I'm with you on being surprised that personal equipment is allowed to connect to a hospital internal network, even more so if it's carrying patient info. Many hospitals, however, do provide public wifi networks for their patient's and guest's convenience (as well as secure wifi for portable equipment).
As someone who both wrote hospital apps as well as ran the hospital IT department, I'll say that people employed for longer than 10 years in the hybrid of healthcare and IT will tell you that way back in the dark ages of the mid-90s, before HIPAA: the Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act, there was HIPPA: Health Information Privacy Protection Act. HIPPA was finally discussed in House hearings in 1996. The transcript is online. It was the subject of much discussion in '93 - '95 among the Medical Records and Hospital IT groups.
HIPPA (PL 104-191) was an umbrella act to amend the IRS code "to improve portability and continuity of health insurance coverage in the group and individual markets, to combat waste, fraud, and abuse in health insurance and health care delivery, to promote the use of medical savings accounts, to improve access to long-term care services and coverage, to simplify the administration of health insurance, and for other purposes." Some, but not all of the privacy protections in HIPPA made their way into HIPAA.
EPIC has a good Bibliography on the Confidentiality of Health Information.
I have to agree with you on both counts: Yes, I'd purchase it and test drive it, just like I do with my x86 based FreeBSD, Slackware, & Solaris boxes.
Will it happen? Most likely not. I can't see Apple, which makes its money from hardware sales from folks attracted to the OS, forking the OS onto commodity x86 PCs.
And I'll add a third point, If I really want to run OS X (which I do), I'd rather go the easy route and get a nice G4 or G5 PowerBook (which I plan to do).
HP has a bit of an history of using great hardware for their calculators then botching them with inferior software.
It's not limited to their calculators. HP-UX anyone?
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Their network. Their rules.
I'm with you on being surprised that personal equipment is allowed to connect to a hospital internal network, even more so if it's carrying patient info. Many hospitals, however, do provide public wifi networks for their patient's and guest's convenience (as well as secure wifi for portable equipment).
As someone who both wrote hospital apps as well as ran the hospital IT department, I'll say that people employed for longer than 10 years in the hybrid of healthcare and IT will tell you that way back in the dark ages of the mid-90s, before HIPAA: the Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act, there was HIPPA: Health Information Privacy Protection Act. HIPPA was finally discussed in House hearings in 1996. The transcript is online. It was the subject of much discussion in '93 - '95 among the Medical Records and Hospital IT groups.
HIPPA (PL 104-191) was an umbrella act to amend the IRS code "to improve portability and continuity of health insurance coverage in the group and individual markets, to combat waste, fraud, and abuse in health insurance and health care delivery, to promote the use of medical savings accounts, to improve access to long-term care services and coverage, to simplify the administration of health insurance, and for other purposes." Some, but not all of the privacy protections in HIPPA made their way into HIPAA.
EPIC has a good Bibliography on the Confidentiality of Health Information.
Isn't "Invite Only" the way Google handles all of their public Betas?
Ummm, what about the backup tapes? Admins don't need spyware. They only need to do your job and they'll have a full copy of everything on the servers.
Future business plans are to acquire BellSouth and Qwest and change the name to "The Phone Company®."
I have to agree with you on both counts: Yes, I'd purchase it and test drive it, just like I do with my x86 based FreeBSD, Slackware, & Solaris boxes. Will it happen? Most likely not. I can't see Apple, which makes its money from hardware sales from folks attracted to the OS, forking the OS onto commodity x86 PCs. And I'll add a third point, If I really want to run OS X (which I do), I'd rather go the easy route and get a nice G4 or G5 PowerBook (which I plan to do).
You can read the latest over at Groklaw. IBM's MIT computer scientist actually exists as opposed to $CO's mystery team.
HP has a bit of an history of using great hardware for their calculators then botching them with inferior software. It's not limited to their calculators. HP-UX anyone?