Wolters Kluwer CEO Nancy McKinstry was joined by other company executives to discuss cloud computing as the next revolution in the information industry and one of the game changing trends that impact professionals today.

Jack Lynch, Member of the Executive Board, shared his views on how changes in technology have impacted the information industry and present new opportunities for innovation. Salvador Fernandez, Regional Managing Director of Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory, Southern Europe spoke about game changers in the legal profession, such eJustice which “brings the advantages of technology to the court and is a key driver for efficiency and justice for citizens.” Mike Sabbatis, President and CEO of CCH North America, Wolters Kluwer Tax & Accounting, highlighted the dramatic impact of the cloud on leveling the playing field for small firms and entrepreneurs. Boudewijn Beerkens, Chief Financial Officer, spoke about cloud computing in the context of the 2011 financial results for Wolters Kluwer.

You can listen back to the podcast of the Media Roundtable: The Transformative Power of the Cloud.

What can users expect from digital content?

What the core characteristics of digital content products are, and what consumers can expect from ebooks, apps or data banks is fundamentally the result of an intrinsic and multifaceted relationship of technical architecture and design, licensing conditions, copyright, and the usage entitlements users have paid for, as well as other interests that businesses and advertisers might follow when selling digital content.

While the huge choice in different means of distributing, selling and consuming digital content certainly offers interesting possibilities for businesses as well as for users, the degree of diversification means that no clear standard exists as to what characterizes digital content. So far it is simply quite unclear what is considered “normal” with regards to digital content, which level of functionality users should be entitled to expect, and under which circumstances restrictions to access and use of digital content are to be considered unfair.

Functionality matters

Users of Wolters Kluwer Italia’s “La Mia Biblioteca” app, which is a pdf reader for the digital edition of the paper books they bought, e.g. are expecting to be able to highlight and then copy and paste fragments of text from the book pages into their clients dossiers. And they’d like to e-mail them to colleagues too. Currently they can do it on a whole page only. Can this functionality be considered “normal”? Is that because iBooks provides it? 

I think that there is room for assessing on a case-by-case basis taking into account factors such as a product’s intended use, as well as external and more objective factors, such as price, state of market and technology, shared social values, emerging industry guidelines as instruments of self-regulation, and industry practice.

What do you think about that?

YouTube has Become a Primary Source of Learning
Through my kids point of view, I have discovered YouTube is much more than an infinite repository of wacky pet videos, rather it is becoming a legitimate first place to go if you need to know how to learn something new. Watching my kids attempt to master new things, they and their friends have developed a knee jerk use of YouTube as the place to go when they need to learn something new. There is an expectation that anything they want to learn how to do should be in YouTube somewhere whether it’s how to play a popular a sax solo, how to beat a tough video game level, or, god forbid, additional explanations on some of their homework topics.

The implications for future professional software and courseware product design is clear. There will be an increasing expectation that all things worth learning must have a 3-5 minute video explaining them. A corollary expectation that those of us who are trying to teach or train them on something better have video that is indexed in a manner that allows the user to effectively surface when keywords or a question is entered into the search engine.

Facebook is Helping Everyone Learn to Share More
Recent Facebook features like Open Graph and Timeline appear to have greater popularity with teens. This is no surprise as teenagers as a group are much more willing to share information about their lives including favorite songs, brands and other things, as well as their activities and even location data. Teens share information both explicitly and implicitly in interacting with various web applications without the same reservations as older user groups. The increased openness to sharing, beyond photos or comments, makes concepts such as Facebook’s new Open Graph particularly appealing for them as it is now easier to see what their friends are up to across the Internet. Through its real-time Ticker feed, users can now see what articles their friends are reading, what music they are listening to and so on.

Similarly the implication on product design is that this evolving increased acceptance of sharing can be further developed and exploited. On the surface incorporating sharing of ideas and passive and active information into product and content strategy can translate into more engagement by current users, and equally importantly, encourage them to promote the product to their friends. The expectation of increased sharing that is being cultivated in today’s teenagers may eventually allow designers to consider additional features providing users with feedback on the usage, mastery and experiences that can be effectively shared and incorporated for purposes of professional validation as much as satisfying consumer product expectations that may bleed over to the professional environment.

Given the pervasiveness of Facebook and the lifelong training that the next generation of professionals are going thru with this “tool”, software developers will need to look at it in the same way they have looked to Microsoft as a standard setter. For example, professional software may be designed to profile accomplishments and activities in Timeline and Open Graph to share an increasing amount of users behavior to highlight and promote product further thru social media and to stimulate intrinsic motivation to build on product competency as well.

With an abundance of Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) data and other health data available as part of the Health Data Initiative (HDI), students have an unprecedented opportunity to create interactive apps and other tools that engage and empower people in ways that lead to better health. Working in interdisciplinary teams that meld technological skills with health knowledge, the IOM and NAE believe that college students can generate exciting and powerful new products – the next “viral” apps – to improve health for communities and individuals.

The contest offers a total of $18,000 in prizes. The team that designs the best app will receive a $10,000 prize and the opportunity to demonstrate their app during the plenary session of The Health Data Initiative Forum to be held June 5-6, 2012, in Washington, D.C. Additional eligibility criteria and terms are described here.

Last year, the winning team created SleepBot, an app that charts users’ sleep habits and benchmarks them against potential threats associated with sleep deprivation. SleepBot’s creators, a team of college students from Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York University, and Northwestern University, won the top prize.

Second place went to a team from Arizona State University (ASU) who created Freebee, an app that spreads awareness within college campuses about a variety of health risks including alcoholism, smoking, unsafe sex, drug use, and campus safety issues. Third place went to another ASU team who created IMPAct, a Web-based, interactive planner that allows individuals and families to keep track of medical appointments.

The highly regarded contest will showcase the ingenuity and talent of today’s health, engineering, and IT students who can transform raw health data into innovative, health-promoting products. The result? Very “intelligent solutions.”

[The Institute of Medicine and National Academy of Engineering along with the National Academy of Sciences and National Research Council make up the National Academies. They are private, nonprofit institutions that provide science, technology, and health policy advice under a congressional charter.]

Ms. Kirchberger claims such proactive apps are rare and implies those that do exist are largely outside the legal field (e.g., apps for monitoring medical conditions, productivity, or GPS navigation). In the field of tax and accounting, however, this would not be an entirely new concept and would be referred to as “compliance.”

The trend in providing more compliance content has been around for quite some time but it is obvious that the focus has recently shifted to the issue where and when that content is delivered to the user. A whole collection of terminology and concepts has accompanied this shift in focus. For example, when integrating content into a process or workflow, someone might refer to delivering content at the “point-of-need.” If approached from an information retrieval perspective someone might talk about incorporating “context” to narrow what content is retrieved — a point recently made by Christian Dirschl in his post on The Future of Retrieval Engines.

Regardless of the terminology used, the goal seems to be the same — delivering compliance content to users at the relevant time not relying on the user to locate the content. Despite Ms. Kirchberger’s assertions that such products are rare, there are products that put these concepts into practice today. For example, Intelliforms is a software product that helps tax preparers find, organize, and complete tax forms. When filling out these forms, the product links users to compliance materials relevant to the specific form field the user is completing.

Even if there is a lot of overlap in the terminology used, having a variety of ways to approach these issues and think about the solutions is valuable. Ms. Kirchberger’s comparison to apps outside of law for example, raises the issues that may not be obvious when discussing point-of-need or context, including the possibilities of delivery directly to non-professional consumers. However, the most important possibility raised by Ms. Kirchberger’s post also happens to be where I think the compliance trend will focus next. After tackling when and where to deliver content, the focus will likely shift toward further customizing the content and its delivery by incorporating personal and other data, which opens up numerous possibilities with its own set of terminology.

This is just one example of an innovative company that is slowly becoming obsolete by new technology. Erik Qualman, author of Socialnomics predicts that even the DVD will be gone in six years. Other products and industries that are expected to sunset, at least in their present forms, are:

• Wrist watches
• Paperback books
• Instruction manuals
• Greeting cards
• Car keys
• Tollbooth agents
• Maps

Credit cards, checkbooks, retail coupons and even cash are also going out of style. Groupon purchases have replaced traditional coupon clipping. Bills can be paid with PayPal, direct-debit from your bank account, or providing the numbers off of your check over the phone. Consumers can take a photo of a check using a cell phone in some instances! Click here to see a short video on Erik Qualman’s book.

What does this mean for the accounting practice? The client of the future prefers to communicate digitally wherever possible. They will be working from their mobile device such as a cell phone or tablet and sending their financial information via a secure web connection such as a portal where they will collaborate with their financial advisor.

The accountant of the future wants to be connected to the information they want whenever they want. They will be scanning documents upfront and keeping track of everything in a document management system tracked via a web based workflow system. All of this lends itself to utilizing cloud technology.

In fact, the accountant of the future will be more involved in analytics rather than compliance. The data of the client will be captured at source directly from credit cards, bank information and other sources via the cloud. Click here to see the future of screen technology.

The current Health Level Seven (HL7) “Infobutton” standard (technically known as the Context-Aware Knowledge Retrieval standard) features a relatively simple model. Requests contain a main search criterion, such as a disease, a drug or a lab test, as well as a set of optional context information. The context information may include:

• Patient context (e.g. age, gender)
• Provider/user context (e.g. physician, nurse, pharmacist)
• System context (e.g. order entry, lab results review)
• Encounter context (e.g. outpatient, inpatient)
• Information recipient context (e.g. provider level information, patient level information)

For example, an Infobutton request may be asking for provider level information on the outpatient treatment of hypertension in a 54 year old female. The request specifically excludes data elements that could identify the patient, such as the patient’s name, date of birth, email address or phone number.

At the recent HL7 working group meeting, there was some discussion about expanding the scope of the Infobutton model to include certain information that could identify the patient. One of the use cases presented dealt with the ability for the user to send information to the patient. Specifically, the user, let’s say a physician, would start in the EHR, click on an Infobutton to a knowledge resource, locate a patient information document and then email the document to the patient. In order for the knowledge resource to be able to email the document to the patient, the EHR would have to have sent the patient’s email address to the knowledge resource in the original Infobutton request.

This issue prompted a lively discussion at the meeting. One of the points that was made was that the email address in this use case would be there to facilitate delivery of the information, but it wouldn’t add to the description of the context of the information request. Even if information elements related to delivery of the information were added to the model, they should be in their own class(es) and clearly separated from the classes that describe the context. The Infobutton implementation guide could then make it clear that those who implement the delivery class(es) must do so in accordance with patient privacy laws in their jurisdiction.

Others pointed out that the successful adoption of the Infobutton standard may be largely attributable to its simplicity, and in particular, to the fact that patient privacy isn’t an issue with the current model. If the model were expanded to include patient-identifying information, even in “specially marked” classes, Infobutton adoption could suffer. As soon as these classes became part of the model, implementers could no longer assume that patient-identifying information would be absent from Infobutton requests, so they would have to take steps to ensure compliance with patient privacy laws. These steps might include legal, technical and administrative measures that might very well stop some healthcare organizations from implementing Infobuttons.

This discussion will be continued on some upcoming HL7 conference calls, so stay tuned to this blog for further updates. In the meantime, feel free to post your own thoughts on this question using the comments box below.

As has been well documented, especially in the past year, there is a growing recognition that we require novel tools and approaches to handling big data. As noted by David Weinberger in his book, Too Big To Know, the role of knowledge and information has changed with the advent of the Internet and the scale of information we’re dealing with.

Concurrently, it is becoming increasingly clear that we need our software, systems, and computers to be able to communicate with one another meaningfully – at a semantic level. It’s no longer adequate to create a silo of information, rather, data is being generated in a decentralized fashion by multiple, distinct actors. There is value in sifting through and aggregating all this. Indeed, 2011 was a breakout year, bringing ontology to the mainstream with Apple’s introduction of Siri. As Steve Hamby notes here, 2012 looks to be the year of the Semantic Web.

Lastly, in many cases people are not waiting for the top down models to catch up, but are actively engaging with the plethora of information and tools at their disposal. Mashups - web applications that combine data and functionality from two or more services have been undergoing rapid growth, innovation, and iteration over the past few years and allow citizens and users to create datasets and online environments that resonate directly with an experience or story. As Christine McLaren observes here:

From people’s kisses in Toronto, to the concentration of pizza joints in New York, to the number of women who ride bikes, to the likelihood of being killed by a car in any given American city, the list of lenses through which we can now view our cities and neighborhoods goes on, thanks to data-mapping geeks.

What’s been missing so far is true semantic integration of the various back-end services and data sets.

Organizations with a wealth of experience in combining large volumes of data from multiple sources (such as Wolters Kluwer) are uniquely positioned to take advantage of all these opportunities. This should be an exciting year.

Dominator

Now this is not the opening to my upcoming Sci-Fi drama but rather an imminent reality. At the end of 2011 there were 82 million connected TVs in homes worldwide according to research group Informa. By 2016 it forecasts that number will have ballooned to 892 million. I also predict Smart TV’s will be into corporate offices quicker than you can spell: iPad. At Wolters Kluwer’s HQ in Alphen a/d Rijn, Netherlands, you are greeted by the latest news displayed on a large screen in the lobby. These are scatter around the building and in board rooms. Fact is, the TV screen still dominates and it will continue to do so by convergence with the web.

Domesticated

Actually, my first web-like experience coming to Europe was ‘surfing’ TeleText pages on my TV. I still use it occasionally for looking up flight status from my comfortable couch at home. And it’s not just flight status lookups but also legal research that is being domesticated. While doing year stats analysis on research portals, I discovered that engagement peaks during weekends with hours instead of minutes spent on site. Imagine you could utilize the biggest screen (TV) in your home for research. It’s the same argument why you would use your smallest screen (Smartphone) for quick lookups.

Dipping toes

Natural interfaces such as touch on Apple’s mobile devices or motion on Microsoft Kinect are slowly replacing mouse and keyboard. I wouldn’t go as far as using my eyes to control the screen but I think it isn’t farfetched that a minority report style of interface will enter our television sets. And some in legal technology have already been wondering when it will appear for legal research. Traditional print publishers are already dipping their toes on Apple TV, Google TV or Roku.

In the end, the trick is not looking objectively at what’s happening now but intuitively at what will happen. More after the break…

• seamlessly connect a patient to all of their lifetime medical records;
• improve the quality of healthcare received;
• lower costs;
• facilitate information sharing.

Privacy advocates fear that medical data and information, which is already bought and collected without patient approval, would become an even greater commodity. They also fear that patients would be less honest with physicians, due to fear of diagnosis or items remaining in their medical records for “life”.

Other countries have identification numbers, much like the United State’s current Social Security Numbers that are used in a variety of contexts including health care purposes. In New Zealand all citizens are issued a National Health Identifier number at birth, it is used to track records and can alert health care providers that use a medical warning system to unique risks for individual patients. In 2010 it was announced that investments were being made to update the system to improve information security and how information was shared into a newly coined “Health Identity Programme” that promises reduced costs and greater efficiency. In the European Economic Area and Switzerland a “European Health Insurance Card” is issued to all residents and is presented upon receipt of health care and contains an identification number.

While privacy concerns are certainly legitimate, I believe a larger privacy issue looms with UPIs and electronic health records in general, and that is the security of the system the records and information is maintained in. With UPIs is is feasible that security breaches would have larger implications due to the vast amount of connected information regarding any one individual. It remains to be seen whether or not the United States will adopt UPIs or continue to rely on current systems and over-use of Social Security Numbers, but it is worth keeping an eye on as electronic health record systems grow.