July 2015

Labor secretary weighs in on 'gig economy'

Secretary of Labor Tom Perez is decrying what he calls a “false choice” between worker protections and innovation during a conversation about the bnurgeoning "on-demand economy". Companies like Uber and Taskrabbit have built their businesses by using independent contractors instead of employees. Contractors don’t get the same benefits as employees, so they cost the companies less. Critics say that in some cases, the workers are closer to employees than contractors.

“Our current law provides a useful framework for understanding the rights and responsibilities of workers and employers,” Sec Perez said. “I am concerned that some observers have framed a false choice of protecting workers OR promoting innovation in today's economy.” The Department of Labor recently announced new guidelines meant to crack down on worker misclassification across the economy.

Verizon teams up with digital health company to give broadband to low-income patients

A Manhattan company that focuses on managing chronic conditions in the home is working with Verizon to provide broadband to low-income patients. The firm, eCaring, contracts with payers and home care agencies to provide care management software to reduce avoidable readmissions among their patients. But because many patients served by eCaring's product don't have high-speed Internet, access to broadband has been an issue. The company now supplies patients with a Samsung tablet and a Verizon data plan so that home health aides can send alerts and communicate with care managers. The eCaring software is now designed specifically for Samsung Galaxy Tab tablets, although that agreement could expand to include other Samsung devices.

The company's clients include insurers and home care agencies; Samsung ships its tablets to those clients and provide tech support. The tablets will be leased by eCaring insurance clients, such as Manhattan insurer Healthfirst. Robert Herzog, eCaring's chief executive, sees his company's service as an important method of keeping patients out of hospitals. For instance, one home aide encountered a patient with slurred speech. A manager was alerted, and sent a nurse to the home to make sure the patient hadn't suffered a stroke. The incident actually was a diabetic episode, and the nurse was able to administer insulin. "That returned the person's blood sugar to a normal range and avoided a trip to the emergency room," Mr. Herzog said. "We do that kind of thing every week." The company's clients include Senior Health Partners (Healthfirst's managed long-term care plan), Metropolitan Jewish Health System and several home care agencies, including Premier, Best Care, Allen and All Metro.

The New York Times’ Botched Story on Hillary Clinton

[Commentary] I have read The New York Times since I was a teenager as the newspaper to be trusted, the paper of record, the definitive account. But the huge embarrassment over the story claiming a criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton for her e-mails -- leading the webpage, prominent on the front page, before being corrected in the usual, cringeworthy fashion of journalists who stonewall any alleged errors and then downplay the real ones -- is a direct challenge to its fundamental credibility. And the paper’s response since the initial huge error was uncovered has not been adequate or acceptable.

Holding a story until you are sure you have the facts -- as other reporters did, with, it seems, “government officials” shopping the story around -- or waiting until you can actually read the documents instead of relying on your good sources, so to speak, providing misleading and slanted details, is what they could have done differently. If reporters are hot to publish their scoops, it is up to editors, in Washington and New York, to put the brakes on. And that is especially true if reporters have previously made mistakes and overreached on stories. Someone should be held accountable here, with suspension or other action that fits the gravity of the offense. I want, and need, the old New York Times, the leader of responsible journalism, the paper of record back.

[Ornstein is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute]

Right-wing media ‘hijacking’ Republican Party, concludes Harvard report

It’s only fitting that Republican candidates are lobbying Fox News intensely to be among the 10 selected for the first GOP presidential debate on Aug. 6. The Fox role as sponsor bolsters the thesis of a new study that argues conservative media now have undue influence in the Republican Party. Jackie Calmes, a veteran Washington correspondent for The New York Times, makes the case that it’s now no longer Republican Party leaders setting the party agenda. No, “It is conservative media -- not just talk-show celebrities Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin and Laura Ingraham, but also lesser-known talkers like Steve Deace, and an expanding web of ‘news’ sites and social media outlets with financial and ideological alliances with far-right anti-government, anti-establishment groups like Heritage Action, Americans for Prosperity, Club for Growth and FreedomWorks. Calmes did her research and writing during a recent Harvard fellowship.

Her report is published by the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. She’s now back at her paper’s DC bureau. Calmes and others concede that the existence of very conservative media is nothing especially new. Indeed, other books and academic research have explored the same terrain, including a very revealing 2004 book, “The Republican Noise Machine,” by David Brock, a onetime conservative polemicist who by then had made an ideological turn and is now a high-profile Hillary Clinton acolyte. And while conservative media will surely discount Calmes’ analysis merely due to her affiliation with what some deem the Great Liberal Nemesis, namely The New York Times, it’s clear that their impact has grown sharply since Brock’s own transformation, as detailed by many longtime Washington observers of the nexus of politics and media.

Donald Trump Doesn’t Represent the Best of America: Why it’s Time for Him to Go

[Commentary] Democrats are giggling with delight as Donald Trump sucks up media attention and gathers support from the least-informed members of the Republican Party. But he has scant chance of actually winning the Republican nomination. Trump is playing the media and hurting his own party. The media circus he is attracting makes me wish the Federal Communications Commission would consider bringing back the so-called “Fairness Doctrine” requiring broadcasters to give equal time to both sides of an issue.

As for me, I will not hold meetings at or visit any Trump property or even watch any Trump TV show until he drops out of the presidential race and apologizes to those he slandered. Recently, in response to the unfortunate church slayings, South Carolina acted almost unanimously to remove the confederate flag flying above its capitol. As Americans, we can each make a decision to do our part to remove Trump and his racism and inanity from the important political discourse our nation needs in a presidential campaign.

[Shapiro is CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association]

Securing Electronic Health Records on Mobile Devices

The National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) has released a draft for public comment of the first guide in a new series of publications that will show businesses and other organizations how to improve their cybersecurity using standards-based, commercially available or open-source tools. The step-by-step guide demonstrates how health care providers can make mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, more secure, in order to better protect patient information and still take advantage of advances in communications technology. Stolen personal information can have negative financial impacts, but stolen medical information cuts to the very core of personal privacy.

Medical identity theft already costs billions of dollars each year, and altered medical information can put a person's health at risk through misdiagnosis, delayed treatment or incorrect prescriptions. Yet, the use of mobile devices to store, access and transmit electronic health care records is outpacing the privacy and security protections on those devices. Securing Electronic Records on Mobile Devices provides IT implementers and security engineers with a detailed architecture so that they can copy, or recreate with different but similar technologies, the security characteristics of the guide. It also maps to standards and best practices from NIST and others, and to Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) rules. The guide takes into account the need for different types of implementation for different circumstances such as when cybersecurity is handled in-house or is outsourced. The draft guide was developed by industry and academic cybersecurity experts, with the input of health care providers who first identified the challenge. The center then invited technology providers with relevant commercial products to partner with NIST through cooperative research and development agreements and collected public feedback at multiple steps along the way.

NIST to Host First App Challenge to Improve Data Access

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) plays an essential role in developing and distributing Standard Reference Data, or SRD. The NIST SRD collection contains some of the world’s most accurate and comprehensive datasets of physical, materials science, chemical, and biological data. But is there a better way to share NIST SRD with the researchers who need it? That’s the assumption behind the Reference Data Challenge.

NIST is offering prizes totaling $45,000 to software developers who create the most innovative and impactful Apps using NIST reference data. The challenge is open to US citizens or permanent residents over the age of 18. A panel of judges will determine which Apps are deserving of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd prize cash awards. From now until September 28th, NIST invites submissions of mobile applications to the Reference Data Challenge that use at least one of six eligible NIST datasets. All of the eligible datasets are freely accessible online, both at the NIST website and on data.gov in machine-readable format.

Choosing the Right Way

In the hypercompetitive wireless market, mobile service providers are constantly pushing the envelope to bring better, faster and cheaper services to consumers. Such is the case with the ability to make voice calls over Wi-Fi networks, which enables consumers to make calls in areas that are challenging to serve, like deep indoors, underground and in remote parts of the country. And because the wireless market moves at a hypercompetitive speed, with several competitors already offering Wi-Fi calling, we have requested that the Federal Communications Commission move with similar speed to act on AT&T’s waiver petition so we can deploy Wi-Fi while maintaining compliance with existing FCC rules. As we prepare to roll out the service later in 2015, we’ve made it a top priority to ensure that the new technology is accessible to our customers who are deaf, hard of hearing or have experienced hearing loss, or have speech disabilities.

More than $38 million awarded to improve coordinated health information sharing in communities across America

As part of the Administration’s efforts to create an interoperable learning health system that achieves better care, smarter spending and healthier people, the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) announced twenty awardees for three health information technology (health IT) grant programs totaling about $38 million. The three cooperative agreement programs are:

Advance Interoperable Health Information Technology Services to Support Health Information Exchange – This two-year cooperative agreement program has awarded $29.6 million to support the efforts of 12 states or state designated entities to expand the adoption of health information exchange technology, tools, and services; facilitate and enable the send, receive, find, and use capabilities of health information across organizational, vendor, and geographic boundaries; and increase the integration of health information in interoperable health IT to support care processes and decision making.

The Community Health Peer Learning Program - This two-year cooperative agreement grant award was made to AcademyHealth to work with 15 communities around population health strategies. Communities working with AcademyHealth under this program will be required to identify data solutions, accelerate local progress, disseminate best practices and learning guides, and help inform national strategy around population health challenges. The grant for this program totals $2.2 million.

The Workforce Training Program – This two-year cooperative agreement program has awarded seven grantees $6.7 million to update training materials from the original Workforce Curriculum Development program funded under HITECH. In addition to updating training materials, the goal of this program is to train incumbent health care workers to use new health information technologies in a variety of settings, including: team-based care environments, long-term care facilities, patient-centered medical homes, accountable care organizations, hospitals, and clinics. This workforce program will focus on the four key topic areas of: population health, care coordination, new care delivery and payments models, and value based and patient centered care.

The White House’s Alpha Geeks

A Q&A with United State chief technical officer Megan Smith and Deputy CTO Alex Macgillivray.

Until about a year ago, Megan Smith was the ultimate Silicon Valley insider. A brainy math kid out of Buffalo (NY) who earned an engineering degree at MIT, she hit California like a meteor, working for Apple, General Magic, and Google. Then Todd Park, the United State chief technical officer and advisor to the President, called, asking her to take his job. She said yes. Around the same time another Silicon Valley lifer, Alex Macgillivray (known widely as AMac) got a similar call from Park. Macgillivray had been a top policy attorney at Google and general counsel of Twitter. Park was tapping him to become Smith’s deputy CTO, and he also agreed.

The duo, on the job almost a year now, have presided over the White House tech policy operation, situated within the Office of Science and Technology Policy, at a time when President Barack Obama seems to finally be getting his geek on. It is probably no coincidence that in the aftermath of the healthcare.gov debacle -- and the subsequent triumphant rescue by a cadre of Silicon Valley veterans of Google and other companies -- that the chief executive is speaking forcefully and frequently about utilizing the energy of our nation’s tech talent to make government more efficient. He has also been more present in speaking up for some of his long-held tech-friendly policy issues, like net neutrality. Smith and Macgillivray are taking advantage of the gov-tech moment to involve the White House in a number of projects, including the Police Data Initiative (compiling information from cooperating local departments on things like who gets detained, and what happens with bodycams) and TechHire (to open up technical jobs to a diverse population). Smith has been at the President’s side at a number of events familiar to Californians but previously rare on Pennsylvania Avenue, like meetups, tech fairs and demo days.

Benton

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