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The sluggish rollout of COVID-19 vaccines so far has many causes, but one of the biggest has been a suboptimal infrastructure for coordination and record-keeping. A new coalition of some of the biggest healthcare and technology organizations is hoping to change that, and quickly.

WHY IT MATTERS

The new Vaccination Credential Initiative announced Thursday is bringing together a wide array of stakeholders CARIN Alliance, Cerner, Change Healthcare, the Commons Project Foundation, Epic, Evernorth, Mayo Clinic, Microsoft, MITRE, Oracle, Safe Health, and Salesforce to work together on a new approach.

HIMSS20 Digital

The widely varied public and private organizations say they'll collaborate on developing a standard model for organizations administering COVID-19 vaccines helping to create a "trustworthy, traceable, verifiable, and universally recognized digital record of vaccination status."

The goal is to leverage open and interoperable standards to ensure vaccinations and securely demonstrate patients' vaccine status to enable safer return to a new normal.

Participating organizations will agree to offer individuals with digital access to their vaccination records using the open, interoperable SMART Health Cards specification based on W3C Verifiable Credential and HL7 FHIR standards, according to VCI.

A common registry of issuers, along with these SMART Health Cards accessible via digital wallet apps or QR codes will build toward a nationwide system that more readily enables verifiable vaccination records to be accessed, controlled and shared.

"We are kicking off the most significant vaccination effort in the history of the United States," said Ryan Howells, principal, Leavitt Partners and program manager of the CARIN Alliance, in a statement. "Now more than ever, individuals need access to their own vaccination and health information in a portable format to begin to move about the country safely and comfortably."

"This process needs to be as easy as online banking," added Mike Sicilia, executive vice president of Oracle's Global Business Units.

Dr. Brian Anderson, chief digital health physician at MITRE, said health equity has to be a major priority as vaccines proliferate.

"As we explore the many use cases for the vaccination credential, we are working to ensure that underserved populations have access to this verification," said Anderson in a statement. "Just as COVID-19 does not discriminate based on socioeconomic status, we must ensure that convenient access to records crosses the digital divide."

The hope to continue to expand with new use cases based on the infrastructure being built.

For instance, Ken Mayer, founder and CEO of Safe Health, noted that expanded availability of cheaper smartphone-enabled rapid tests recently authorized by FDA could, together with VCI standards, "enable application developers to create privacy-preserving health status verification solutions that can be seamlessly integrated into existing ticketing workflows.

He said the companyis working with Hedera to "develop a blockchain-enabled crowd safety solution using the VCI standards designed to help get concerts and sporting events going again."

More information about VCI can be found at vaccinationcredential.org.

THE LARGER TREND

It's been apparent since the first COVID-19 vaccines were approved, of course, that the technology and data-sharing infrastructure in the U.S. was not up to the task of managing their rollout and record-keeping. System failures have already led to significant slowdowns in some states.

Without adequate federal support, state and local healthcare have been forced to think creatively about how to manage these complex demands sometimes even turning to "off-label" use of certain platforms that could pose serious privacy and security risks.

That said, there does exist a robust network of electronic health record systems nationwide, and vendors such as Cerner and Epic have been working for months to optimize their EHRs for the challenges of vaccine distribution.

We recently asked those vendors along with Allscripts, athenahealth, DrChrono, Greenway Health, Meditech and NextGen how theyre tweaking their systems to better enable complex immunization record-keeping for their customers.

ON THE RECORD

"Cerner is already providing tools to clinics, hospitals and other venues that provide healthcare to support the rapid COVID-19 vaccination process and ensure a safe, streamlined experience," said David Bradshaw, senior vice president of consumer and employer solutions at Cerner.

The Vaccine Credential Initiative, he said, "will grow the standards around data exchange and help patients have access to and easily share verified vaccination information via their mobile device in situations where proof-of-vaccine is necessary."

Twitter:@MikeMiliardHITNEmail the writer:mike.miliard@himssmedia.comHealthcare IT News is a HIMSS publication.

Original post:
Epic, Cerner and other health IT heavy hitters join forces for Vaccine Credential Initiative - Healthcare IT News

Dodocool

I've been spoiled by smart lights. I love telling my army of Philips Hue lights when to turn on and off, and how brightly to shine. But this gooseneck floor lamp is very nearly as smart, and is convenient enough to steal my heart. For starters, it's height adjustable -- you can collapse it down small enough to serve as a desk lamp, or extend it to a height of 62 inches for duty as a floor lamp. And that's just for starters. Right now this 2-in-1 floor lamp is $30, down from its regular price of $40. To get this price, you'll need to apply the coupon on the product page and also add promo code TECHB005 at checkout.

In addition to the magic trick of working as a desk lamp or floor lamp, it's adjustable through a range of color temperatures from a cool 5,000 degrees through a warm 3,500 degrees. The lamp's touch sensitive control lets you smoothly brighten or dim the light, and a double-tap starts a sleep timer so it will shut itself off after your choice of 10 or 40 minutes.

The 15 watt bulb is rated for more than 50,000 hours, and at its brightest generates 2,000 lumens. What's it missing? Alexa, honestly. But for $30, I don't imagine I should expect voice control -- and you can always connect it to a smart plug if you need that.

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Excerpt from:
Light up your bedroom or office with this surprisingly smart lamp that's 25% off - CNET

Over all, childrens screen time had doubled by May as compared with the same period in the year prior, according to Qustodio, a company that tracks usage on tens of thousands of devices used by children, ages 4 to 15, worldwide. The data showed that usage increased as time passed: In the United States, for instance, children spent, on average, 97 minutes a day on YouTube in March and April, up from 57 minutes in February, and nearly double the use a year prior with similar trends found in Britain and Spain. The company calls the month-by-month increase The Covid Effect.

Children turn to screens because they say they have no alternative activities or entertainment this is where they hang out with friends and go to school all while the technology platforms profit by seducing loyalty through tactics like rewards of virtual money or limited edition perks for keeping up daily streaks of use.

This has been a gift to them weve given them a captive audience: our children, said Dr. Dimitri Christakis, director of the Center for Child Health, Behavior and Development at Seattle Childrens Research Institute. The cost will be borne by families, Dr. Christakis said, because increased online use is associated with anxiety, depression, obesity and aggression and addiction to the medium itself.

Crucially, the research shows only associations, which means that heavy internet use does not necessarily cause these problems. What concerns researchers, at a minimum, is that the use of devices is a poor substitute for activities known to be central to health, social and physical development, including physical play and other interactions that help children learn how to confront challenging social situations.

Yet parents express a kind of hopelessness with their options. Keeping to pre-pandemic rules seems not just impractical, it can feel downright mean to keep children from a major source of socializing.

Jan. 16, 2021, 4:58 p.m. ET

So I take it away and they do what? A puzzle? Learn to sew? Knit? I dont know what the expectations are, said Paraskevi Briasouli, a corporate writer who is raising four children ages 8, 6, 3 and 1 with her husband in a two-bedroom Manhattan apartment. Device time has replaced sports on weekday afternoons and soared 70 percent on weekends, she said.

See original here:
Childrens Screen Time Has Soared in the Pandemic, Alarming Parents and Researchers - The New York Times

The propagation of such narratives and portraying farmers as ill-informed shows a recurring theme of corporate-owned platforms. The majority of news organisations in the country is owned either by political parties/leaders or corporate houses. Zee News, for example, is run by Subhash Chandra, a Member of Parliament of the upper house. Bennett Coleman, the group that runs the Times of India, runs a massive network, exercising a virtual monopoly across media.

It is noteworthy that even Prime Minister Narendra Modi was seen in a full-page advertisement for Reliance Jio in September 2016. Unsurprisingly, the media, corporate houses, and political leaders all share close ties with each other.

As rural affairs expert and founding editor of Peoples Archive of Rural India, P Sainath, said in a podcast of Indian Journalism Review last June: When we started out in journalism, there were still newspapers that were the only business the owner had. They were dedicated to the journalism business and what they earned they poured back into journalism. Now one major newspaper owner has 200 other interests.

With the media being increasingly corporatised, it has buried the story of rural distress, that has been deepening in the recent past. An average of 28 farmers die by suicide every day in India.

Three years ago, we earned the average national daily dedicates 0.67 percent of its front page to news of rural origin where 69 percent of the population lives, Sainath had said in the podcast. That 0.67 percent figure is a huge exaggeration. It is a five-year average with an election year in between. If you take out the election year, coverage is between 0.18 and 0.24 percent.

He added: For today's media, 75 percent [of the] population of the country do not make any news. When I joined journalism in 1980, every single newspaper had a labour correspondent, an agricultural correspondent, actually covered farming. Today, the primary function of the agriculture correspondent is to cover the agriculture ministry.

Starting their own newspaper and social media platforms is the protesting farmers statement that they are not ill-informed or nave, and that they have the courage to face mainstream media channels head-on, as Ajay Pal Natt said. If we cannot defeat them, we should at least fight to reclaim the narrative.

Between romanticism and reality

We are here to protect our land. They call us Khalistani and everything, let them say, said Balweer Kaur, who came to Singhu all the way from Amritsar. They do not know anything about Punjab. One of my sons is in the army, another in government service. We will not be deterred by these propagandas. We will not go back until these black laws are repealed.

She continued: We have been sleeping in tents, arranging everything we can to survive the cold. It is difficult but we will fight.

The farmers arent contending only with outright misrepresentation. In an attempt to highlight the farmers woes, well-meaning accounts on social media and news platforms have romanticised the struggles, with eloquent accounts of their hospitality, hookah, foot massages, and courage. If one were to step back from romanticism, they would sense the protesters anxiety, fear and lack of trust in their own government, and their struggle for survival and their livelihoods.

The protesting farmers are struggling for clean drinking water and proper sanitation. Sleeping in the biting cold, away from the comfort of their homes, poses serious health issues, especially for the elderly. The raging Covid pandemic is far from over. The situation only worsened after heavy rainfall: tents and blankets were soaked, roads were muddied, and the farmers tried to clear waterlogging at Singhu border.

In cruel contrast was images of the union home minister eating meals in West Bengal, where elections are due, spotlighting the inattention to protests just a few kilometres from Delhis ministerial bungalows. The prime minister addressed farmers in different states, but not those protesting in and around Delhi. Channel tickers, such as Atmanirbhar Push and Mega Vikas Push, whenever the prime minister has a live telecast show how the fourth pillar of democracy functions.

One for all and all for one

Corporates will not do any good to the farmers. Their whole purpose would be to make money out of everything, said Jaspal Singh, who came to Singhu from Ludhiana for the protests. It is the responsibility of the state to protect us. The government is selling everything to these corporations, including the railways. How can I trust such a government?

Read more here:
Reclaiming the narrative: What farmer protests and Trolley Times tell us about the medias systemic failure - Newslaundry

IO Interactives plans to allow PC players of Hitman 3 the seamless importation of Hitman and Hitman 2 into the new game has hit a snag.

Hitman 2 remains unavailable on the Epic Game Store, where Hitman 3 will be offered exclusively for the year following its launch Jan. 20. That game is only available on Steam. Due to various circumstances out of our control, says IO, its impossible for PC owners of both games to link them up and bring their locations into Hitman 3 as intended.

But IO Interactive has offered a workaround, sort of, for the two weeks following Hitman 3s launch.

In August, when IO announced the timed exclusive to Epic Games Store for Hitman 3, the studio said that PC players would be able to import locations from the previous two games into Hitman 3 on Epic Games Store. That ended up being true on all platforms but the import is free on consoles, and costs money on PC.

Thats because players must import their levels from Hitman 1 into Hitman 2 first. On PlayStation 4 (and 5) and Xbox One (and Series X), Hitman 3 will auto-detect whether the user already owns either preceding game on that platform, and allow them to download their levels from Hitman 3s in-game store. Because Hitman 2 isnt on Epic Games Store, that process doesnt work for PC players.

As for carrying forward their progress from Hitman and Hitman 2, that is accomplished through an IO Interactive website, and isnt affected by Hitman 2s unavailability on EGS.

On ResetEra, upset customers and fans said they would either file for refunds and/or wait the year out until Hitman 3 launches on Steam.

Id just been weighing up whether or not to bite the bullet and buy it on Epic, wrote one. Guess I actually will be waiting until it hits Steam next year. Its a shame because it really looked good, but Im not rebuying all the stuff I already own.

Polygon has reached out to an IO representative for more insight on how much this will cost, and additional comment about the snafu. As it stands now, players who already own Hitman and Hitman 2 on Steam still have to pay for Hitman 2s levels in order to unlock everything in Hitman 3 on Epic Games Store.

Originally posted here:
PC players will have to re-buy Hitman 2 levels to bring them to Hitman 3 - Polygon