Sindya N. Bhanoo

Microsoft engineers imitate "Hole in the Wall" experiment

My piece today from The Standard:

Give an man a computer and he may surprise you, some Microsoft researchers in Bangalore, India are finding.

As an experiment, the researchers set up a spare computer terminal with Internet access in their Bangalore office and allowed low-wage workers, such as cleaning staff, to access it freely during their off-hours.

Many of the workers previously had little or no computer training began surfing the Internet, setting up e-mail accounts and joining social networking sites. And along the way, they tried to help each other.

The researchers reported that "broad gains were seen in confidence, self-esteem, and basic digital literacy, while a few individuals experienced improvements in second-language (English) proficiency and career opportunities."

“We conducted the study in a city office,” Aishwarya Ratan, one of the researchers working on the project, told On Windows. “The support staff that work there – housekeepers, security guards, drivers -- have incomes as low as US$100 a month, and despite the fact that they work next to computers all day, never have a chance to interact with them.”

Individuals taught one another what they had figured out about e-mail and and accessing videos on the Web. After several months, individuals were doing more complex tasks, such as setting up personal accounts on Orkut.

The Microsoft project, called Kelsa+, is inspired by the "hole in the wall" experiment by Sugata Mitra, who heads research and development at NIIT, a computer software and training company in New Delhi India.

Mitra set up an Internet console outside his office, which faces a slum, as an experiment. He gave no further instructions. Within a day, slum children who had never used a computer before had figured out how to point, click and browse the Internet.

The Microsoft researchers hope to continue their research and see Kelsa+ grow into a program that offers free, unrestricted access to Internet-connected PCs for low-income office workers in developing countries. It is, they believe, a simple and inexpensive way to help bridge the digital divide.

Virginia website hacked, patient information deleted

My latest for The Standard on EHR and privacy breaches:

Hackers last week attacked a Virginia state website that pharmacists use to track prescription drug abuse. The hackers deleted the information of more than 8 million patients and replaced the site's homepage with a ransom note demanding $10 million.

The ransom note on the Virginia Department of Health Professions website read:

"I have your [expletive] In *my* possession, right now, are 8,257,378 patient records and a total of 35,548,087 prescriptions. Also, I made an encrypted backup and deleted the original. Unfortunately for Virginia, their backups seem to have gone missing, too. Uhoh :(For $10 million, I will gladly send along the password."

"There is a criminal investigation under way by federal and state authorities, and we take the information security very serious," Sandra Whitley Ryals, director of Virginia's Department of Health Professions told The Washington Post.

The database that was hacked is the state's prescription monitoring program, which helps pharmacists monitor and prevent illegal prescription activity, such as prescription forgery and "doctor shopping," where one patient might be visiting different doctors and pharmacies to obtain certain prescribed drugs. Virginia is one 32 states to maintain such a database.

The investigation is being handled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

"At this point we're not commenting on the progress of the case but we're working in conjunction with the Virginia State Police," M.A. Myers, a spokesperson for the FBI told The Industry Standard.

Nearly a week after the hack, the site remains down and a message on the homepage simply states, "The Virginia Department of Health Professions is currently experiencing technical difficulties which affect computer and email systems. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause."

Several months ago, The Standard reported on an electronic health record security breach at a Los Angeles hospital, where a former employee was accessing information and filing false insurance claims. And in October of last year, a prescription drug management company, Express Scripts, was sent a ransom note that threatened the release of millions of patient records.

David Blumenthal: Uncle Sam's EHR man

Last month, President Obama picked Harvard Medical School professor David Blumenthal as his national coordinator of health information technology.

Blumenthal will facilitate transitioning the nation to electronic health records over the next couple years. He has long been a supporter of electronic health records, but wrote in a paper that he recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine that EHR will face "huge challenges."

Why? It's laborious to make the change, many doctors and hospitals have been less than welcoming, and there are many privacy concerns.

A recent New England Journal of Medicine study found that fewer than 1.5% of hospitals have EHR implemented in all their clinical units. In addition, the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society rates hospitals based on how advanced their health IT is, on a scale of 0 to 7. Only 15 hospitals - all in the Kaiser Permanente system and NorthShore University Health System - received a 7 for their sophisticated electronic medical record systems.

Blumenthal has a lot to tackle, but he has been interested in EHR for a while. In 2006, he published a study that found only about 5% of hospitals nationwide had implemented EHR.

"We are pitifully behind where we should be. We must find ways to get more physicians to embrace this technology if we are to make major strides in improving health care quality," Blumenthal said in an interview several years ago. 

He assumed his new role this week.

Inaccuracies of the BMI - bad news for Indians

My latest piece for The Post is about BMI - Body Mass Index - the metric that is commonly used to estimate whether our percent body fat is in the appropriate range.

A new study in the British Journal of Nutrition claims that since the BMI formula is based on data from Caucasians, it may not be an accurate representation for other national origin groups.

From the article:

"This scale was created years ago and is based on Caucasian men and women," said Molly Bray, one of the study's researchers and an associate professor of pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. "It doesn't take into account differences in body composition between genders, race/ethnicity groups and across the life span."

Bray and her colleagues are using another method, a low-dose X-ray called DXA, to estimate bone density, lean mass and fat mass.

Based on the DXA reading, the researchers found that an African American woman, for example, may not be overweight or obese even though the BMI formula, which considers a person's height and weight, indicates that she is.

"Right now non-Hispanic white women are not considered obese until they have a BMI of 30 or above," said Bray. "For African American women the number to cross is around 32." Women in some other racial and ethnic groups were considered obese even if their BMI number was below 30.

What was left out is that the numbers were most skewed for Asian Indians. Our body fat might be 6% higher than what a current BMI measurement estimates.

We definitely need to see more research on this, but meanwhile I'm wondering if I should be going on a diet.

Comcast Twitters

We'd been having trouble with our Internet lately, so I've been on the phone with Comcast. I also noticed that there's a lot of Twitter activity about Comcast.

That led to short piece for The Industry Standard about Comcast's twittering customer service representatives. The reps use Twitter to reach out help customers with problems who are tweeting their woes, which is great. The problem is that the there's a bit of a communication gap between the twittering reps and the regular reps.

For The Standard, I've also been writing quite a bit about information technology in health, an area that will see a lot of development in the next few years. President Obama has allocated about $19 billion to help digitize electronic health records, and doctors will be getting some attractive incentives to help them make the switch to EHR.

At the moment, I have two upcoming pieces. One is about how BMI (body mass index) may not really be all that accurate for Non-Caucasians. That's good news for some ethnic groups, but very bad news for Asian Indians. I'll post my story tomorrow.

My other upcoming piece is about the struggles new grads are facing as they finish school this year -- it's a tough job market!

I'm also putting together a pilot podcast about emerging technologies for the developing world...an experiment, so we'll see how it goes. 

Rareshare.org

I had a piece in the The Washington Post today about Rareshare.org, a site that helps people with rare diseases form communities.

It's a very simple site that does something very important. People have connected and shared experiences on the site from all over world. 

The central character in my piece is an remarkable man in his own right - Arturo Porzecanski, an economics professor at American University, and one of the world's experts on emerging markets.

Porzecanski was diagnosed with a disease called systemic capillary leak syndrome (SCLS). It's scary and can be fatal. Porzecanski has been a patient advocate since the day he was diagnosed. Thanks to him, the NIH is now studying SCLS.

NIH defines a rare disease as something that affects fewer than 200,000 people in the United States. There have only been about 100 known cases of SCLS in the entire world, and about a dozen SCLS patients have found Rareshare.

The cover of the paper's health section has a nice map illustrating how Porzecanski and other SCLS patients from near and far connected through Rareshare. 

The Post also hosted a live chat with one of the founders of Rareshare, and Porzecanski.

Also today: My J-School classmate Eric Simons was featured in the San Francisco Chronicle. You can buy his book on Darwin here.

Hello World!

This is my latest attempt to create a web presence for myself. I'm hoping it will be a place to share my articles and anecdotes about my articles that (I think) are interesting.

I just had a piece come out about a 14 year old CEO in Silicon Valley, who told me that even kids can start companies. "You don't have to be, like, 30 years old."

Ouch.

I also just did this piece on a large center in San Francisco where doctors can practice surgery on robots and cadavers.

To read my stories for The Industry Standard, click here.