"Standards" are wonderful, there are so many ... :-/ My physician wife is currently "seeing" patients using the physician-specific web-app "doxy.me" using a headset and a narrow-field camera on our dedicated linux "video computer".
"doxy.me" isn't perfect, but she pays them to get it right. They are paid by tens of thousands of doctors, so they are the deep pockets in the ambulance-chaser cross-hairs. While I am certain we are not meeting every jot and tittle of the vast corpus of medical legislation and HIPAA, that is because there is so damned much legislation. We were helped a lot by a medical informatics intern and her OHSU teachers, but even they don't know everything. I focus proper use of software and hardware, she focuses on the medical concerns of each patient. If she is forced to choose between a patient's well-being and following the uninformed diktats of bureaucrats, she will make the right choice. It might cost us our savings, our house, and jail time, but it won't cost patient lives, or our souls. We have way too many computers; I try to segregate them by function and vulnerability. Of course these are behind a separate firewall computer (which I am slowly upgrading, with expert help). We use a single two-way-video-equipped desktop for doxy.me; we could use it for web meetings like OMSI Science Pub and Science On Tap, but - security first! - we'll forgo interactivity and watch those events on youtube later, on other less-secure computers. After the facebook password fiasco, we deleted our facebook accounts. Facebook attracts way too much attention from thousands of skilled cybercriminals, and seems impossible to protect 100%. We miss out on many family activities, but we can't choose those AND professional responsibility. I appreciate pluglist discussions about meet.jit.si. We may risk using jit.se with the secure video desktop to connect to her iPhone-and-FaceTime-using father, and to her other Android-using siblings, assuming we can convince most of them to use the open-source meet.jit.si app. We were on Apple's and Microsoft's accelerated-obsolescence treadmills for years; we aren't making that mistake again. We don't use portable computers (laptops or handhelds) to access our own financial or medical records; that is only for a few specific machines secure inside the house. A restriction I impose that is a small strain on our marriage; "no, you must not do that, because ...". I try to explain why to her with medical infection analogies. Convenience and security are usually opposites. So is computer security expertise (which expands to fill entire brains) and almost every other kind of expertise (ditto). In the end, it will be computers and their programmers that must adapt; physics and physiology aren't programmable. Would you rather your doctor debug apps, or debug YOU? Keith -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected] _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
