News and Updates

A More Realistic View of Epic?

blog1@vashonsoftware.com — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 15:37:35 GMT

Epic is the darling of many electronic health record users: many users have spoken of it positively and certainly the New York Time’s January 15th Epic Systems, Digitizing Health Records Before It Was Cool article about them lends it high praise – without any criticism. However there are some more frank discussions about the Epic powerhouse. This Google+ thread, initiated by the insightful Brian Ahier, has a number of alternate views that counterbalances the NYT’s puff piece on Epic. Also pretty revealing are the views of Epic’s own employees, as can be seen on GlassDoor, where it only currently rates 2.8 out of 5. (Meditech rates 3.2 and Cerner gets 3.0 in contrast.)

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The Future of Healthcare in Washington State

blog1@vashonsoftware.com — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 00:01:37 GMT

Bellevue College’s Helen Clarke, Program Coordinator of their Health Information Technology Consortium, has just posted details on their upcoming “The Future of Healthcare in Washington State” conference on March 29th, 2012 from 9 am – 5 pm, at Bellevue College.

A number of notable keynotes including Mary Selecky, WA Secretary of Health and Nancy Fisher, Chief Medical Officer for CMM Region X will attend. See the associated poster for specifics.

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Lost & Stolen Laptops and Flash Drives Lead to Medical Data Breaches

blog1@vashonsoftware.com — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 16:51:59 GMT

The healthcare industry experiences more data breaches than any other industry, according to Privacy Rights Clearinghouse (PRC) data.

PRC maintains a database of privacy breaches from 2005 to the present. When available, the database includes what type of information was breached, how many records were affected, the organization that was storing the data, the types of records accessed, and a narrative of the circumstances surrounding the breach.

In 2011, 170 of 481 publicly disclosed breaches happened in the medical industry. Most of the breaches (50 breaches containing at least four million records) happened after portable data devices went missing. In several cases, the information was on laptops and flash drives that had been stolen or lost.

-- www.securitymanagement.com/news/healthcare-industry-still-struggling-with-information-breaches-009230

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Secured WiFi Networks Aren’t–Unless you disable WPS on the router

blog1@vashonsoftware.com — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 16:38:05 GMT

Per DarkReading, WiFi Protected Setup (WPS) has a design flaw that allows one to relatively easily guess the PIN in a few hours, then access the router’s WPA password.

According to US-CERT’s Vulnerability Note VU#723755,

The WiFi Protected Setup (WPS) PIN is susceptible to a brute force attack. A design flaw that exists in the WPS specification for the PIN authentication significantly reduces the time required to brute force the entire PIN because it allows an attacker to know when the first half of the 8 digit PIN is correct. The lack of a proper lock out policy after a certain number of failed attempts to guess the PIN on many wireless routers makes this brute force attack that much more feasible.

Routers from Cisco/Linksys, Netgear, D-Link, Belkin, Buffalo, ZyXEL, and Technicolor are all affected. Now open source tools are out that exploit this. The only workaround is to disable WPS.

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Next Gen Gigabit Wi-Fi reaches Draft Status: let the New 802.11ac Products Free!

blog1@vashonsoftware.com — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 20:20:52 GMT

Four times the spectral frequency (i.e., density) via QAM encoding, plus 2-4 the frequency channel, plus using some funky kind of magic to ensure reflected signals arrive in phase with each other looks to dramatically boost bandwidth via Wi-Fi – though the reliance only on 5 GHz signals may actually reduce signal distance/penetration. Future support for up to 8 spectral streams (over a current max of 3) also leaves future room for additional bandwidth. Quality of life (and signal) keeps getting better!

- Details: www.anandtech.com/show/5292/80211ac-gigabit-wifi-primer

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Canon unveils new Powershot flagship – in time to beat out the iPhone though?!

blog1@vashonsoftware.com — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 19:19:25 GMT

At the Consumer Electronics Show today Canon released their new Powershot flagship, the GX 1. With the new DIGIC 5 processor and most critically a much larger, 1.5-inch 14.3-megapixel CMOS sensor it looks good – but only offers a disappointing 4x optical zoom. With much of the market pretty happy just using their Smartphone now (“The best camera is the one you have with you”) – one wonders how many of these they’ll sell at $800.

-- Details at www.dailytech.com/Canon+Unveils+Powershot+G1+X+Elph+520+HS+110HS+Cameras/article23703.htm

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Aurion 4.1 Released

blog1@vashonsoftware.com — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 15:05:00 GMT

On the heels of funding issues with CONNECT last fall and winter, the Alembic Foundation got its start. Alembic forked HHS’ Federal Health Architecture CONNECT source code and worked with a number of partners to start adding critical features. They released their initial Aurion 4.0 Open Source Health Information Exchange Software last May (with some key enhancements) and now have just announced version 4.1 – which is still listed as an alpha release.

Aurion 4.1 release notes list all of them, but key new features include:

64 bit support (unless one need FIPS certification as the 64-bit JDK has yet to gain certification)
Asymmetric Patient Discovery & Document Retrieve – previously this had been handled sequentially – a huge bottleneck.
Continued SAML Assertion enhancements (after some initial SAML work for the 4.0 release)
Audit Query Adapter and Connection Manager services were refactored, joining the numerous services done previously
Auditing can now be done on a per interface basis
Performance can be more closely monitored with more metrics
While significant work to fully automate testing of the SoapUI still needs to be done, Continuous Integration for builds, unit testing, and publishing of the release artifacts has now been implemented

Most import to my eyes are the list of volunteers helping work on this release – including the addition of several key Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center (TATRC) members. The presence and personal contribution of Agilex, Harris, Mirth and TATRC staffers is one of the most reassuring aspects of this Aurion effort.

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Tags: Connect,NwHIN,Alembic Foundation,Aurion Project,US

Fascinating Mobile Usage Statistics

blog1@vashonsoftware.com — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 15:26:41 GMT

While I’m passionately against all the tracking done over the Internet – by advertisers and governments – it does happen and isn’t all used for underhanded purposes.

As a case in point, JumpTap uses their network (n.b., not fully representative of the whole market) to analyze mobile advertising and monthly puts out a MobileSTAT (Simple Targeting & Audience Trends) report that contains insights into mobile device usage patterns.

For instance, there’s a bit of an artificial war currently between use of dedicated “apps” or mobile friendly web sites. In JumpTap’s latest report, , they report that Apps account for 52% of ad requests (dominated by Android and iPhones), while mobile web sites for a slowly declining 48% (primarily generic “feature phones” and some Blackberries).

If you like looking at trends around the smartphone/mobile space, I’d recommend these free reports!

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Joe Ulatoski is running for VIFR Fire Commissioner

blog1@vashonsoftware.com — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 00:00:37 GMT

Joe Ulatoski is running for VIFR Fire Commissioner position 4. Check out his newly articulated positions on the issues - and then send him your endorsements. Also note the free website that takes advantage of the super simple WordPress framework – created as a community service by Vashon Software.

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DHS struggles w/security access cards

blog1@vashonsoftware.com — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 21:50:37 GMT

HSToday.us has a new article out today noting that “The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other federal agencies are still struggling to comply with a presidential order to use smart cards for physical and logical access to their facilities and computer systems nearly three years after the original deadline.”

A variety of issues have confronted DHS (and other agencies) from accomplishing personal identity verification (PIV) card use as called for by 2004 Homeland Security Presidential Directive (HSPD) 12, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO). The full GAO report can be found at: Personal ID Verification: Agencies Should Set a Higher Priority on Using the Capabilities of Standardized Identification Cards.

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