eHealth tricorder fraudster - impersonating Canadian Deputy Minister of Health

There is a really bizarre story reported by CBC and sundry other new services that has a decidedly eHealth angle. A person named Howard Levanthal in the US impersonated a Canadian Deputy Health Minister to fraudulently win loans from an investment bank. The guy doesn't look remotely like Glenda Yeates, but her signature appears on his million dollar contract with Health Canada. Revolving around these expenses was a supposed medical device his company Neovision had developed called the Heltheo's McCoy Home Health Tablet, named after Dr. McCoy of Star Trek and Tricorder medical device fame.

Tricorder-like devices are actually being developed by the Qualcomm Tricorder XPrize. There are are now 3 Canadian teams in the competition.  I blogged about the XPrize Tricorder competition before and continue to be interested in it. This story was picked up by a delightful science fiction/science fact blog called Giant Freaking Robot. The Robot had the wherewithal to know that there are quickly evolving attempts to develop tricorder like medical diagnostic and assistive devices, and even posted to his story a youtube video to one of the contestants for the Xprize - Scanadu.

It makes me wonder if eHealth is being over-hyped these days ("Healthcare Hullabaloo", as Giant Freaking Robot says) and people are readily responding to new developments. Not that this blog is helping to over-hype eHealth or anything... Anyway, I really like the quote in the CBC news story that: "His actions were the stuff of fantasy and science fiction, valid only in another dimension"

Howard Leventhal pleads guilty to posing as Canadian deputy health minister

Pleads guilty to aggravated identity theft for impersonating Glenda Yeates

The FBI says an Illinois man accused of impersonating a Canadian deputy health minister as part of a fraud scheme has pleaded guilty to wire fraud and identity theft charges.

Howard Leventhal, 56, of Long Grove, Ill., was accused of trying to defraud a number of individuals and entities of millions of dollars by falsely claiming his company, Neovision, had a lucrative contract with the Canadian Health Department.

'His actions were the stuff of fantasy and science fiction, valid only in another dimension.'
- United States Attorney Loretta Lynch

Leventhal pleaded guilty to aggravated identity theft, which carries a mandatory two-year term of imprisonment, for stealing the identity of Glenda Yeates.

When sentenced on April 3, 2014, Leventhal faces up to 22 years in prison, $1,050,819.78 in forfeiture and restitution, and a fine of more than $2 million.

Tablet named after Star Trek's Dr.Leonard McCoy

Court in Brooklyn, N.Y. heard Leventhal told potential investors Neovision had written agreements with Health Canada, whereby Neovision would provide Health Canada with Heltheo's McCoy Home Health Tablet.

Leventhal pleaded guilty to aggravated identity theft, which carries a mandatory two-year term of imprisonment, for stealing the identity of Glenda Yeates, pictured above.

The device — named after the fictional Dr. Leonard McCoy of TV's Star Trek series — purportedly delivers instantaneous and detailed patient data to physicians and other licensed health-care providers.

Prosecutors alleged earlier this year that Leventhal scammed Paragon Financial Group for $800,000 by claiming it could collect money he said Health Canada owed to his company.

Leventhal also used the purported agreement with Health Canada to solicit more than $25 million from other potential investors, including an undercover law enforcement agent. RCMP allege Leventhal tried to get a $2.5-million line of credit from TD Bank in Toronto in July.

"In Leventhal's world, the truth was cloaked by his web of lies and impersonation. Within this alternate reality, Leventhal marketed non-existent technology, fabricated an online presence, and impersonated a government official, all to defraud investors out of very real money," said United States Attorney Loretta Lynch in a statement.

"His actions were the stuff of fantasy and science fiction, valid only in another dimension."

© The Canadian Press, 2013

Terrapower - very clean nuclear energy?

Bill Gates chairs the board of directors for this new company:
http://www.terrapower.com/

It can burn all the depleted uranium at one waste site in Kentucky to power all the homes in the US for 700 years:
http://terrapower.com/pages/environment

I think they combine supercomputers with the wave vector energy grid to maximize energy production. No special relevance for eHealth, save for the "e". And that is why it is "awesome".

This type of energy source seems more appealing than a 250 mile wide solar panel belt around the moon one Japanese company has proposed. And here I was about to give up all hope on the future of humanity.

Data in Electronic Health Records for Medical Research

The Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technology had an excellent article by Donna Hanrahan entitled "Data Mining, Meaningful Use, Secondary Use, & Potential Misuse of Electronic Health Records". It has an excellent synopsis of what many clinical researchers, ethicists, and privacy experts have been saying for many years, about how data in the EHR can be used for medical research purposes.

There are ways to do that, like consent management, audit record logs, and increasingly better means to de-identify data and prevent it from being re-identifed. This latter work is really being pioneered by Dr. Khalid El-Emam. That is, before one would be able donate the data in the EHR to science, post-mortem.

I will copy in here just the section on how data in EHR can be used for medical research:

Beneficence of Electronic Data in Medical Research

Despite the ethical concerns addressed above, the use of electronic health data is critical to ensuring patient health, improving our healthcare system, and making new scientific discoveries in this technological age. Critics may question whether EHRs are truly meaningful or whether it is an “excessive bureaucratic requirement to spend public dollars on doctors’ computer systems.”^xxxii This answer to this question can be discussed through the principle of justice. It is ethical, one could argue, to expend public funds for EHR systems that provides for the greater good and benefits for the public as a whole. Having data that is structured and easily retrievable benefits clinicians, patients, and the greater population. These benefits include safer prescribing, prevention of medication errors, epidemiological tracking to protect population health, and public medical error reporting. Furthermore, there is a clear need to switch from outdated, burdensome, and inefficient clinical charting traditions to electronic format.

EHR adoption aims to reduce cost, which is a primary goal of health reform in the United States. The increase in information available to clinicians can help prevent redundant or unnecessary tests and imaging. Furthermore, EHRs can provide point-of-care clinical decision support (CDS) as doctors prescribe tests, medications, and imaging requests, which can also help reduce costs. Lastly, “shared savings,” or “gain-sharing,” allows hospitals and healthcare providers to collaborate to reach quality metrics.^xxxiiiAccordingly, EHRs enable users to measure desired outcomes and report this data more quickly and easily, saving both time and money. With regard to the costs associated with EHRs, studies have documented the strong return on financial investment that may be achieved following EHR implementation.^xxxiv Other financial benefits include increased revenues due to improved care coordination, averted costs of paperwork, chart pulls, and billing errors, and fee-for-service savings including the rate of new procedures and charge capture. Furthermore, the secondary use of health record information is anticipated to become one of the healthcare industry’s greatest assets and the key to greater quality and cost savings over the next five years.^xxxv In fact, a recent report by the McKinsey Global Institute, estimates the potential annual value to the healthcare industry at over 300 billion dollars.^xxxvi These savings in cost benefit both the patient and provider.

There are also several patient-centered benefits that result from the “meaningful use” EHR data. Perhaps one of the most promising results of EHR data mining is the use of predictive modeling techniques to identify medical conditions and promote interventions before the onset of symptoms. Furthermore, retrospective analysis of the health data mined from EHRs could expedite scientific discovery in medicine by providing valuable information for research. In addition, physicians’ access to data and analysis could demonstrate the efficacy of different treatment options across large populations, which could help treat and prevent chronic conditions. Lastly, such data can be used to identify evidence-based best practices, identify potential patients for clinical trials, and monitor patient compliance and drug safety. These measures show beneficence towards the patient by providing better more individualized care.

IBM's Watson now an API for cloud development - is there a Doctor in the House?

I am still trying to pin down a focus on eHealth application for this, but IBM has opened an API (application program interface) for the Watson cognitive computing intelligence. This sounds like developers can open up smartphone applications to query the cognitive fireworks of the Watson computer that defeated the best humans in the world of TV game Jeopardy. 

For eHealth, the API needs to tap into the right data content. IBM already has several services for this:

MD Buyline: This provider of supply chain solutions for hospitals and healthcare systems is developing an app to allow clinical and financial users to make real-time, informed decisions about medical device purchases, to improve quality, value, outcomes and patient satisfaction.Hippocrates powered by IBM Watson will provide users with access to a helpful research assistant that provides fast, evidence based recommendations from a wealth of data, to help ensure medical organizations are making the best decisions for their physicians' and patients' needs. 

Guess there's not much else you could ask for? But yes there is - Welltok:

Welltok: A pioneer in the emerging field of Social Health Management™, Welltok is developing an app that will create Intelligent Health Itineraries™ for consumers. These personalized itineraries, sponsored by health plans, health systems and health retailers, will include tailored activities, relevant content and condition management programs, and will reward users for engaging in healthy behaviors. Consumers who use Welltok's app -- CaféWell Concierge powered by IBM Watson – will participate in conversations about their health with Watson. By leveraging Watson's ability to learn from every interaction, the app will offer insights tailored to each individual’s health needs.  

And there is more. Watson Path is diagnostic education program, and perhaps even a clinical decision support aid for diagnosis? All this from a game of Jeopardy?

Is US Homeland Security Accessing Canadian Personal Health Information?

There is a disturbing story about how more than several Canadians have been denied entry to the United States by Homeland Security because of the information they held on their medical condition. You can read an instance of the story < here >. Ontario Privacy Commission Dr. Ann Cavoukian says it is a "matter of grave concern". I find it quite shocking too. Actual facts may point to Homeland Security receiving the medical condition information through 911 call records, and not somehow directly accessing medical records (as the story might suppose), but still...

A digital umbilical cord for life extension

A project at Lifenaut aims to create a digital image vault of your life history where avatars of the future will live forever. At least, that is my interpretation. It reminded me of a project Ray Kuzweil has to bring his father back to life. He has a store room full of bankers boxes of information about him. Probably that is all digitized now. This is not an actual eHealth application like the Virtual Self, which can be used for diagnostic simulations.

Create a Mind File

How it Works

Upload biographical pictures, videos, and documents to a digital archive that will be preserved for generations.

Organize through geo mapping, timelines, and tagging, a rich portrait of information about you. The places you’ve been and the people you’ve met can be stored.

Create a computer-based avatar to interact and respond with your attitudes, values, mannerisms and beliefs.

Connect with other people who are interested in exploring the future of technology and how it can enhance the quality of our lives.

Future Med Conference at Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego

The future med conference this year is at the Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego. The Core Track of the conference is very eHealth relevant:

• Introduction to Exponentials on the topics of Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, 3D Printing, and IT Data Driven Health 
• Future of Oncology 
• Personalized Medicine 
• Mobile Health & Body Computing 
• Design Thinking and Tech Integration (i.e. Google Glass in Healthcare) 
• Future of Intervention 
• NeuroMedTech 
• Regenerative Medicine 
• Future of Pharma & Clinical Trials
•  Global Health Impact of Technology on the Practice of Medicine 

I had heard that San Diego is a great place for conferences, but what I think is the real star of this conference is the Hotel! The Del Coronado is made of wood - over a hundred years old - and it's on the beach!

Now, this conference is going to set you back $4500 as an ordinary registrant for the four days. The last time I went to a 4 day conference happened to be in Boston. Paid by my institution, it was over $1000. It had stellar presentations and I will never forget the keynote presentation by Dr. Judah Folkman who talked about how the Institutional Review Board at his university (Harvard), instead of doing it's usual rubber stamp bureaucratic handling of a research protocol, made recommendations to the scientist that actually lead to the permanent end of a terminal illness that affected kids. I digress. What I mean is, unless you are paying the VIP price of over $8000 dollars, you might get a valuable experience without feeling like you've been robbed at this conference.

And that VIP experience made me think of a TV program I was watching the other day - more and more digression but this has an eHealth element - CPAC channel actually, which is a dedicated Canadian politics channel, that featured a live broadcast from the United Nations on Maternal Health. On the same panel with our Prime Minister Stephen Harper was Melinda Gates. Melinda spoke about how she personally observed how simple cell phone and text messaging used by women in Kenya/Tanzania was leading to all kinds of health improvements. Exactly! It is Communications Technology that is needed, as well as the vaccines and the mosquito nets. There is your eHealth element.

But what this made me also think about - and there is no eHealth dimension to this really (except maybe the Science fiction movie Elysium again - is the book I am reading "Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Eveyrone Else" by Chrystia Freeland. Maybe I thought, the Future Med conference is one of those Davos / TED / Gilded Age kind of meeting places on the Global circuit. Perhaps not, but digression will now cease.

eHealth Sources of Wellness

Disclaimer: opinions expressed here do not necessarily represent the policy of McMaster University, where I am employed.

I was checking the student wellness website at McMaster and immediately saw the eHealth application and benefit. First, there was a list of apps for smartphones on wellness and fitness <here>. Since I don't have a smartphone I can't testify about the worth of these apps. All I know is that everybody (and their dog) these days you see on the street is staring more at a phone than anything else in the environment. McMaster's employees website also have excellent resources for health and wellness, part of that movement toward corporate wholeness and a healthy workplace.

Another one of the great resources I found on the McMaster website was a link to a depression symptom checker. Now, that is the sort of thing you can find on some of the major consumer health websites, but this depression checklist was very good - had received research testing, face validity, evaluation etc. Problem is, I can't find the link to it now, but it was kind of like this one < here >. Maybe that is why people use the common consumer health websites - stuff is easy to find there. The thing is, if depression is part of ones' own personal health inventory, these should be integrated into one's personal health record, which should be easy to find, and accessed as often as one uses a tooth brush.

Should a personal health record also include apps and records for wellness and fitness, and counselling resources, and yoga videos, dental x-rays, MMR shots, etc.? Yes I think they should. This was also a question I once asked the late Kevin Leonard at a health informatics conference. At that time people at the conference were thinking mostly about personal health records as portal views of the physician's electronic medical record. Kevin thought everything related to one's health should be accessible in a electronic health record. Dr. Leonard was one of the leading advocates for personal wellness in the age of electronic health records. When I learned that he died of complications from pneumonia and that he had Crohns, I can understand more his personal mission. Why can't there just be One Record? < Patient Destiny >

Surgery transmitted by Google glass

Google glass apparently wasn't used here first, according to a poster at the Kurzweil site:

Great accomplishment BUT not the 1st time! It was a FutureMed/Singularity grad who performed the first Surgery s GoogleGlass! See:
Google Glass In The Operating Room! http://t.co/bMR64jVCTQ
&in Med Ed”OK Glass:Teach me Medicine!” http://t.co/0vYPZcrzKk

The spanish Clinica Cemtro looks like an interesting organization with eHealth applications like this, even though I am not sure how this can be applied in the future.

Crowdsourcing rare diseases for patients - Crowdmed

I recently discovered two crowdsourcing sites for medicine after starting to wonder how it would work in an ehealth type of application. Strangely, they both have a similiar name and function if I am not mistaken, medcrowd.com and crowdmed.com.  I am going to talk a little about Crowdmed as it looks more interesting.

https://www.crowdmed.com/

To my mind, this is a very powerful crowdsourcing site to fetch opinions on rare medical conditions without an IBM Dr. Watson nearby. Is is a trusted source of information? I wouldn't know, but I like the way the site works, according to this article in the new scientist:

Anyone can join CrowdMed and analyse cases, regardless of their background or training. Participants are given points that they can then use to bet on the correct diagnosis from lists of suggestions. This creates a prediction market, with diagnoses falling and rising in value based on their popularity, like stocks in a stock market. Algorithms then calculate the probability that each diagnosis will be correct.

Here is the welcome email from the founder and CEO Jared Heyman:

Here’s a quick refresher on how CrowdMed works:

1. Patients complete a questionnaire, which collects information regarding their symptoms, medical history, family history, basic demographics, medications, and lifestyle.
2. Once a case is submitted, CrowdMed invites hundreds of Medical Detectives (“MDs”) to recommend potential diagnoses and bet on the ones they think are most likely.
3. CrowdMed’s patented prediction market technology harnesses ‘the wisdom of crowds’ and provides patients with a short list of the most likely diagnostic suggestions to discuss with their doctor.

I started CrowdMed because I watched my younger sister, Carly, suffer through three years of debilitating symptoms, visits to two dozen doctors and specialists, and over $100,000 in medical bills before she was finally diagnosed with a rare but treatable illness. She was CrowdMed’s first test case, and our phenomenal community of Medical Detectives collaborated to accurately solve her case in just a few days, proving that large crowds working to solve a problem are often smarter than even the most expert individual. I want to share CrowdMed with other patients so they don’t have the same experience Carly had. Read more about CrowdMed’s story.

To get started, log in to CrowdMed and choose ‘Solve a case’ or ‘Submit a case’. And don’t forget -- for every 1,000 points you win solving cases on CrowdMed, you can donate $1.00 to the patient of your choice on Watsi and potentially help save two lives at once.

We love to help bring patients one step closer to the right diagnosis and treatment, so please visit CrowdMed today!

Together, we can help save lives.

Jared Heyman

Founder, CrowdMed 

The eHealth Dimension of Elysium

I saw Elysium last night and wish to comment on my impressions. The movie was hilarious in some unexpected ways. The first was when power went out in the Cineplex theatre. Was this a local brownout or was the entire East coast of North America now in the dark. Sitting in a pitch black movie theatre with strangers all around makes you wonder. The usher announces a 5 minute power outage but not to leave our sits. Most of us are riveted in our seats anyway on a far distance world of the imagination on the screen. Lesson for ehealth - always have a backup power source for your data.  Movies these days are run on digital. There is no film "rewind". The usher asks us how far we have to back up before the movie stopped. The movie resumes. Ten minutes later the sound disappears but the movie still continues.

The audience is hilarious. Someone says he will be Matt Damon, and someone else the bad guy Kruger, who starts talking with the exact same accent. The movie stops, the usher enters again, and asks us when they should stop backing it up. Someone in the audience says when can we get a refund for this bullshit. It seems to be a general consensus. The film is ruined for many. Eventually the film starts up and it wasn't too far to the last scene. Leaving the theatre we all get courtesy tickets for a free film. Lesson for ehealth: engage your audience (users) with feedback.

No spoilers here - see the movie - it is chock-a-block with ehealth wonders.

ehealth enabled Word Cloud with NVivo

I have tried experimenting with NVivo on some research data we collected from an online survey. Using the website for this blog I created a PDF and imported it into NVivo, ran a query, and created this Word Cloud for the site. This isn't for the entire site, but I think it is an intriguing picture of the weather patterns the data is sending forth.

I went back to the drawing board and make a Word Cloud for as much as the website I could get into Adobe Acrobat before it "ran out of memory" - about 1300 pages. The word count frequencies on the top 40 words was much much higher but the cloud still looks about the same as I will post it here. By the way, there are much better uses for NVivo, but this is the most fun so far:

Perception ethics and machine brain interfaces

Melanie Swan, aka, "La Blogga", has a great article/video on her blog which was also listed on the Institute for Ethics of Emerging Technology website entitled "Killer Apps of Cognitive Nanorobotics". The title alone is enough to suggest what is out there these days and what is someday possible, and thus having a remote semblance to ehealth and the purpose of my blog. She made the video in French and Spanish as well. The YouTube talk is called the "Introduction to Ethics of Perception in Nanocognition".  There is a longer, and I think much greater, version < here >.

The YouTube video is kind of fun because if you don't want to try and listen to the lecture in the different languages, you can also click the Icon for Transcript on the youtube dashboard (beside Statistics and Reports) and see a line number machine translation output of it, which is almost accurate. I say almost because the machine algorithms pick up "epic" instead of "ethic" frequently. It also transcribed "Azimovs Robotic Laws" as "Mom's Law of Robotics" (in the shorter Introduction video).

I liked the references to philosopher Henri Bergson who's ideas about creativity I have always valued. "Machine Ethics Interfaces"? In the realm of Brain Computer Interfaces (BCI), the nanorobotic and perception technology is a little advanced or science fiction-like. You need to get some background in nanomedicine or reading Ray Kuzweil's articles about how nanorobotics injected into the brain will be able to alter perception, if not entirely create alternative virtual realities. On the other hand, current BCI (Emotiv, Personal Neuro, Muse, etc.) might be able to augment a kind of ethical space. My 2 bit intellectual comments on the article and the video lecture would be a waste of your time (and probably a challenge to your wit) so I recommend going to the source.

eHealth and the sci-fi movie Elysium

The science fiction movie Elysium has some interesting ehealth and healthcare applications. For example, there is the Med pod 3000.
Looking at the timeline for Elysium we see the following milestones (as they relate to healthcare):



2024: Armadyne first company to develop AI that eclipses power of human brain.
2052: MedPod 1000 debuts.

2093: MedPod 2000 finds cure for cancer.

2154: MedPod 3000 cures last known human disease.

ehealthenabled.ca new blog on Word Press!

Hello

I have imported this blogger site into a new experimental IP address I have named ehealthenabled.ca but am using the site only for some software implementation experiments. I will continue to blog from there while I compare, Word Press, which is awfully good, to blogger.

Australian Physicians are eHealth Enabled

http://www.immi.gov.au/gateways/panel_doctors/ehealth/

Sounds like down under the national architecture for electronic medical records is working well. I like the simplicity of this web link above and the reasons for eHealth implementation:

Why use eHealth?

eHealth means:

• no paper records
• faster processing
• less complaints from clients.

Manchester secures site for national health informatics research institute | The University of Manchester

Manchester secures site for national health informatics research institute | The University of Manchester

Google's Project Loon - The (Ballon) Technology

Your smartphone will see you now - McLeans article on Tricorder

I have been looking for stories or updates on the Tricorder Xprize and have found a few updates here and there, but this one on the March issue of McLeans magazine just caught my attention. How could I, a member of the public, have missed it? I like the McLeans online version "View in Clean Reading Mode". Is that a hat tip to the smartphone too? Probably. Time to get one myself maybe. Anyway, no belly aching about that. And that reminds me about a conversation I had with a refugee from Ethiopia that other day. He is interested in starting "literacy" programs in Ethiopia/Eritrea. I asked him if it was true that everyone in Africa has a cellphone. He said yes it was true that everyone had a cellphone, but not bread. This article is one of those "must reads" for anyone who actually reads this blog.
http://www2.macleans.ca/2013/03/04/the-smartphone-will-see-you-now-2/
http://www2.macleans.ca/2013/03/04/the-smartphone-will-see-you-now-2/2/
http://www2.macleans.ca/2013/03/04/the-smartphone-will-see-you-now-2/3/

IEEE conference in Toronto: Theme - SmartWorld

If I find the pocket change for registration - I am there in a heartbeat. Two panelists or speakers  of interest to eHealth students are Dr. Ann Cavoukian, Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, and Dr. Alex Jadad, who is founder for the Centre for Globale eHealth Innovation lab at the University of Toronto. Having Ray Kuzweil, Steve Mann, Marvin Minsky, et al there is just "icing on the cake".

Website for IEEE ISTAS'13: http://veillance.me

Theme - "Smartworld"

Living in a Smart World - People as Sensors

ISTAS'13 presenters  and panellists will address the implications of living in smartworlds - smart grids, smart infrastructure, smart homes, smart cars, smart fridges, and with the advent of body-worn sensors like cameras, smart people.

The environment around us is becoming "smarter". Soon there will be a camera in nearly every streetlight enabling better occupancy sensing, while many appliances and everyday products such as automatic flush toilets, and faucets are starting to use more sophisticated camera-based computer-vision technologies.  Meanwhile, what happens when people increasingly wear these same sensors?  

A smart world where people wear sensors such as cameras, physiological sensors (e.g. monitoring temperature, physiological characteristics), location data loggers, tokens, and other wearable and embeddable systems presents many direct benefits, especially for personal applications. However, these same "Wearable Computing" technologies and applications have the potential to become mechanisms of control by smart infrastructure monitoring those individuals that wear these sensors.

There are great socio-ethical implications that will stem from these technologies and fresh regulatory and legislative approaches are required to deal with this new environment.

This event promises to be the beginning of outcomes related to:

1. Consumer awareness
2. Usability
3. A defined industry cluster of new innovators
4. Regulatory demands for a variety of jurisdictions
5. User-centric engineering development ideas
6. Augmented Reality design
7. Creative computing
8. Mobile learning applications
9. Wearables as an assistive technology

"Smart people" interacting with smart infrastructure means that intelligence is driving decisions. In essence, technology becomes society.

Professor Mann University of Toronto will be speaking in the opening keynote panel with acclaimed Professor of MIT Media Arts and Sciences, Marvin Minsky who wrote the groundbreaking book The Society of Mind  and has helped define the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) among his major contributions.

General Chair of ISTAS13 and formerly a member of the MIT Media Lab under the guidance of Nicholas Negroponte in the 1990s Mann is long considered to be the Father of Wearable Computing and AR in this young field.

Bioethics and eHealth - for example - Telecare, Surveillance, and the Welfare State

Key stakeholders in the project management of an eHealth project include, clinicians, nurses, software engineers, Senior Management, Project Manager, statistician, healthcare administration, etc. But often I think a key player that should be added more to the list is a Bioethicist.  This article from the American Journal of Bioethics - Telecare, Surveillance and the Welfare State - is  illustrative about why a bioethicists on the team may be essential. Unless you have some sort of institutional access you might not be able to read the whole article. In this article, the Bioethicists argue the pros and cons of surveillance technology for the elderly who are being monitored in their homes for their chronic health conditions. The authors come out in favour of the surveillance technology - it is not Big Brother - but it all depends on how a chronic a condition a senior might have. Anyway, I value the point of view(s) of bioethicists because they tend to see healthcare differently from front line workers and administrators.

Here is the abstract:

Am J Bioeth. 2012;12(9):36-44. doi: 10.1080/15265161.2012.699137.

Telecare, surveillance, and the welfare state.

Sorell T, Draper H.

Source

University of Birmingham, UK. t.sorell@bham.ac.uk

Abstract

In Europe, telecare is the use of remote monitoring technology to enable vulnerable people to live independently in their own homes. The technology includes electronic tags and sensors that transmit information about the user's location and patterns of behavior in the user's home to an external hub, where it can trigger an intervention in an emergency. Telecare users in the United Kingdom sometimes report their unease about being monitored by a "Big Brother," and the same kind of electronic tags that alert telecare hubs to the movements of someone with dementia who is "wandering" are worn by terrorist suspects who have been placed under house arrest. For these and other reasons, such as ordinary privacy concerns, telecare is sometimes regarded as an objectionable extension of a "surveillance state." In this article, we defend the use of telecare against the charge that it is Orwellian. In the United States, the conception of telecare primarily as telemedicine, and the fact that it is not typically a government responsibility, make a supposed connection with a surveillance state even more doubtful than in Europe. The main objection, we argue, to telecare is not its intrusiveness, but the danger of its deepening the isolation of those who use it. There are ways of organizing telecare so that the independence and privacy of users are enhanced, but personal isolation may be harder to address. As telecare is a means of reducing the cost of publicly provided social and health care, and the need to reduce public spending is growing, the correlative problem of isolation must be addressed alongside the goal of promoting independence.

Coldfusion progamming FLOAT IsNumerc date comparison SQL

One of the systems I developed was done in the Coldfusion programming language. As I have developed and learned more about Coldfusion over the past 9 years or so, the more I realize it depends a lot on SQL. I learned how to do a lot of Coldfusion from another learner in the beginning, but after that, internet searching for code solutions is mostly what I do, as I imagine many programmers and code seekers do as well for answers. Since Coldfusion runs on a proprietary software platform and is not open source like PHP or MySQL, it is more difficult to find Coldfusion programmers to share ideas.

Recently I found the answer for a puzzle that had long baffled me, how to compare two dates then output data fields on a query for them. I knew how to do the SQL to output data from a month, day or year in the past, something like this:

<CFQUERY NAME="GetRecords" datasource="myAccessDB" >
      SELECT COUNT(id)as number_total FROM tblMyTableName Where  Month(DateReceived) Like '1' and DateReceived Like '%2010%' </cfquery>
      <cfoutput query="GetRecords">#number_total#</cfoutput><br>

In order to compare two dates in one year, I found a Coldfusion developer site that suggested using FLOAT, and here is how this is done:

   <CFQUERY NAME="GetMREBRecords" DATASOURCE="myAccessDB">
        SELECT *
        FROM tblMyTableName
          Where DateReceived BETWEEN 40358 AND 40722
        ORDER BY ID
        DESC
        </CFQUERY>

The FLOAT values in this example are actually dates. 40358 is June 30, 2010 and 40722 is July 1, 2011 (maybe give or take a day?). I have yet to find an actual table with FLOAT date equivalents. I am not even sure if this means "Floating point", a term or process used in computational data computing. All I know is, that it works for my system really well, and solved a big problem we had.

Actually, these FLOAT values have no known standard dates(times) that I can find, and are not accurate for leap years and other variables.  Thankfully, I kept searching the internet for some code that would work and finally found this:

<CFSET start_date = #CREATEODBCDATETIME("7/1/2012")#>
 <CFSET end_date = #CREATEODBCDATETIME("6/30/2013")#>

        <CFQUERY NAME="GetRecords" datasource="myAccessDB" >
      SELECT COUNT(id)as number_outstanding FROM MyTable 
   Where DateOfReceipt  Between #start_date# And #end_date# </cfquery>
          Number of 2012-2013 Records 
          = <cfoutput query="GetRecords">#number_outstanding#</cfoutput>