From the case study:

Challenge
Odyssey HealthCare needed a way to electronically capture patient visit information to meet Federal reporting regulations and also cut down on the amount of paperwork the company was processing every day.
Solution
Media Sourcery used their AppMobilizer solution on the BlackBerry smartphone to capture clinical information at the point of care. Home caregivers used BlackBerry smartphones with an electronic Home Health Aide Visit Form and Symptom Assessment Survey to enter patient care information; that data is then transferred to a back end database for reporting and billing purposes. After an automatic check for data accuracy, the visit records are automatically entered into Odyssey’s McKesson Horizon system for billing.
Odyssey’s Results
• Gather patient information at point of care
• Less Paper, reduced administration, faster billing
• Improved working conditions for staff
• Company is better positioned to meet new requirements

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Similar to security assessments, network architecture designs and other projects, a development project, such as this one involves the exchange of confidential data, including in this case, intellectual property designs, requirements documents, test plans, code fragments and roadmaps.
We could have chose to exchange these documents over email, or printed them out and sent them next day parcel post.
Instead, we “ate our own dogfood” and utilized IslandPKI. This gave us and our partners several advantages and efficiencies:

• the timeliness of email, with notification of new content; (the notifications aided our workflow allowing the requirements, design and development process to proceed apace)
• encrypted content; (no loss of IP, protected by our built-in PKI system);
• digital signing; (for non-repudiation);
• tracking;
• confirmation of receipt;
• little to no training for our partners; (so the bringing new members to the team did not impede the process).

Read the entire article here.

Mobile Monday Austin

companies invited to demo and present our mobile solution at the Austin Chapter of Mobile Monday. The agenda (which can be found here) reviewed incubators and funding sources, and the turnout was excellent. Thanks to C. Enrique Ortiz for inviting us and putting the event together, and to the Austin Wireless Alliance for sponsoring the event.

From the article:

Prior to the HITECH Act, the penalty could be no more than $100 for each violation or $25,000 for all identical violations of the same provision.

A healthcare provider, health plan or clearinghouse could also bar the secretary’s imposition of a civil money penalty by demonstrating that it did not know that it violated the HIPAA rules.

Section 13410(d) of the HITECH Act strengthened the enforcement by establishing tiered ranges of increasing minimum penalty amounts, with a maximum penalty of $1.5 million for all violations of an identical provision. A covered entity can no longer bar the imposition of a civil money penalty for an unknown violation unless it corrects the violation within 30 days of discovery.

Read the entire article here.

Read the full article here.

He also notes:

While this attack is better than brute force — and some cryptographers will describe the algorithm as “broken” because of it — it is still far, far beyond our capabilities of computation. The attack is, and probably forever will be, theoretical. But remember: attacks always get better, they never get worse. Others will continue to improve on these numbers. While there’s no reason to panic, no reason to stop using AES, no reason to insist that NIST choose another encryption standard, this will certainly be a problem for some of the AES-based SHA-3 candidate hash functions.

Read the entire post here.

A new study by Lopez Research, founded by President Maribel Lopez, a former Forrester Research analyst tackles this question, looking at these three top competitors in the smart phone arena.  The study was broken down into three categories — device, network, and transmission.  It gives a score of 0 to 4 (highest) to each competitor for each category.

Click here for the full article and rankings.

An article from SC Magazine discussing the report is here.

The Symantec report in PDF format is here.

Read the article here.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act sets aside $20 billion for direct funding and incentives for providers who implement electronic health records and use them in a “meaningful” way beginning in 2010. However, the bill leaves it to the Health and Human Services Secretary to determine what kinds of actions constitute “meaningful use,” and some analysts say that ambiguity built into the law could actually delay the lengthy acquisition and implementation process.

For the entire article, go here.