a nicely worded letter, they can nicely ignore it and wait for an actual cease and desist before even worrying about this.
I don't think Phoenix BIOS has a leg to stand on because of one simple thing, they have to prove that the other party's use of their trademark could potentially cause confusion in the marketplace. Nobody with a brain is going to go looking for a BIOS and try and install the Phoenix browser on their chip, and likewise they won't try and check out the latest slashdot headline with a BIOS, so I think it would be an easy task for a lawyer to prove that the marketplace for the two products is not the same, and therefore no potential confusion.
Of course, as someone pointed out, in a legal system where you have to pay your lawyer tax any time you want to defend yourself, lots of stupid things happen because people can't afford to defend themselves. Donate to the EFF this holiday season, and buy yourself some freedom for years to come.
This is generally a bad idea, although it's used in some really serious infections if it's required (like endocarditis) if the antibiotics have a synergistic effect.
Contrary to what is apparently popular belief, antibiotics are not all nice and can be taken whenever you feel like it. Antibiotics can cause some of the most hideous allergic-type responses of anything on earth (like Stevens-Johnson syndrome) that are often fatal. This is pretty rare but not as rare as we'd like, and there's no way to predict when it will happen, since it can happen to you even if you've taken that medication before without a problem.
The real answer to this lies with the consumer. Don't come to the doctor and want antibiotics. In the majority of cases of upper respiratory infections, diarrhea, and other problems, antibiotics are useless. It's the subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) demands for antibiotics that make docs give antibiotics to patients in the first place rather than spend another 10 minutes explaining to a progressively more angry patient why the doctor won't "give them something to make them feel better."