There have been any number of people and companies working tirelessly to solve healthcare's interoperability challenges. Hospitals, EHR software companies, Health Information Exchanges (HIEs), Federal and State governments, payers, and others have developed, tested, and implemented many in-house or vendor-built solutions to try to clear this hurdle. Recently, consumer technology vendors and patient-centered innovation programs have begun to make significant strides on directly expanding patients access to their own records. This is great news for patients, but when I am a patient, I also want my doctors and other caregivers to be able to communicate about me when needed. So, making me responsible for stewarding pieces of my record between them doesn't solve the challenge. Especially if I have received care in three or four different places or worse yet, become incapacitated.

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During 2018, the U.S. experienced a very active year of weather and climate disasters. In total, the U.S. was impacted by 14 separate billion-dollar disaster events: two tropical cyclones, eight severe storms, two winter storms, drought, and wildfires. The past three years (2016-2018) have been historic, with the annual average number of billion-dollar disasters being more than double the long-term average. The number and cost of disasters are increasing over time due to a combination of increased exposure, vulnerability, and the fact the climate change is increasing the frequency of some types of extremes that lead to billion-dollar disasters.

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Fax is the dominant information exchange technology in U.S. healthcare, outpacing secure direct messaging 25-to-1. Most of that is exchanged using inefficient and unsecure machines. With the emergence of cloud-based fax technology to facilitate secure system-to-system document transfer, the use of cloud fax needs to be part of every CTO's/CIO's digital strategy...The evolution of fax from paper-based to cloud transmission and storage - Cloud Fax Technology (CFT) - is a key step that enables providers to comply with HIPAA and other regulations. Further strengthening CFT as a key component in Healthcare Information Systems (HIS) is its evolution into Direct Messaging platforms, enabling the seamless exchange of Patient Health Information (PHI) between the diverse data and document management systems used by labs, pharmacies, doctor's offices, hospitals, and billing providers. CFT supports and contributes to the goal of interoperability...

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The problem with many IoT devices, though, is similar to with our other devices: what happens when the battery runs low? It's not easy to get a charger into our gut to repower smart pills, and for anyone worried about the ecological risks posed by computer or smartphone batteries, well, imagine tiny versions of those toxic batteries floating around in your body. We'll need sensors to track the damage done by our other sensors' dead batteries. Not with rectennas. Rectennas are powered by Wi-Fi signals, like the kind you use in your house or at Starbucks to get internet access. This is not a new concept, but what is new is that MIT researchers have been able to harvest enough power to make them useful, in a device only a few atoms thick.

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Cacophony Project uses the latest technology to monitor and protect endangered bird populations against predators. The Cacophony Project's broad vision is to bring back New Zealand's native birds using the latest technology to monitor bird populations and humanely eliminate the introduced predators that are endangering them. The project started in our founder's backyard to measure the effectiveness of his efforts to protect the birds on his property. From this simple beginning, the project has quickly grown into a system that includes two edge devices, a cloud server, and automatic identification of animals using machine learning. The project has been completely open source from the beginning and sees regular contributions from a wide variety of volunteers.

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On January 11, 2019, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) released a draft Addendum to the Third Edition of Registries for Evaluating Patient Outcomes: A User's Guide called Tool and Technologies for Registry Interoperability. AHRQ has long written about registries - largely from a research standpoint - and I have been following this from afar for some time. This new guide is focused on helping those who both create and use registries understand the issue surrounding leveraging external data to improve registry completeness, accuracy, and usefulness. This report covers lots of ground and does a good job of summarizing important subtopics. Each chapter is overflowing with footnotes and sources.

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We're going to have robots in our healthcare system (Global Market Insights forecasts assistive healthcare robots could be a $1.2b market by 2024), in our workplaces, and in our homes. Some of them will be unobtrusive, some we'll interact with frequently, and some we'll become close to. How to treat them is something we're going to have to figure out. Written by Alex Williams, Do You Take This Robot...focuses on people actually falling in love with (or at least preferring to be involved with) robots. Sex toys, even sex robots, have been around, but this takes it to a new level. The term for it is "digisexual." As Professor Neil McArthur, who studies such things, explained to Discover last year...

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