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Former Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science Board Member Pleads Guilty

The Chicago Tribune<a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-weinstein-guilty-plea-11-mar11,0,3203453.story"> published </a>a reminder about a scandal from a few years ago that got little other than local attention at the time, <blockquote> Dr. Robert Weinstein, 63, of Northbrook faces 2 to 3 years in prison in connection with a complex fraud scheme in which he and Levine cheated Northshore Supporting Organization, a charity the two controlled. The charity supported the work of the Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science, which lost a combined $6 million in the scheme. Both men sat on the board of the North Chicago medical school. Weinstein, a self-described private investor for the last decade, admitted that he understated his income by $3 million on his 2003 tax return when he actually made $9.2 million. Weinstein, who is scheduled to be sentenced on July 1, didn't agree to cooperate in the federal probe. Weinstein was indicted last June on charges of wire and mail fraud and making false statements. But last week prosecutors charged him with a single tax fraud count after he agreed to plead guilty. The Tribune first reported in 2004 that the $6 million was missing from the charity. Not only did the school lose scholarship money but it also unknowingly paid a school construction contractor $1 million in kickbacks, according to court records. That money allegedly went to Sven Philip-Sorenson, a European businessman who paid it to the medical school as part of the scheme. Philip-Sorenson, who has not been charged, was a director of a Chicago-based health maintenance organization when Levine was a major stockholder of the company. </blockquote> I would submit that in retrospect, having two convicted felons on a medical school's board of trustees suggests a major governance problem. Yet this case, like others we have discussed involving very bad behavior by leaders of academic health care organizations, caused nary an echo outside its local area. Until we acknowledge that bad, sometimes horribly bad leadership and governance of respected health care organizations is possible, little will be done to prevent more bad leaders from damaging more organizations.

Former Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science Board Member Pleads Guilty

The Chicago Tribune published a reminder about a scandal from a few years ago that got little other than local attention at the time, Dr. R...

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Disruptive Innovators at Healthcare Renewal: Disruptive to whom, exactly?

The fascinating site "HealthMemes: Tracking Conversations About the Future of Health" at <a href="http://in3.org/health/" target="blank">http://in3.org/health/</a> identifies latest trends in health care disruptive innovations (innovations that go "outside the box"). I recently found out they've been linking my own writing as per a review of their <a href="http://in3.org/health/archive.php" target="blank">archives.</a> A number of the posts they link to over the past year or two have been mine or that of Dr. Roy Poses of Brown here at Healthcare Renewal blog, along with writings from approximately <a href="http://in3.org/health/sources.php">100 other sources</a>. The first "Permalink: attention should be paid to these posts" in the middle column of their homepage is mine, about endemic "overconfidence" in computing. My writings have also been noted at <a href="http://healthcare.zdnet.com/?p=1848" target="blank">ZDNet Health </a> by business journalist Dana Blankenhorn. I ponder the use of the term "disruptive innovation." Perhaps it's itself disruptive to ask the question: "to whom is such innovation 'disruptive', and for what reasons?" From <a href="http://www.thefreedictionary.com/disruptive">thefreedictionary</a><a href="http://www.thefreedictionary.com/disruptive">.com</a>: <blockquote style="font-family:arial;">disruptive - characterized by unrest or disorder or insubordination; "effects of the struggle will be violent and disruptive"; "riotous times"; "these troubled areas"; "the tumultuous years of his administration"; "a turbulent and unruly childhood" Synonyms:<a href="http://www.thefreedictionary.com/tumultuous"> tumultuous</a>, <a href="http://www.thefreedictionary.com/turbulent">turbulent</a>, <a href="http://www.thefreedictionary.com/riotous">riotous</a>, <a href="http://www.thefreedictionary.com/troubled">troubled</a> Antonyms (from thesaurus.com): <a class="theColor" href="http://thesaurus.reference.com/browse/calming">calming</a>, disciplined, settling, <a class="theColor" href="http://thesaurus.reference.com/browse/soothing">soothing</a>, <a class="theColor" href="http://thesaurus.reference.com/browse/well-behaved">well-behaved</a> </blockquote> On the topic of to whom ideas and writings such as mine and other HC Renewal contributors are "disruptive": If there are disruptive innovators, then there must be a whole taxonomy of people who are not disruptive innovators. The taxonomy might go something like this: <ul style="font-family: arial;"><li>disruptive innovator</li><li>soothing, tradition-bound innovator</li><li>disruptive imitator (the antonym of innovator)</li><li>tradition-bound imitator</li><li>disruptive non-contributor</li><li>tradition-bound non-contributor</li><li>disruptive demolisher</li><li>tradition-bound demolisher (perhaps an oxymoron)</li></ul> Disruptive innovators, thus, are disruptive to the interests of a wide variety of others. The problems with tradition-bound innovators is that they tend not to break with politically correct custom and tradition to speak up when their innovations are misappropriated or misused. The mainstream healthcare IT community largely fits that criterion, resulting in what Harvard professors Jerome Groopman and Pamela Hartzband in today's Wall Street Journal called "<a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123681586452302125.html">Obama's $80 Billion Exaggeration</a>" regarding an industry, HIT, hijacked from the pioneers and morphed into a runaway wagon train to a gold rush that considers clinicians the enemy of profit. Incidentally, the points made by Groopman and Hartzband parallel the <a href="http://www.ischool.drexel.edu/faculty/ssilverstein/medinfo.htm">points I've been making about HIT</a> since 1998 and that other disruptive innovators in Medical Informatics were making long before that. It's good to see an entire half page on these issues in a mainstream news source, finally. Disruptive imitators and tradition-bound imitators propagate the good ideas of innovators, often taking credit themselves. I've worked with several <a href="http://www.ischool.drexel.edu/faculty/ssilverstein/failurecases/?loc=cases&sloc=Cardiology%20story">CIO's</a> and <a href="http://www.ischool.drexel.edu/faculty/ssilverstein/failurecases/?loc=cases&sloc=%5Eyaleinf">professors</a> who fit the former category precisely. I believe many in our medical leadership fall into the tradition-bound innovator and imitator categories, thus allowing their bondage to tradition to faciliate what has been described on Healthcare Renewal as the <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2006/07/anechoic-effect-explained.html" style="font-family: arial;">Anechoic Effect</a> regarding healthcare malfeasance and other abuses. Disruptive non contributors simply make trouble, and tradition-bound non contributors are those the Little Red Hen had to deal with. Then there are the disruptive demolishers. These are the people with net-negative value to an endeavor or workgroup, who are only good at destroying the work of innovators of both stripes. Their demolition often serves their own (sociopathic) interests. Corporate empire builders who have often risen above their level of competence, dishonest speculators, and other parasitic character types fit into this class. Finally, it is clear our current society whose economic system and industries have been brought to their knees, could benefit from paying significant attention to true disruptive innovators. Corporate CEO's, are you paying attention? The disruptive demolition men and women who've led us to this point, while tradition bound others sat back and did little, need some competition. -- SS Addendum: it occurs to me after reading Ignacio Valdes' post "<a href="http://linuxmednews.com/1236901534/index_html">On Medieval Barbering, Wal-Mart and One Size Fits All With Health IT</a>" at Open Source Health IT proponent <a href="http://linuxmednews.com/">LinuxMedNews.com</a> that Open Source Software is a "disruptive innovation" and its authors "disruptive innovators."

Disruptive Innovators at Healthcare Renewal: Disruptive to whom, exactly?

The fascinating site "HealthMemes: Tracking Conversations About the Future of Health" at http://in3.org/health/ identifies lat...

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Here comes Google Voice

We've just started to release a preview of Google Voice, an application that helps you better manage your voice communications. Google Voice will be available initially to existing users of GrandCentral, a service we acquired in July of 2007. The new application improves the way you use your phone. You can get transcripts of your voicemail (see the video below) and archive and search all of the SMS text messages you send and receive. You can also use the service to make low-priced international calls and easily access <a href="http://www.google.com/goog411/">Goog-411</a> directory assistance. <object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/oFVXAqFNgic&hl=en&fs=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/oFVXAqFNgic&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="344" width="425"></embed></object> As you may know, GrandCentral offers many great features, including a single number to ring your home, work, and mobile phones, a central voicemail inbox that you could access on the web, and the ability to screen calls by listening in live as callers leave a voicemail. You'll find these features, and more, in the Google Voice preview. Check out the <a href="https://www.google.com/voice/about">features page</a> for videos and more information on how these features work. If you're already using GrandCentral, over the next couple days, you will receive instructions in your GrandCentral inbox on how to start using Google Voice. We'll be opening it up to others soon, so if you'd like to be notified when that happens, please <a href="http://services.google.com/fb/forms/googlevoiceinvite">send us</a> your email address. Posted by Craig Walker, Vincent Paquet, and Wesley Chan, Google Voice Product Managers

Here comes Google Voice

We've just started to release a preview of Google Voice, an application that helps you better manage your voice communications. Google V...

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Google Reader starts a conversation

I'm a big fan of sharing (might be all those lessons I learned in kindergarten). And when I share something, it's always nice to get a response like "Thanks!" or "That was the funniest thing I've ever read!" Whether you're 5 or 50, you're more likely to share other <a href="http://www.google.com/reader/shared/user/15650323335570657892/label/cool">awesome things</a> if you know people are excited to hear what you have to say. <a href="https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?hl=en&nui=1&service=reader&continue=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Freader">Google Reader</a> makes it easy to read and share your favorite articles, blogs, and videos. In the last year, we've added new features to Reader like the ability to <a href="http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2008/08/pick-your-friends.html">choose friends</a> and <a href="http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2008/05/share-anything-anytime-anywhere.html">share items with a note</a>. But it did occur to us that the sharing process was incomplete -- there was no way to have conversations with friends about all those shared items. That's why we're excited to announce that starting today, your friends will be able to reply to shared items with comments, allowing you to have conversations with your friends right inside Reader. Comments can only be seen by friends of the person who originally shared the item. <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilrhy0E7OMtC6FtChbXFBWrFcQXFqdC_Hvb12vQw1yS7ayDIE8x-43cuEgbxy45F3NKL5_XNIjTIlqJ6WWB7D81U7iWNoUoppqKYjnX66FFKV3m929Qs5rCYyBMB1yWHtFtRYjG9oq-lKX/s1600-h/pancake-instructions.png" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5312058712813090546" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilrhy0E7OMtC6FtChbXFBWrFcQXFqdC_Hvb12vQw1yS7ayDIE8x-43cuEgbxy45F3NKL5_XNIjTIlqJ6WWB7D81U7iWNoUoppqKYjnX66FFKV3m929Qs5rCYyBMB1yWHtFtRYjG9oq-lKX/s400/pancake-instructions.png" style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 393px; height: 400px;" /></a> <div>To get started, click "Comment View" at the top of your Friends' shared items in Reader, or just write a comment by clicking "Add comment" at the bottom of any shared item. For more details on how comments work, check out the <a href="http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2009/03/google-reader-is-your-new-watercooler.html">Google Reader blog</a>. Posted by Dolapo Falola, Software Engineer</div>

Google Reader starts a conversation

I'm a big fan of sharing (might be all those lessons I learned in kindergarten). And when I share something, it's always nice to get...

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Wal-Mart to market Electronic Medical Records? Has Medicine Gone Bananas?

No, it's not April 1 yet. While I bought the very netbook on which I am composing this essay at Wal Mart, along with the shirt I'm wearing and the astronomy magazine I will soon read, considering the exploratory nature of clinical IT and the expertise needed to install, manage, maintain, train, customize, remediate, and back up EHR's, as well as the history of <a href="http://www.ischool.drexel.edu/faculty/ssilverstein/failurecases/">health IT misadventure on a national scale</a>, I will only provide a few comments on the following, including this pithy one: Rotsa Ruck. <blockquote style="font-family:arial;">Wal-Mart to market EHR system to small practices. On the front page of its Business Day section, the <a href="http://links.mkt211.com/ctt?kn=71&m=3958340&r=MjIyMjczNDU4NgS2&b=0&j=MTEwNzg5OTk3S0&mt=1&rt=0">New York Times</a> (3/11, B1, Lohr) reports, "Wal-Mart Stores is striding into the market for electronic health records [EHRs], seeking to bring the technology into the mainstream for physicians in small offices, where most of America's doctors practice medicine." Partnering "its Sam's Club division with Dell for computers and eClinicalWorks, a fast-growing private company, for software," Wal-Mart aims to "make the technology more accessible and affordable, undercutting rival health information technology suppliers by as much as half." In doing so, the company will offer a "package deal of hardware, software, installation, maintenance and training." The package will "be made available this spring" for "under $25,000 for the first physician in a practice, and about $10,000 for each additional doctor." According to experts, "traditional health technology suppliers...have tended to shun the small physician offices because it has been costly to sell to them." But, "Wal-Mart...has the potential to bring not only lower costs but also an efficient distribution channel" through the "200,000 healthcare providers" among its Sam's Club members. </blockquote> Next, McDonald's. Can I have an EMR with that cheeseburger? (Oh, wait. McDonald's already <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2006/07/pfizer-brings-life-to-my-if-youve-run.html">cornered the Pharma market</a>.) Seriously, all I see with yet another intermediary between the vendors and the physician is more money taken out of healthcare and given to yet more nonmedical for-profits, and this for a technology our own National Research Council <a href="http://www.ischool.drexel.edu/faculty/ssilverstein/failurecases/?loc=cases&sloc=NRC">tells us does not meet clinicians' needs</a>, and may in its present form actually hamper healthcare improvement. Walmart has expertise in supporting ultra-specialized, cross-disciplinary enduser technologies such as an EMR like I have expertise in, say, nuclear engineering or high energy physics. (Maybe less, as I took physics in high school and college and did quite well in them.) It may be just me, but I've never thought of Walmart as the place to support ultra high tech virtual clinical devices such as EMR's. Sell cheap imported stethoscopes for blood pressure measurement, yes. Sell a device that our National Research Council says is not quite ready for prime time clinician use, that's a bit more iffy. Then, what would a Walmart EMR department look like? Shrink wrapped Acme Anvil EMR boxes stacked to the ceiling on warehouse shelves? Huge banners proclaiming "PRICE DROP: TODAY ONLY, $23,999.00?" What? <div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYzqqMseHktA_gweGeuaFoTdXGzhBCA8qDYlFSFuGVQpRJ2CRQLjo-sfQFnqAnBM5FJKqZYws2x7ULmPpYLd6G-vIgveDVrApZJvabBw04raCy6DlLkTqt4SCqeU84pjcrXmZ7VfygROT-/s1600-h/acme+catalog.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5312303891533916658" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYzqqMseHktA_gweGeuaFoTdXGzhBCA8qDYlFSFuGVQpRJ2CRQLjo-sfQFnqAnBM5FJKqZYws2x7ULmPpYLd6G-vIgveDVrApZJvabBw04raCy6DlLkTqt4SCqeU84pjcrXmZ7VfygROT-/s320/acme+catalog.jpg" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 238px; height: 320px;" /></a>Price drop: Acme Anvil EMR, regularly $25,000. Special today, only $23,999! </div> Would it not be cheaper for the HIT vendors to simply post billboards for their products and services in small towns across America? This entire scheme reminds me of the cockamamie dot-com boom, free mortgages, and arcane financial instruments that have recently caused certain tectonic shifts in our society. With perhaps a touch of the Ol' West snake oil salesman entrepreneurship thrown in. Finally, why WalMart? RadioShack is also widespread and have a technology focus. They were a computer pioneer, and even used to have their own computer centers. Even Best Buys has far more extensive computer departments, including Apple in this area, and a knowledgeable sales team and technical "<a href="http://www.geeksquad.com/">Geek Squad</a>" to help support IT. I can't even believe I'm writing such things. Medicine has truly gone bananas when such issues even need to be written about. -- SS

Wal-Mart to market Electronic Medical Records? Has Medicine Gone Bananas?

No, it's not April 1 yet. While I bought the very netbook on which I am composing this essay at Wal Mart, along with the shirt I'm w...

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Serious leak of top secret classified information: physicians find health IT clunky and unresponsive to their needs

In news that must have been leaked by anonymous spies after being kept at a level of "Top Secret" and not acted upon for decades, Healthcare IT News reports on the <a href="http://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/docs-may-be-using-it-they-dont-love-it">healthcare IT user experience</a>: <blockquote> Healthcare IT News (3/10, Merrill) reported, a survey conducted by the American College of Physician Executives found "that although more physician leaders are using healthcare information technology, they still find it clunky and unresponsive to their needs." The survey of 1,000 ACPE members "revealed that the biggest source of frustration is a lack of input from physicians when designing and implementing healthcare information technology systems. Many said involving clinicians at the planning stages would pre-empt many of the problems that crop up later." [ya think? -ed.] One respondent noted that "systems are chosen according to administrative criteria rather than what physicians need." </blockquote>The Top Secret material has this been revealed. Call in the FBI ... Seriously, it almost seems there must have been an industry agreement to keep this information a secret before now, since people in my field, Medical Informatics, have been writing this for a long time, decades in fact. Yet nothing much has occurred as a result of those writings. In my case, a decade. See my HIT difficulties site at <a href="http://tinyurl.com/hit-misadventure" title="http://tinyurl.com/hit-misadventure">http://tinyurl.com/hit-misadventure</a> and my recent posts on health IT's mission hostile user experiences at <a href="http://tinyurl.com/hostileuserexper" title="http://tinyurl.com/hostileuserexper">http://tinyurl.com/hostileuserexper</a> . In other cases, people in this field have been writing on this for not a decade, but several decades. As far back as 1969, EMR and Medical Informatics pioneer Donald A. B. Lindberg, M.D., now Director of the U.S. National Library of Medicine at NIH, made the following observation. He wrote that "computer engineering experts per se have virtually no idea of the real problems of medical or even hospital practice, and furthermore have consistently underestimated the complexity of the problems…in no cases can [building appropriate clinical information systems] be done, simply because they have not been defined with the physician as the continuing major contributor and user of the information" (Lindberg DAB: Computer Failures and Successes, Southern Medical Bulletin 1969;57:18-21). Only an industry lost in arrogance and unaccountability, and physicians demoralized into a state of (as one lawyer termed it) "<a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2007/10/physicians-learned-helplessness.html">learned helplessness</a>" could create such a ludicrous and in fact dangerous scenario, after 30+ years of effort.Was the industry learning nothing during that time? Physicians should refuse to use Health IT that has not undergone documented, rigorous user experience testing and that might have hundreds or thousands of unremediated defects and deficiencies that healthcare systems may be contractually obligated not to disclose. Interestingly, at yesterday's <a href="http://www.burnesscommunications.com/new/new_show.htm?doc_id=824981">Health Affairs-sponsored health IT briefing</a> "Stimulating Health Information Technology" in Washington, DC, kicking off a special HIT-focused issue of Health Affairs (Mar/Apr 2009), the only speaker who even mentioned the deficient health IT user experience and the need to improve it was self-described "only a software guy" Peter Neupert of Microsoft. Mr. Neupert mentioned the issue almost in passing during his talk. When I spoke to him afterward, he did not seem to understand the criticality of the point he made, even when I reminded him of how much time and resource Microsoft devotes to improving the user experience of its operating systems. In fact, the sine qua non of health IT is the enabler of healthcare, the clinician. Health IT that presents a poor user experience is not optimally helping healthcare enablers, nor, I might add, healthcare facilitators (i.e., everyone else in healthcare who does not see patients), healthcare payers, and finally the "customers" of healthcare, namely, all of us.It troubles me that in this special issue of Health Affairs, even sober articles critical of HIT in its present form carried subtitles somewhat detached from reality. Jos Aart and Ross Koppel's article "Implementation of Computerized Order Entry in Seven Countries" carried the curious subtitle "Although hospital's uptake of CPOE is generally low, nothing diminishes CPOE's promise for patient safety and cost savings."Nothing at all, except these, as mentioned in the article itself, starting off with our old friend: <ul><li>Poorly designed user experience hindering clinician performance of certain tasks</li><li>Poorly designed, bull in a china shop, fatiguing decision support alerting systems</li><li>Increased time to enter orders</li><li>Decreased communications among doctors and nurses</li><li>Low levels of integration with clinician workflow and with other HIT</li><li>Unanticipated outcomes (of a negative nature), which were found to be the rule, rather than the exception</li></ul>I asked Koppel about the ebullient subtitle. To the best of his memory, he did not recall writing it.Dr. Farzad Mostashari of New York City’s <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/business/01unbox.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Mostashari&st=cse" target="_self">Primary Care Information Project </a>(PCIP) described how 25% of the physicians mandated to use EHR "hate it", with many others suffering significantly longer workdays as servants of the computer data overlord. I am sad to say that the overall attitude at the Health Affairs meeting, with a few exceptions such as from privacy rights advocate <a href="http://www.patientprivacyrights.org/site/PageServer?pagename=Board_Of_Directors">Dr. Deborah Peel</a> of <a href="http://www.patientprivacyrights.org/">patientprivacyrights.org</a>, seemed one of physicians as indentured servants. The purpose of HIT as expressed seemed to be to make the indentured service better and cheaper, with little thought given to the life and comfort of the servant, the optimal leveraging of his or her training, experience and judgment, or the usability of his or her accouterments.Physicians need to extend the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrygian_cap">Phrygian cap</a> and stand up for a far better HIT user experience than is provided now. <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwM4z0uWuYXcV-9UrcqiNEzV3JS3nJu2SHMugu3ka0ypRyC7EBNA5rNtPSUASPoyPt8yifiTHvjtkbtKD2W9dFP_ebJ6QVv8eQhp3Dn2uf0hrqzy7Fn0LRQX0MdvEIGtMCjy0L4mB_JR2A/s1600-h/1794_liberty_cap_large_cent_obv.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5314239358940228210" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwM4z0uWuYXcV-9UrcqiNEzV3JS3nJu2SHMugu3ka0ypRyC7EBNA5rNtPSUASPoyPt8yifiTHvjtkbtKD2W9dFP_ebJ6QVv8eQhp3Dn2uf0hrqzy7Fn0LRQX0MdvEIGtMCjy0L4mB_JR2A/s320/1794_liberty_cap_large_cent_obv.jpg" style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 162px; height: 170px;" /></a> -- SS

Serious leak of top secret classified information: physicians find health IT clunky and unresponsive to their needs

In news that must have been leaked by anonymous spies after being kept at a level of "Top Secret" and not acted upon for decades, ...

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Making ads more interesting

At Google, we believe that ads are a valuable source of information — one that can connect people to the advertisers offering products, services and ideas that interest them. By making ads more relevant, and improving the connection between advertisers and our users, we can create more value for everyone. Users get more useful ads, and these more relevant ads generate higher returns for advertisers and publishers. Advertising is the lifeblood of the digital economy: it helps support the content and services we all enjoy for free online today, including much of our news, search, email, video and social networks. That's why Google has worked hard to create technology that makes the advertising on our own sites, and those of our partners, as relevant as possible. To date, we have shown ads based mainly on what your interests are at a specific moment. So if you search for [digital camera] on Google, you'll get ads related to digital cameras. If you are visiting the website of one of our <a href="http://adsense.google.com/">AdSense</a> partners, you would see ads based on the content of the page. For example, if you're reading a sports page on a newspaper website, we might show ads for running shoes. Or we can show ads for home maintenance services alongside a YouTube video instructing you on how to perform a simple repair. There are some situations, however, where a keyword or the content of a web page simply doesn't give us enough information to serve highly relevant ads. We think we can make online advertising even more relevant and useful by using additional information about the websites people visit. Today we are launching "interest-based" advertising as a beta test on our partner sites and on YouTube. These ads will associate categories of interest — say sports, gardening, cars, pets — with your browser, based on the types of sites you visit and the pages you view. We may then use those interest categories to show you more relevant text and display ads. We believe there is real value to seeing ads about the things that interest you. If, for example, you love adventure travel and therefore visit adventure travel sites, Google could show you more ads for activities like hiking trips to Patagonia or African safaris. While interest-based advertising can infer your interest in adventure travel from the websites you visit, you can also choose your favorite categories, or tell us which categories you don't want to see ads for. Interest-based advertising also helps advertisers tailor ads for you based on your previous interactions with them, such as visits to their websites. So if you visit an online sports store, you may later be shown ads on other websites offering you a discount on running shoes during that store's upcoming sale. Our advertisers and publisher partners have been asking us for a long time to offer interest-based advertising. Advertisers need an efficient way to reach those who are most interested in their products and services. And publishers can generate more revenue when they connect advertisers to interested audiences. This kind of tailored advertising does raise questions about user choice and privacy — questions the whole online ad industry has a responsibility to answer. Many companies already provide interest-based advertising and they address these issues in different ways. For our part, we're launching interest-based advertising with three important features that demonstrate our commitment to transparency and user choice. <ul><li>Transparency - We already clearly label most of the ads provided by Google on the AdSense partner network and on YouTube. You can click on the labels to get more information about how we serve ads, and the information we use to show you ads. This year we will expand the range of ad formats and publishers that display labels that provide a way to learn more and make choices about Google's ad serving.</li><li>Choice - We have built a tool called <a href="http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/">Ads Preferences Manager</a>, which lets you view, delete, or add interest categories associated with your browser so that you can receive ads that are more interesting to you.</li><li>Control - You can always opt out of the advertising cookie for the AdSense partner network <a href="http://www.google.com/privacy_ads.html">here</a>. To make sure that your opt-out decision is respected (and isn't deleted if you clear the cookies from your browser), we have designed a <a href="http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/plugin">plug-in</a> for your browser that maintains your opt-out choice. </li></ul>To find out more about what Google is doing in this important area, please visit our <a href="http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2009/03/giving-consumers-control-over-ads.html">Public Policy blog</a> and <a href="http://www.google.com/privacy">Privacy Center</a>. Keyword advertising has been so successful because it's useful to users, advertisers and publishers — everyone's interests are aligned. We believe that interest-based ads will create the same virtuous cycle, by giving users more relevant ads, while generating higher returns for advertisers and publishers. Posted by Susan Wojcicki, VP, Product Management

Making ads more interesting

At Google, we believe that ads are a valuable source of information — one that can connect people to the advertisers offering products, serv...

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