The New Excuse for "No Comment": HIPAA
In a study of unintended consequences, the Milwaukee Sentinel has a story on how HIPAA has chilled the release of once common information.
ambulance. Friends, relatives, neighbors, citizens want to know: Who's
injured? How badly?
But the hospitals, “they weren't releasing diddly,” said Charles
Davis, executive director of the National Freedom of Information
Coalition.
The reason: the HIPAA privacy law.
The same veil of silence shrouds a nightclub fire and an Amtrak derailment. Same explanation: HIPAA.
A woman with mental health problems checks herself out of a hospital
and disappears. Even her family can't find out what she was doing at
the hospital. Because they have not been authorized to receive the
information, they run into the same barrier as the reporters covering
the porch collapse, the fire and the train accident.
HIPAA.
The West Allis Fire Department refuses to give even the time that a fire call came in. You guessed it: HIPAA.
Much of the above seems silly, and not wholly consistent with the letter or intent of the law.
Barbara Shore, a Brookfield woman who worked as a medical
underwriter for an insurance company for 32 years, said she heard from
patients frustrated with consequences of the new push for privacy.
“It delayed getting records,” Shore said. “It delayed getting
insurance paid . . . We got pressure on the phone all day and were
constantly fighting with agents and clients.”
Shore, who retired from underwriting in 2005, made sure her family
was well prepared to deal with the privacy laws when it came to their
health problems. She had her parents sign HIPAA authorization forms
allowing their doctors to share information with her, and she keeps
copies in case she needs to fax them to a hospital.
What a mess. Check out the Health Privacy Project web site, there's lots of interesting info there, including a nice section on Myth and Facts About HIPAA.
802.11n Stumbles on Way to Finalization
This story provides an interesting glimpse into both the standards process and chip maker's business models. It seems that the main faction that pushed Draft 1.0 through the IEEE Task Group N has a bit of a conflict of interest. The companies involved, Atheros, Broadcom and Marvell, were already “showing silicon” – i.e., have demonstration chips available. The Draft 1.0 was positioned by Atheros' CTO as being a complete standard except for, “small details to work out.” If those “small details” get any bigger, the toika will have to “retape” their chip designs, which would require significant (and expensive) testing – not to mention reset the development work being done by vendors looking to use the troika's chips in new products.
Now a vendor with a different perspective has raised their voice.
that “There’s been an unprecedented effort to manipulate and monopolize
the standards process.” Raleigh maintains there are a few key issues
for performance and backwards compatibility that are simple and won’t
change the cost for chip or device production. “It literally takes a
couple of weeks” to make these changes in the spec, he said. Several
chip competitors that are trying “to prevent any improvements” because
they’re “struggling to ship chips based on immature versions of the
standards.”
So where stands the march to an official standard?
a Draft 2.0 or 3.0 will be required before they are comfortable putting
their fabless—that’s chip-fabrication-plant-less—efforts into what
they’re calling their Gen N chip, which will succeed three generations
of chips they’ve sold into the marketplace through Belkin, NetGear, and
others. Cisco and Motorola are chairing an ad hoc group in Task Group N
to put together a proposal for some changes to Draft 1.0, Raleigh said.
Thousands of comments from the ballot that will go out are also
expected, one source said.
The conclusion here seems to be, don't plan on incorporating 802.11n radios into your products any time soon, unless you want a proprietary product (or a considerable upgrade once the real standard is complete). And if you're a potential buyer, be patient.
UPDATE: This must be a hot story, based on the page loads this story has gotten – and from some interesting domains, too.
