The study reviewed 3,291 patient records and looked at both procedural (incomplete, unclear medication orders) and clinical (e.g. wrong dose, wrong drug) errors, and rated the potential severity of the errors (minor to serious). The researchers found that procedural prescribing error rates fell by more than 90 percent, and the most serious prescribing errors declined by 44 percent.

German Hörrohr

“The study provides persuasive evidence of the value of commercial e-prescribing systems to significantly and substantially reduce a range of prescribing errors,” said study leader Professor Johanna Westbrook, from UNSW’s Australian Institute of Health Innovation.

The 60 percent reduction was far beyond anything anticipated, Professor Westbrook said. Previous attempts to reduce prescribing error rates in hospitals - such as the introduction of a standardized National Inpatient Medication Chart - had resulted in an improvement of only around four percent.

“Prescribing errors are among the top hazards faced in a hospital setting,” said Ric Day, a Professor of Pharmacology who helped implement a commercial e-prescribing system at Sydney’s St Vincent’s Hospital. “From a clinician’s point of view this is an incredible result given the prevalence and the intractability of the problem. It’s even more significant given that we expect to see greater reductions once user support is added to the systems.”

Australian hospitals are only now starting to make multi-million dollar investments in e-health technologies. “Most of this technology was developed in the US with the big medical centers designing their own customized systems. Hospitals in Australia can’t afford to do that, so they’re taking commercial off-the-shelf systems. We set out to see whether these systems are as effective as the home-grown ones,” Westbrook said. She stated more research was required to ensure the new technologies were both effective and safe. Despite the significant improvements, the study found that the new technology - which demands changes in doctor, nurse and pharmacists’ work practices - also introduced new errors.

“e-prescribing systems can be very effective, but we need to monitor them closely,” Westbrook said. “They can unwittingly introduce system-related errors such as a clinician accidentally selecting the wrong drug name from a drop down menu. Systems are most useful when they provide user support to guide clinicians in their decision making. The systems we examined had very limited decision support and thus we would anticipate that, with support added over time, even greater reductions in medication errors can be achieved.” The findings were first published in the magazine PLoS Medicine.

Medical technology has come a long way from the early stethoscope (a German Hörrohr dating back to the 19th century is shown in the illustration). Computer based electronic prescribing technology or e-Rx can reduce errors between 58 and 66 percent, new research conducted in Australia shows. Illustration: Meyers Lexicon/Public Domain

"Businesses are struggling to protect themselves as these outside threats become more resistant to signature-based security tools," said Christine Liebert, senior analyst, Security Services. "It's becoming clear that many of these emerging threats cannot be defended against in-house, creating a shift in security posture toward being more proactive."

The security services threat intelligence market is made up of advanced security event monitoring and management technologies that incorporate a variety of threat-related information sources to develop predictive security. However, emerging Web applications and other difficult-to-detect attacks are changing the security protection landscape and, subsequently, enterprise security posture.

Signature-based tools including antivirus products, firewalls, and intrusion prevention software are only effective against 30 to 50 percent of current security threats, IDC says. Attacks are becoming shorter, lasting less than a couple of hours or only a few minutes, and can be highly targeted to a specific URL, person, company, or IT asset. This trend further complicates detection, mitigation, and remediation. Over the past five years, attackers have enlarged their scope to include commercial small and medium businesses (SMBs) offering high-value targets such as financial information, intellectual property, and other proprietary data.

Many organizations, despite having implemented some of the more standard countermeasures such as firewalls, antivirus, IDs, still do not have visibility across their environment to understand what is happening at any given time, IDC says. To ensure that enterprise network, application, data, and endpoints can remain secure, anti-malware products and services are evolving to deal with these threats and reducing reliance on general signatures by instead adopting other forms of detection. From 2010 to 2011, security services threat intelligence products and services grew 65 percent in North America as enterprises looked to proactively monitor and mitigate malicious network traffic.

Security threats are evolving and organizations struggle to keep pace. Advanced security event monitoring and management technologies grew 65 percent in North America on a year by year base from 2010 to 2011. Common signature based security tools are only effective against 30 to 50 percent of current threats. Photo: www.imagine-your-world.com

“Malicious users with access to the source code have an increased ability to identify vulnerabilities and build new exploits,” Symantec says. “Additionally, customers that are not following general security best practices are susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks which can reveal authentication and session information. General security best practices include endpoint, network, remote access, and physical security, as well as configuring pcAnywhere in a way that minimizes potential risks.”

PcAnywhere allows remote users to connect to a host, using an Internet or LAN connection and an access password. The program runs on multiple platforms, including Microsoft Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and Pocket PC.

“Our current analysis shows that all pcAnywhere 12.0, 12.1 and 12.5 customers are at increased risk, as well as customers with prior, unsupported versions of the product,” Symantec says. PcAnywhere is also bundled in three Symantec products, Altiris Client Management Suite and Altiris IT Management Suite versions 7.0 or later, and Altiris Deployment Solution with Remote v7.1. In addition, customers with earlier versions of Altiris suites may have opted to leverage pcAnywhere. The increased risk is isolated to the pcAnywhere components only. There are no known impacts to the rest of the components in the Altiris products or the pcAnywhere Solution component that provides integration between pcAnywhere and the Symantec Management Console. Customers should validate the remote control tools currently in use.”

Pc Anywhere users could be exposed to “man in the middle” attacks, meaning that data exchanged between a remote user and the host could be intercepted. If the malicious user gains access to passwords used to log on to the host, he could gain access to corporate networks. Users are also at risk of remote code injection. Symantec has released a White Paper (available here) to provide remediation steps to maintain the protection of their devices and information until security patches are released.

Symantec warns users about possible exploits in its remote access program pcAnywhere and recommends disabling the remote access software suite until patches are released to resolve the issue. Photo: EL

“Business users are often frustrated by the deployment cycles, costs, complicated upgrade processes and IT infrastructures demanded by on-premises BI solutions,” said James Richardson, research director at Gartner. “SaaS- and cloud-based BI is perceived as offering a quicker, potentially lower-cost and easier-to-deploy alternative, though this has yet to be proven. It’s evident that, despite growing interest, the market is confused about what cloud/SaaS BI and analytics are and what they can deliver.”

The use of SaaS BI may lead to faster deployment, insight and value, particularly where IT is constrained by existing work and/or limited budget so that it cannot respond to demands for information and analysis as quickly as the business requires, Gartner says. The cost dynamic differs between on-premises and SaaS models. Software purchased as a service can usually be expensed, rather than capitalized, on the balance sheet. Buyers often think that SaaS is cheaper, but the reality is that this is unproven. Gartner's cost models show SaaS can be cheaper over the first five years, but not thereafter. The long-term benefits lie elsewhere - in terms of cash flow, reduced IT support costs, etc. SaaS analytic applications offer prebuilt intellectual property that can help firms work around a lack of the skills needed to build their own analytic solutions.

Instead of disrupting the enterprise BI platform and corporate performance management suite market, a more likely scenario is that SaaS and cloud-based offerings will tap into new opportunities - e.g., with midmarket companies that have yet to invest in BI, or by offering domain-specific analytics.

“If their operational business applications are in the cloud, organizations should consider pursuing cloud BI/analytics for those domains,” said Richardson. “However, they must assess risks on an ongoing basis and ensure their chosen cloud provider has appropriate business skills to provide a viable outcome. They must also ensure their BI strategy outlines how to ensure that data flows to and from these solutions in order not to become yet more silos of analysis.”

Almost one third (27 percent) of the 1,364 IT managers surveyed already use or plan to use cloud/SaaS options to augment their BI capabilities for specific lines of business or subject areas in the next 12 months. Photo: www.imagine-your-world.com

The Fourier transform is one of the most fundamental concepts in the information sciences. It’s a method for representing an irregular signal such as the voltage fluctuations in the wire that connects an MP3 player to a loudspeaker as a combination of pure frequencies. It’s universal in signal processing, and it can be used to compress image and audio files, solve differential equations and price stock options, among other things.

The reason the Fourier transform is so prevalent is the FFT, devised in the mid-1960s, which made it practical to calculate Fourier transforms on the fly. Like the FFT, the new algorithm works on digital signals. A digital signal is just a series of numbers - discrete samples of an analog signal, such as the sound of a musical instrument.

The FFT takes a digital signal containing a certain number of samples and expresses it as the weighted sum of an equivalent number of frequencies. “Weighted” means that some of those frequencies count more toward the total than others. Indeed, many of the frequencies may have such low weights that they can be safely disregarded. That’s why the Fourier transform is useful for compression. An eight-by-eight block of pixels can be thought of as a 64-sample signal, and thus as the sum of 64 different frequencies. But as the MIT researchers point out in their paper, empirical studies show that on average, 57 of those frequencies can be discarded with minimal loss of image quality.

Signals whose Fourier transforms include a relatively small number of heavily weighted frequencies are called “sparse.” The new algorithm determines the weights of a signal’s most heavily weighted frequencies; the sparser the signal, the greater the speedup the algorithm provides. Indeed, if the signal is sparse enough, the algorithm can simply sample it randomly rather than reading it in its entirety.

“In nature, most of the normal signals are sparse,” says Dina Katabi, associate professor of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and one of the developers of the new algorithm. Consider, for instance, a recording of a piece of chamber music: The composite signal consists of only a few instruments each playing only one note at a time. A recording, on the other hand, of all possible instruments each playing all possible notes at once wouldn’t be sparse - but neither would it be a signal that anyone cares about.

The new algorithm relies on two key ideas. The first is to divide a signal into narrower slices of bandwidth, sized so that a slice will generally contain only one frequency with a heavy weight. In signal processing, the basic tool for isolating particular frequencies is a filter. But filters tend to have blurry boundaries: One range of frequencies will pass through the filter more or less intact; frequencies just outside that range will be somewhat attenuated; frequencies outside that range will be attenuated still more; and so on, until frequencies are reached that are filtered out almost completely.
If it so happens that the one frequency with a heavy weight is at the edge of the filter, however, it could end up so attenuated that it can’t be identified. So the researchers’ first contribution was to find a computationally efficient way to combine filters so that they overlap, ensuring that no frequencies inside the target range will be unduly attenuated, but that the boundaries between slices of spectrum are still fairly sharp.

Once they’ve isolated a slice of spectrum, however, the researchers still have to identify the most heavily weighted frequency in that slice. They do this by repeatedly cutting the slice of spectrum into smaller pieces and keeping only those in which most of the signal power is concentrated.

The team plans to present the new algorithm at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA).

A new algorithm that improves on the fast Fourier transform (FFT) was developed by a team of MIT researchers. The algorithm can help to dramatically compress music and video files. The picture shows sine waves of several frequencies. Photo: Public Domain