Redescribing Health Privacy: The Importance of Health Policy

Current conversations about health information policy often tend to be based on three broad assumptions. First, many perceive a tension between regulation and innovation. We often hear that privacy regulations are keeping researchers, companies, and providers from aggregating the data they need to promote innovation. Second, aggregation of fragmented data is seen as a threat to its proper regulation, creating the risk of breaches and other misuse. Third, a prime directive for technicians and policymakers is to give patients ever more granular methods of control over data. This article questions and complicates those assumptions, which I deem (respectively) the Privacy Threat to Research, the Aggregation Threat to Privacy, and the Control Solution. This article is also intended to enrich our concepts of “fragmentation” and “integration” in health care. There is a good deal of sloganeering around “firewalls” and “vertical integration” as idealized implementations of “fragmentation” and “integration” (respective). The problem, though, is that terms like these (as well as “disruption”) are insufficiently normative to guide large-scale health system change. They describe, but they do not adequately prescribe. By examining those instances where: a) regulation promotes innovation, and b) increasing (some kinds of) availability of data actually enhances security, confidentiality, and privacy protections, this article attempts to give a richer account of the ethics of fragmentation and integration in the U.S. health care system. But, it also has a darker side, highlighting the inevitable conflicts of values created in a “reputation society” driven by stigmatizing social sorting systems. Personal data control may exacerbate social inequalities. Data aggregation may increase both our powers of research and our vulnerability to breach. The health data policymaking landscape of the next decade will feature a series of intractable conflicts between these important social values

Understanding voluntary organizations : guidelines for donors

Voluntary development organizations have demonstrated substantial comparatiave advantage in developing countries - especially in their ability to innovate, adapt to local conditions, and reach and work with poor and difficult to reach populations. These capabilities are a function of their values, special skills, small size, limited resources, flexibility, and freedom from political constraints. Their weaknesses are a function of many of the same characteristics - particularly their value commitments, small size, independence, and lack of administrative rigidity. The authors explain that the strongest Voluntary Organizations (VOs) and People's Organizations (POs) respond to more than financial incentives. Their strength lies in the fact that they are not the same as government organizations or businesses. At the same time, they are not immune to financial incentives, which if wrongly applied can destroy the voluntarism of all but the most strongly aware of VOs and POs.Environmental Economics&Policies,Early Child and Children's Health,Health Economics&Finance,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Poverty Assessment

Information and Communication Technology in Child Welfare: The Need for Culture-Centered Computing

This article discusses the introduction of information and communication technology (ICT) in the California child welfare system. Drawing from anthropological literature, the authors emphasize the role of work practice and context associated with new ICT implementation. This case study uses a documentary- historical approach to analyze interviews with 386 workers who used the Child Welfare Services/Case Management System (CWS/CMS) between 1997 and 2005. Data show the implementation of CWS/CMS impacted the work practice of the welfare system. The authors recommend culture-centered computing for future developments and upgrades of ICT in child welfare

Collaborative Multidisciplinary Design in Virtual Environments

International audienceThe application designers can usually define their own “virtual environments” by selecting the appropriate computing resources required, or reuse and compose existing environments. The approach is generic by allowing various application domains to benefit from potential hardware and software resources located on remote computing facilities in a simple and intuitive way. The computing resources are defined by services made available as sets of standardized interfaces performing specific tasks: application workflow, input data streams, output visualization tools, monitoring facilities, etc. Services can be composed and hierarchically defined. Transparent access to heterogeneous hardware and software operating systems is guaranteed. An aeroelasticity example in airliner design is given

Public Health Rep

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A knowledge services roadmay for online learning

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering; and, (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, Technology and Policy Program, 2005.Includes bibliographical references (p. 76-78).In today's society, there is a need for organizations to have a robust knowledge infrastructure in place, so that they can create or acquire knowledge; store knowledge; disseminate knowledge, and protect and manage their knowledge assets. However, with advances in the publishing media, our ability to generate information has far exceeded our abilities to find, review and understand it, thus leading to "Information Overload". Information overload refers to the inability to extract needed knowledge from existing information due to the volume of information, or lack of understanding of information and its whereabouts, or efficient ways to locate relevant information. These issues could be addressed by having efficient Knowledge Management Systems/Knowledge Services, so that people can create and understand available information, and have services to help them learn effectively and make better decisions. To tackle the new information needs, the use of technologies such as Weblog Services (weblog-enabled knowledge services) offer opportunities for decentralized knowledge creation and dissemination; as such tools put the authors in charge of knowledge creation process without any administration-enforced policies. Learning environments are also typically characterized by challenges such as barriers to use, quality control and relevance issues, or issues of credibility of information. These issues are effectively tackled by weblog services since weblogs are often open source and need no training for authoring. In addition, favorite blogs act as information filters or "bird dogs" and point at useful information. Feedback incorporated in weblog services makes people react and learn "interactively" and also enhances credibility and trust in information.(cont.) Weblog services can also share published content through the process of Content Syndication, and thus offer an insight into knowledge assets in the timeliest of ways. This thesis report describes certain weblog services implementations carried out at MIT. Results of such implementations have emphasized the applications of such weblog (knowledge) services in knowledge sharing and online learning. However, there are certain issues to be addressed in weblog services such as privacy and intellectual property issues, as well as resolution of organizational tussles in the domain of content syndication standards.by Anand Rajagopal.S.M

Lecture recording in higher education: Risky business or evolving open practice

Reports on a survey into the copyright and intellectual property (IPR) policies of UK higher education institutions with regards to lecture recording. The practice of using institutional semi-automated lecture recording systems is becoming mainstream with 71% of institutions reporting using it in 2016 (UCISA, 2016). However, these systems raise a number of issues related to copyright and IPR that in some cases are documented in specific policy documents. Issues that arise include the consent that is obtained from academic staff, the ownership of the resulting outputs and responsibility and advice given for the use of third party content in the lectures. These issues are also often linked to, or conflated with wider ethical issues such as identity, privacy and academic freedom. The findings from the survey are presented alongside a policy analysis of IPR documents and policies from 11 institutions. These are compared to the guidance provided by Jisc (2015). The findings from the survey reveal that most institutions are still developing their IPR policy with regards to lecture recording, that many institutions seek consent from lecturers, but there is an increasing move towards making lecture recording opt-out as opposed to opt-in. The survey revealed in 94% of cases the lecturers or presenter is responsible for any third party content contained within their lecture and while institutions do offer advice about dealing with third party content, much of it is delivered in a relatively passive way, through agreeing to use the system or by information made available online in guides. The findings from the policy analysis suggest that those institutions with a high level of institutional control tend to have a higher level of comprehensiveness of approach towards lecture recording. Additionally the institutions that provide a higher level of support for copyright advice, have a tendency towards open practice and higher levels of appetite for risk. Good practice advice for institutions and recommendations for further research are presented as part of this study

The BG News March 29, 1999

The BGSU campus student newspaper March 29, 1999. Volume 82 - Issue 123https://scholarworks.bgsu.edu/bg-news/7471/thumbnail.jp