The Doctor Is Out!

So one huge downside to this Coronavirus shutdown is that you can barely get any help for other medical conditions or elective surgeries. 

I just heard this morning from a relative about family members that can’t get shots they need for pain control or surgeries for breathing problems.

Everything now is COVID-19.

That’s the priority (maybe all of the top ten priorities)!

But does it really make sense to completely triage COVID-19 above Cancer, Heart Disease, Respiratory Disease, Strokes, Alzheimers, Diabetes, Kidney Disease, Liver Disease, Parkinson’s, and more. 

Coronavirus patients are who the hospital and ICU beds are for now. 

And the respirators. 

The testing. 

The new research dollars. 

Perhaps, the global medical community has gone a little Coronavirus crazy, extreme, radical, overboard in their singular focus, panic, and chaos over just one virus to the exclusion of everything else!

Apparently, our totally “overwhelmed” medical system can’t “walk and chew gum at the same time.”

Certainly, we have a lot to be grateful for to the dedicated and selfless doctors and nurses in the medical community for everything they are doing to help people with Coronavirus under very trying circumstances.

The problem is that in the meantime, people that have new or other chronic conditions are being left out and sometimes to rot. 

Unless of course you are a big fan of telemedicine, which may be good to get something routine looked after, but something major, and I think you’re in big trouble. 

After this Coronavirus (assuming there is an after), there is going to be a lot of pent up demand for medical care. 

I think a lot of people are suffering now with conditions that they were waiting to take care of until they were absolutely necessary, but unfortunately when it became necessary, then the care was not there. 

Makes you wonder whether and when you should do or put off medical procedures in the future: just because the care is there “today,” doesn’t mean it will be there tomorrow. 😉

(Credit Photo: Andy Blumenthal)

Great Explanation of Coronavirus (Covid-19)

Great explanation of Coronavirus (Covid-19) by the World Health Organization (WHO).

Need a Part II though to explain what people should do when they get sick–communication on this part has been awful. 

BTW, the governor of California stated that he estimates that 56% of their population or 25.5 million people would be infected there within eight weeks. 

At a 1-2% fatality rate (lower than the current global 4% fatality rate) that would mean between 250,000 and 500,000 dead just in California.  

This is very serious stuff folks. 😉

(Credit to my daughter, Rebecca for sharing this with video)

Stop The Coronavirus, Please!

It’s been a few exhausting weeks since the outbreak of the Coronavirus (Covid-19) has gone public. 

First case in China in November.

Now as a Pandemic in 126 countries!

Over 132,000 confirmed cases, so far .

And around 5,000 deaths 🕱.

The numbers are projected to climb/////.

With Dr. Faucci of NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) warning that it will “get worse before it gets better.”

Everything is closing down from our work facilities to Cruises, Broadway, and Disney.

Of course, we need the government (at all levels), health professionals, and pharmaceutical companies to get their acts together with an effective response strategy. 

Also, this is a wake up call for better preparedness for all sorts of natural and man made disasters that are awaiting. 

Today it’s a virus (natural or biowarfare) and tomorrow it’ll be a devastating cyber attack that we are woefully unprepared for. 

No more playing politics, half measures, and waiting for the next shoe to drop (Spanish Flu, Pearl Harbor, 9/11).

The rest of us need to do our “prepping” parts and to say a prayer or two and keep going. 

(Source Graphic: Andy Blumenthal)

Growing Fears Of Coronavirus

As the coronavirus continues to infect more and more people, the fear is continuing to grow.

Today, Apple announced that the outbreak will imagine their sales. 

And I read yesterday that airlines, even Israeli El Al, is warning of the impact. 

But how you know that the people, as individuals, are getting seriously worried are by the level of precautions they are starting to take.

These include: canceling travel arrangements, wearing (antiviral) face masks and latex gloves, and ever more frequent hand-washing and use of hand sanitizers. 

The picture here shows a couple of ladies waiting on line for some gelato at the airport, and they have masks over their faces and this is in the Holy Land, and not even where the outbreak is in China!

I hear official figures of 70,000+ infected and 1,800 dead, but on the street people are saying these are grossly understated. 

Let us pray that this virus is brought speedily under control, that a cure is found, and that no more people are sickened or killed by it. 

(Credit Photo: Andy Blumenthal)

Scary Model of Cancer

Saw this at a doctors office in one of the patient rooms. 

At first I wasn’t even sure what it was. 

Looks like a stomach.

What are those globs?

Oy, they represent malignant tumors (from what I understood reading the fine print). 

Really makes it hit home when you see it in front of you on display like that. 

So much suffering from illnesses like cancer.

G-d should have mercy. 

We really need to find “the cure!”  

Imagine what a day that will be.  😉

Cancel Out Those Tremors

This is a wonderful new product available from Lift Labs.

It is a spoon for people that suffer from hand tremors, like those from Parkinson’s Disease.

With tremors, a person has trouble lifting the spoon to their mouth and doing it without spilling.

With Lifeware, the tremors are said to be reduced in trials by 70%!

The spoon is battery operated and it has sensors for the tremors and performs countermeasures to stabilize itself.

It does this with technology including an accelerometer and microprocessor to actively cancel out the tremor.

In the future, additional attachments are forecasted, including a folk, keyholder, and more.

The special device was made possible through a grant under the NIH Small Business Innovation Research Program.

An awesome advance for Parkinson’s patients to be more self-sufficient and live with dignity despite such a debilitating illness.

Thank you to the engineers at Life Labs (and to the NIH) for bringing this stabilization technology to those who really can benefit from it.

Technology Heals

My wife took this photo today at The Drupal for Government Conference at NIH.

The man in the photo was not only participating in the conference, but also taking notes on his Apple Macbook Air.

It is incredible how technology is helping us do our jobs and be ever more productive.

This is the vision of technology taking us beyond the natural limits we all have and face.

I remember a few years ago when I was in the hospital for something and feeling bad about myself, and my wife brought me a laptop and said “Write!”–it was liberating and I believe helped me heal and recuperate.

I wonder if hospitals in the future will regularly provide computers and access to patients to not only keep them connected with their loved ones, but also let them have more options for entertainment, creativity, and even productivity, to the extent they can, while getting well.

Kudos to this gentleman–he is truly a role model and inspiration for us all.

(Source Photo: Dannielle Blumenthal)

>HSPD-12 and Enterprise Architecture

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Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12, 27 August 2004, is a “Policy for a Common Identification Standard for Federal Employees and Contractors.”

HSPD-12 establishes a mandatory, Government-wide standard for secure and reliable forms of identification issued by the Federal Government to its employees and contractors (including contractor employees).

The policy mandates promulgation and implementation of secure, reliable identification that covers Federally controlled facilities, Federally controlled information systems, and other Federal applications that are important for security. “Secure and reliable forms of identification” for purposes of this directive means identification that (a) is issued based on sound criteria for verifying an individual employee’s identity; (b) is strongly resistant to identity fraud, tampering, counterfeiting, and terrorist exploitation; (c) can be rapidly authenticated electronically; and (d) is issued only by providers whose reliability has been established by an official accreditation process. The Standard will include graduated criteria, from least secure to most secure, to ensure flexibility in selecting the appropriate level of security for each application.”

In Government Computer News, 27 October 2007, Jack Jones, the CIO of the National Institute of Health (and Warren Suss, contractor) discuss how NIH leveraged the mandates of HSPD-12 to not only implement the common identification standard for more than 18,000 federal employees [and another 18,000 part time employees, contractors, fellows, and grant reviewers] on its main campus in Bethesda, Md., and at satellite sites nationwide,” but also modified and improved it’s business processes to ensure a holistic and successful architectural implementation.

What business modifications were involved?

“HSPD-12 was a catalyst for change at the institutes. The NIH Enterprise Directory (NED), which automated the process for registering and distributing badges to new NIH employees, needed to be revised to comply with HSPD-12…the conversation led to a re-examination of the broader set of processes involved in bringing a new employee onboard. In addition to registering new employees and issuing badges, NIH, like other federal agencies, must assign e-mail addresses, add new employees to multiple agency mailing lists, order new phones, assign new phone numbers and update the phone directory.”

How did NIH address this using enterprise architecture?

“NIH changed its enterprise architecture through a formal, facilitated business modeling process that involved all NIH stakeholder groups. The results included clarifications in the policies and procedures for processing new employees along with the transformation of NED into a significantly improved tool to support better communication and collaboration in the broad NIH community.”

From a User-centric EA perspective, this is a great example of EA supporting successful organizational change. NIH, like other federal agencies, was faced with the mandates of HSPD-12, and rather than just go out and procure a new system to meet the requirement, NIH used EA as a tool to look at its entire process for provisioning for new employees including policy. NIT EA modeled it business processes and made necessary modifications, and ensured a successful implementation of the identification system that is supported by sound business process and policy. Additionally, the CIO and the EA did not do this in some ivory tower, but rather in a collaborative “workshops with NIH stakeholder groups”. This collaboration with stakeholders hits on the essence of what User-centric EA is all about and how powerful it can be.

>Getting People to Use Enterprise Architecture

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There is a terrific white paper from the National Institute of Health (NIH) called Enterprise Architecture: Engaging and Empowering People while Creating Opportunity for Change.

NIH conducted a qualitative research study involving 15 users to understand how user behave and work in order to identify opportunities to foster adoption of EA.

First, NIH identified a clear mandate to not only develop and maintain EA, but for its end use:

“Enterprise Architecture (EA) is a critical part of IT strategy in any organization. However, just defining enterprise architecture doesn’t bring its true value of efficiency to the organization nor support for the organization’s strategic objectives. In the EA Assessment Framework 2.0 published by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in December 2005, three capability areas, Completion, Use, and Results are defined as primary objectives of every government agency’s EA program. It is clear that EA is not just an assignment for CIOs to document architecture standards for the agency—for the future value to be realized, it must be used to achieve results.”

Second, NIH identified 3 user segments that are each looking toward the architecture for satisfying different needs. (While the study views all three segments as belonging to EA, I believe that only the first is EA, while the other two are segment and solution architecture.)

• Trend Finders—want to know “where we are going?” They are interested in understanding the current and future business and IT landscape. (I believe this equates to enterprise architecture and its focus on developing the as-is, to-be, and transition plan.)
• Fit Seekers—want to know “Does it fit my projects?” They want to find a solution for the project. (I believe this equates to segment architecture and its focus on developing solutions at the line of business (LOB) level.)
• Fixer-Doers—want to know “How to make it work?” They want to build, maintain, or support a project. (I believe this equates to solutions architecture and its focus on developing technical project solutions for the end-user.)

While the study posits that user segments are not mutually exclusive and that users can actually evolve from one segment to another (and of course this is possible in some cases), I believe that generally speaking the segments do represent unique architecture perspectives in the organizations (enterprise, segment, and solutions architectures as defined in the Federal Enterprise Architecture Practice Guidance, December 2006).

In summary, architecture users are looking to understand the big picture (the EA and IT strategic plan), justify decisions (develop segment architectures that are ‘justified’ by aligning to and complying with the overall EA), and make it work (develop solutions architecture using technical details from the enterprise and segment architectures).

User-centric EA can satisfy the various segment needs by following the opportunities identified in the study to improve EA use. These are as follows (modified to more accurately represent what I believe is their correct application to users.)

For trend seekers/EA:

• Show the big picture—high-level, non-technical information about the EA (this equates to EA profiles) and the direction of overall business and IT initiatives (this is the business, EA, and IT strategic plans)
• Provide access to the source—ways to find more information and points of contact

For fit-seekers/segment solutions:

• Lead to the right information—clear guidance through understandable nomenclature and information structure

• Provide proof—through IT investment Review Board and EA reviews that include findings and recommendations.

For fixer-doers/solutions architecture:

• Give specifics for immediate help—through more detailed EA models and inventories as well as SDLC job aids.

For all:

• Share and enhance—capture performance metrics on EA program and products, especially use of EA information and governance services.

At the end of the day, EA needs to fulfill user’s requirements and empower them to leverage use of the information and services.