The Bipartisan Policy Center released a report last Friday — Transforming Health Care: The Role of Health IT — emphasizing the critically important role that health information technology plays “in supporting new models of care and payment designed to achieve health care’s triple aim” of improving health, improving the experience of care for patients and families, and reducing the cost of care. In the report — whose contributors include leading health care experts from around the country — the Bipartisan Policy Center concludes, “despite the introduction of IT to nearly every other aspect of modern life, the U.S. health care system remains largely paper-based.” The report identifies six common attributes regarding health […]

USA TODAY is out this week with an interesting article featuring the work of MacArthur Foundation Fellow Constance Steinkuehler, an Assistant Professor in the Educational Communications & Technology program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison — who’s on assignment for 18 months as a Senior Policy Analyst at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to study video games that improve health, education, civic engagement and the environment, among other areas. According to the USA TODAY piece: If you’re training for a new job someday soon with a video game controller in your hands, thank Constance Steinkuehler.   This summer, when your kids’ favorite science museum boasts a new augmented-reality […]

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Microsystems Technology Office (MTO) has announced a Proposers Day for a new program — Power Efficiency Revolution for Embedded Computing Technologies (PERFECT) — to introduce the research community to the PERFECT vision and goals, and to facilitate interaction and coordination among prospective PIs and technology developers. The Proposers Day will take place on February 15, 2012, in Arlington, VA. The PERFECT program seeks to “provide the technologies and techniques to overcome the power efficiency barriers that currently constrain embedded computing systems capabilities and limit the potential of future embedded systems.” Importantly, a key component of this is resiliency, an area for which a recent CCC visioning […]

The Institute of Medicine (IOM) and National Academy of Engineering (NAE) have partnered to launch the “Go Viral to Improve Health” Health Data Collegiate Challenge, designed to spur undergraduate and graduate students to create health-related apps. The contest is aimed at students pursuing degrees in health, engineering, and computer science. And the prize for the winning team is $10,000. According to the Challenge website (after the jump):

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is out this month with a broad agency announcement soliciting “innovation research proposals in support of the development of new software-based biometric modalities” that go beyond the current focus of passwords for identity validation: The current standard method for validating a user’s identity for authentication on an information system requires humans to do something that is inherently difficult: create, remember, and manage long, complex passwords. Moreover, as long as the session remains active, typical systems incorporate no mechanisms to verify that the user originally authenticated is the user still in control of the keyboard. Thus, unauthorized individuals may improperly obtain extended access to […]

An interesting interview with Alex Szalay, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University — about data-intensive computing — in Datanami this week: When it comes to thought leadership that bridges the divides between scientific investigation, technology and the tools and applications that make research possible … Szalay is one of the first scientists that springs to mind.   Szalay, whom we will dub “Dr. Data” for reasons that will explained in a moment, is a distinguished professor in the university’s Department of Physics and Astronomy. Aside from his role as a scientist — an end user of high performance computing hardware and applications — he also serves director of the JHU […]