August 2009

Google, Microsoft executives criticize Obama's e-health records plan

Top executives at Google and Microsoft sharply questioned the structure of the Obama administration's $20 billion health information technology plan at a meeting of a presidential technology council on Thursday. Eric Schmidt, chairman and chief executive officer of Google, told top health technology officials at a meeting of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology that the current national health IT system planned by the administration will result in hospitals and doctors using an outdated system of databases in what is becoming an increasingly Web-focused world. The approach will stifle innovation, he said, and ensures medical professionals continue to use existing outmoded medical databases, many of which are copyrighted and cannot be duplicated. Google and Microsoft have developed Web-based personal health record software products, called Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault. Schmidt told the council that, like the Google and Microsoft applications, the national health IT system should be based on Web records that patients can control.

Time for media to clarify the health care debate

[Commentary] Depending on how you look at it, we're roughly six months or 60 years into the debate over whether and how the government should ensure universal health care for all Americans. And yet if there's one thing polling on the public's opinions about health care makes clear, it's that people are confused, holding a disparate mix of often contradictory views and frequently clinging to incorrect beliefs. For reporters, there is a clear lesson in this: Put the polls down. Just walk away. Pay them no attention. Pretend they don't exist. How should news organizations cover health care reform? Simple: Cover health care reform. All those polls showing that people hold contradictory views and false -- or at least highly questionable -- beliefs about health care and efforts to reform it are a pretty good indication of what reporters should be doing: Reporting the truth, and doing it often. Giving people the facts about health care and about proposals to reform it.

Study places EHRs at core of saving cardiac patients' lives

An electronic health record (EHR) program that cut cardiac deaths by 73 percent has also kept patients healthy two years later, according to a new study. The Kaiser Permanente program in Denver linked coronary artery disease patients and teams of pharmacists, nurses, primary care doctors and cardiologists with an electronic health record to help keep the patients healthy two years after they left the program by keeping them in touch with their caregivers electronically, according to a randomized study. The study, which was funded by the American College of Clinical Pharmacy, is published in The American Journal of Managed Care this month. It is the first randomized study to evaluate a follow-up system for patients discharged from a cardiovascular risk reduction service, researchers said.

At Fox and MSNBC, Hosts Refire the Insult Machines

Executives at two of the country's largest media companies are still trying to salvage what was essentially a cease-fire between MSNBC and the Fox News Channel. The two cable news channels temporarily resumed their long-running feud this week after The New York Times reported that their parent companies, General Electric and the News Corporation, had struck a deal to stop each other's televised personal attacks. Fox News executives felt that MSNBC had broken the deal when Keith Olbermann, in an apparent show of independence, insulted his 8 p.m. rival, Bill O'Reilly, and the News Corporation's chairman, Rupert Murdoch, on Monday. On his show, "Countdown," Olbermann called O'Reilly a "racist clown." O'Reilly responded with his own attack two days later on his program, "The O'Reilly Factor," where he claimed that GE, through MSNBC, was "promoting the election of Barack Obama and then seeking to profit from his policies." The chief executives at General Electric, whose NBC News division operates MSNBC, and News Corporation, which owns Fox News, reached an unusual agreement last spring to halt the regular personal assaults on each other's channels.

Professor Main Target of Assault on Twitter

The cyberattacks Thursday and Friday on Twitter and other popular Web services disrupted the lives of hundreds of millions of Internet users, but the principal target appeared to be one man: a 34-year-old economics professor from the republic of Georgia. During the assault — the latest eruption in a yearlong skirmish between nationalistic hackers in Russia and Georgia — unidentified attackers sent millions of spam e-mail messages and bombarded Twitter, Facebook and other services with junk messages. The blitz was an attempt to block the professor's Web pages, where he was revisiting the events leading up to the brief territorial war between Russia and Georgia that began a year ago.

In a Digital Future, Textbooks Are History

Textbooks have not gone the way of the scroll yet, but many educators say that it will not be long before they are replaced by digital versions — or supplanted altogether by lessons assembled from the wealth of free courseware, educational games, videos and projects on the Web. "Kids are wired differently these days," said Sheryl R. Abshire, chief technology officer for the Calcasieu Parish school system in Lake Charles, La. "They're digitally nimble. They multitask, transpose and extrapolate. And they think of knowledge as infinite." "They don't engage with textbooks that are finite, linear and rote," Dr. Abshire continued. "Teachers need digital resources to find those documents, those blogs, those wikis that get them beyond the plain vanilla curriculum in the textbooks." But the digital future is not quite on the horizon in most classrooms. For one thing, there is still a large digital divide. Not every student has access to a computer, a Kindle electronic reader device or a smartphone, and few districts are wealthy enough to provide them. So digital textbooks could widen the gap between rich and poor.

Piracy verdicts may violate US Constitution

It's been a good summer for the major labels' litigators in their battle against individuals charged with copyright infringement. In June, a Minnesota jury awarded the four majors $1.9 million in damages, finding that single mom Jammie Thomas-Rasset had used the peer-to-peer file-sharing network Kazaa to illegally download and share 24 songs. And at the end of July, a federal jury in Boston ordered college student Joel Tenenbaum to pay the majors $675,000 for sharing 30 songs, after hearing evidence that he used at least six different P2P networks for nearly a decade, continuing to infringe even after receiving multiple warnings. But with the defendants challenging the damage awards and likely appealing the verdicts, these cases are far from over. And the courts will now have to confront a difficult and unresolved question in copyright law: Can awards in cases like this be so big that they violate the US Constitution's guarantee of due process?

Ad Industry Gears Up for Battles With Washington

Up to now, advertisers and agencies have dodged a bullet on one of the administration's marquee issues: health-care reform. They've mounted a successful campaign to block an amendment that would help pay the tab for health care with billions in new taxes on TV drug ads. But the battling has only begun, and a years-long war over ad-related issues that could threaten billions of dollars in spending is on the horizon. The operative question is whether decreased ad spending in a down economy, combined with an administration vowing a consumer focus that translates into tightening the regulatory reins, could produce a perfect-storm scenario for advertisers.

Article Faults FCC On Handling Of Comcast 'P2P' Complaint

The Federal Communications Commission let the rule of law go by the wayside as it came up with a novel approach to resolving a complaint against Comcast's broadband Internet service. That's the conclusion of Barbara Esbin and Adam Marcus of the Progress and Freedom Foundation. They assert that in its order finding that Comcast's peer-to-peer management practices "unduly interfered" with users' access to the Internet, the FCC effectively "imposed a broad nondiscrimination requirement on all Internet-service providers" by cobbling together at least seven portions of the Communications Act to find ancillary authority. Esbin and Marcus argue that it is likely the court will find the Comcast order "beyond the agency's delegated authority."

FCC Releases Telephone Penetration report

The Federal Communications Commission released a report presenting data on telephone penetration levels on a state-by-state basis for various income categories. 1) In March 2008, penetration among low-income households (under $10,000 annual income in 1984 dollars) nationwide was 89.7%. This contrasts with an overall nationwide penetration rate of 95.2% in March 2008. 2) Since 1985, when the FCC first established Lifeline to help low-income households afford the monthly cost of telephone service, penetration rates among low-income households have grown from 80.0% to 89.7%. 3) States that have provided a high level of lifeline support for telephone service for low-income consumers experienced an average growth in penetration of 4.0% for low-income households from March 1997 to March 2008. In contrast, states that provided a low level of lifeline support experienced an average growth of 1.4% in telephone penetration rates for low-income households between March 1997 and March 2008. 4) Penetration rates among low-income households ranged from a high of 97.3% to a low of 81.7% in March 2008.

Benton

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