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

“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 success of the e-commerce channel will be enhanced by a multichannel approach, where retailers leverage the store to make the e-commerce channel even more appealing to consumers,” Mim Burt, research director at Gartner, said. “In many product categories, consumers prefer to shop online and take possession in the store. Multichannel retailers that offer the ability to order online and take possession in the store will be offering increased flexibility to customers, which should enhance revenue for them.”

The multichannel forecast shows that the U.K. leads the U.S. significantly in the current percentage of e-commerce, which was approximately 9.3 percent of retailers’ revenue in 2011. This contrasts with the U.S. percentage of slightly less than 5.3 percent of retailers’ revenue for 2011. U.S. retailers must focus on boosting e-commerce channel sales and become more multichannel aligned in their strategies. They can do this, for example, by leveraging their store assets to complement and enhance sales in both channels. Western European markets, particularly in the U.K., have benefited from generally high Internet penetration and usage, a higher online per capita expenditure, and a better multichannel fulfillment infrastructure.

“Executing on cross-channel consistency will prove challenging, as retailers continue to grapple with siloed business process and a plethora of disparate applications,” Burt said. “Most challenging are the product-centric organizational structures that are no longer suitable for today’s customer-centric approach, which should take full account of customers shopping across current and emerging touch points.”

Channels have grown as largely separate entities, and business metrics in retail remain overwhelmingly product and channel-focused. Retailers need to change internal organizational alignments to execute a consistent cross-channel shopping experience. Requirements of shoppers across channels and the customer shopping process should be their guiding principles, rather than focusing on the ROI of multichannel initiatives.

“Focusing on ROI on multichannel is a misnomer,” said John Davison, managing vice president at Gartner. “Retailers should focus on identifying the impact of investments in one channel on the other channels. For example, our multichannel retailers’ forecast shows revenue from the mobile channel through 2015 is less than 2 percent, but retailers should not underestimate the impact this channel will have in pushing sales to other channels. Equally, an expected drop in store revenue does not mean reduced investment in their stores. In fact, the store will require more investment targeted at cross-channel shopper fulfillment as its importance as the hub of the retailer’s multichannel offer increases.”

The U.K. leads the U.S. significantly in the current percentage of e-commerce, which accounted for approximately 9.3 percent of retailers’ revenue in 2011, compared to slightly less than 5.3 percent in the U.S. Photo: www.imagine-your-world.com

In a paper published in the American Chemical Society's Nano Letters, the ORNL-led team demonstrated metallic conductivity in a ferroelectric film that otherwise acts as an insulator. This phenomenon of an insulator-metal transition was predicted more than 40 years ago by theorists but has eluded experimental proof until now.

"This finding unambiguously identifies a new conduction channel that percolates through the insulating matrix of the ferroelectric, which opens potentially exciting possibilities to 'write' and 'erase' circuitry with nanoscale dimensions," said lead author Peter Maksymovych of ORNL's Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences.

From an applied perspective, the ability to use only an electric field as a knob that tunes both the magnitude of metallic conductivity in a ferroelectric and the type of charge carriers is particularly intriguing. Doing the latter in a semiconductor would require a change of the material composition.

"Not only can we turn on metallic conductivity, but if you keep changing the bias dials, you can control the behavior very precisely," Maksymovych said. "And the smaller the nanodomain, the better it conducts. All this occurs in the exact same position of the material, and we can go from an insulator to a better metal or a worse metal in a heartbeat or faster. This is potentially attractive for applications, and it also leads to interesting fundamental questions about the exact mechanism of metallic conductivity."

Although the researchers focused their study on a well-known ferroelectric film called lead-zirconate titanate, they expect their observations will hold true for a broader array of ferroelectric materials.

"We also anticipate that extending our studies onto multiferroics, mixed-phase and anti-ferroelectrics will reveal a whole family of previously unknown electronic properties, breaking new ground in fundamentals and applications alike," said co-author and ORNL senior scientist Sergei Kalinin.

ORNL researchers used piezoresponse force microscopy to demonstrate the first evidence of metallic conductivity in ferroelectric nanodomains. A representative nanodomain is shown in the PFM image above. Image: Oak Ridge National Laboratory