IOM estimates suggest that as much as 750 billion dollars is spent every year within the US health system without contributing to better health

Global Health blog: Health Technology Assessment in the Americas

from Center for Global Development - Latest Updates by cgdev.rss@cgdev.org (CGD RSS feed)

By Amanda Glassman - This is a joint post with Kate McQueston.
“Every country, no matter how wealthy or how impoverished, cannot afford to waste money in healthcare on health technology that does not contribute to health.”

These words were spoken by Harvey V. Fineberg, the President of the Institute of Medicine, at a recent event co-hosted by CGD and PAHO, which highlighted the importance of supporting health technology assessment (HTA) in the Americas. Low-and middle-income countries are increasingly interested in building capacity for priority setting, particularly in regards to public funding in a time where pressures to incorporate costly new technologies are on the rise and donor contributions are stagnating. Over the past five years Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Colombia, Croatia, Estonia, the Republic of Korea, Malaysia, and Uruguay have also added health technology assessment agencies—tasked with varying responsibilities, including the generation or coordination of health technology assessment and budget impact analysis, as well as the creation recommendations for coverage or reimbursement decisions related to public spending.

Of his main key points, Dr. Fineberg pointed out that recent IOM estimates suggest that as much as 750 billion dollars is spent every year within the US health system without contributing to better health...

please see full article...

The Department of Health’s NHS information strategy

The Department of Health’s new information strategy sets out plans to standardise data collection in NHS bodies, and to share and use it more effectively. Colin Marrs examines a trailblazer for the open data agenda

The Department of Health’s NHS information strategy, released last week, blazes a trail for other government departments by outlining the department’s approach to using open data as a way to improve service delivery. Although the strategy (see box) doesn’t envisage giving people new rights to access data currently kept out of the public domain, it does require NHS service providers to improve the way they collect, hold and release information – with the intention of improving patients’ experiences, providers’ performances, and the opportunities for private companies. The challenges facing those implementing the strategy will provide lessons for the rest of government, and help shape the future of the coalition’s open data initiative.

http://network.civilservicelive.com/pg/features/csw/read/658968/open-datas-healthy-life-signalsNHS Information Strategy: key points

• Create a single comprehensive online ‘portal’ – provided by government from 2013 – to present information on health, care, support services and public health;
• Move away from a national NHS IT system to locally-commissioned systems;
• Give all NHS patients secure online access to their personal GP records by 2015;
• Ensure that all GPs make available electronic booking and cancelling of appointments, and ordering of repeat prescriptions, by 2015;
• Introduce systems to ensure that medical information is recorded only once – at first contact with professional staff, and using nationally-defined data standards – and shared securely between healthcare providers.

If you are interested in this you might also be interested in the following sessions at Civil Service Live:

• Day 1: 15.10 - 16.10 - Transparency and Open Data
• Day 2: 15.20 - 15.50 - How digital channels transformed Health for Work

Junar gets $1.2M to make open data more useful - from Gigaom.com

The open data movement holds that much of the information garnered using public funds should be freely accessible to interested parties as long as what they do with that information is also made available to everyone. Organizations that are opening up at least some of their data include NASDAQ, the New York Stock Exchange, the UK’s data.gov.uk, and Data.gov.

“A ton of data has been opened up by governments, think tanks, academia, NGOs — it’s an iceberg of data,” said Junar CEO Diego May in an interview last week. The issue is finding the right ways to look at that data to attack real-world problems. Open data projects have grown around genomic data, other public and private health data, even around food data.

“Many organizations are opening their data up to be more transparent, to foster collaboration, to help innovation … Many put out HTML tables or PDFs on their web sites, but they do a crappy job and it’s not really their fault. The tools [for really good visualization] are lacking,” May said.

Junar’s Open Data Platform promises to make it easier for users to find the right data (regardless of its underlying format); enhance it with analytics; publish it; enable interaction with comments and annotation; and generate reports. Throughout the process it also lets user manage the workflow and track who has accessed and downloaded what, determine which data sets are getting the most traction etc.

The most direct competitors to Junar’s software as a service are Tableau and Google visualization tools, and Socrata but those products focus on the display/visualization piece of the solution, not all the other components, May said.

http://gigaom.com/cloud/junar-gets-1-2m-to-make-open-data-more-useful/

HHS innovator: Grants, challenges are growing healthcare entrepreneurs - from MedCityNews

When you hear “government” and “healthcare,” you probably think Medicare, Medicaid and other government programs directed at the general public.

Wil Yu

Wil Yu, director of innovations at the Department of Health and Human Services in the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, by contrast, wants to build an entrepreneurial ecosystem in the private sector to solve big healthcare problems.

His tools? Data liberacion and app challenges that are designed to help entrepreneurs think up and build the next innovative solution for problems facing the industry.

In his government job, the former investment banker and equity analyst:

• Leads several innovation grant programs and created “Investing in Innovations;“
• directs the Strategic Health IT Advanced Research Projects program;
• serves as a senior adviser at the CMS Innovation Center and on the HHS Innovation Council;
• manages the DC-to-VC program;
• and co-founded the Federal mHealth Collaborative.

He also has helped with many challenges that range from heart health to hospital-to-home transitions.
Yu talked with MedCity News about gaming and health, access to data, and the DC-to-VC program.

MedCity: Many people are skeptical about government’s role in innovation. How can you convince people that government is on their side?

for the full interview:
http://medcitynews.com/2012/05/hhs-innovator-government-is-supporting-innovative-ecosystem-in-healthcare/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=hhs-innovator-government-is-supporting-innovative-ecosystem-in-healthcare

Big Data can discover things it would take years for human researchers on their own to discover - from Vancouversun.com

B.C. health care on the cutting edge of Big Data

Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/news/health+care+cutting+edge+Data/6575625/story.html#ixzz1uBYdApSg

Big Data can discover things it would take years for human researchers on their own to discover, if they ever could.

Big Data can reveal the overlooked negative effects of a drug or, conversely, unexpected benefits and new treatments. It can lead us to insights into how a drug has worked over a vast population, enabling researchers to determine which doses are most effective, which are wrong-headed or perhaps dangerous.

Tracking Big Data can help you find out if a medical procedure really gets the results we think and desire. Or it might reveal diagnostic and treatment mistakes we are making and suggest overlooked ways of improving health care. Plug in genetics, a factor that often influences how medicines and treatments work on an individual basis, and you are looking at the possibility of bespoke, genomic medicine — health care tailored to an individual, in much the same way as a tailor customizes a suit or dress.

Big Data can and will save lives. And it will almost certainly save money.

The McKinsey Global Institute has estimated that Big Data could lead to $300 billion of savings in the U.S. health care system. John Wilbanks, a senior fellow at the Kauffman Foundation, says in his latest report that “combining larger data sets on drug response with genomic data on patients could steer therapies to the people they are most likely to help. This could substantially reduce the need for trial-and-error medicine, with all its discomforts, high costs and sometimes tragically wrong guesses.”

Yet almost every B.C. researcher you talk to will lament British Columbia is not using its public health data resource to the degree it should be. The question is why not?

Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/news/health+care+cutting+edge+Data/6575625/story.html#ixzz1uBYSg2yO

The Wireless Revolution Hits Medicine, from WSJ

Eric Topol talks about the upheaval that's coming as the digitization of health care meets the smartphone

By RON WINSLOW

After 14 years as chief of cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic, Eric Topol moved to La Jolla, Calif., in 2006 to become director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute, which was established to apply genetic discoveries to personalized medicine. Three years later, he helped launch the West Wireless Health Institute, for which he is vice chairman and which is investigating use of wireless technology in the delivery of health care.

More in Innovations in Health Care

• The Simple Idea Transforming Health Care
• Medical Researchers Tune In Online Buzz
• Patients as Partners
• Drug Discovery Gets an Upgrade
• If Only Heart Attacks Were Predictable
• Read the complete report

The convergence of these two fields—genomics, marked by the rapidly plummeting cost of sequencing a person's entire genetic code, and wireless, with its flurry of innovative health-care apps—led Dr. Topol to write "The Creative Destruction of Medicine," a book that offers an illuminating perspective on the coming digitization of health care. It's also a reminder that while medicine is one of the globe's premier drivers of innovation, it is also a conservative culture that now finds itself buffeted by transformational change.

The Wall Street Journal's Ron Winslow discussed the implications with Dr. Topol. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation:

Unnecessary Boundaries

WSJ: Let's start with the title. "Creative Destruction" is a provocative term. What needs to be destroyed?

Enlarge Image

 

Oxford Nanopore TechnologiesLtd., AirStrip Technologies Inc., iRhythm Technologies Inc., Sensimed AG

DIGITAL DOCTOR Eric Topol advocates the transformative power of technology like the MinIon, a disposable device being developed to sequence parts of an individual's DNA; a mobile patient monitor enabled by an iPhone app; the Zio patch, worn above the heart to check for irregular heartbeats; and a contact lens embedded with a chip to measure eye pressure for people with or at risk of glaucoma.

DR. TOPOL: There are two levels. One is that in medicine, everything we do essentially is at the population level. Whether it's mass screening or giving the same medication to all people with a particular diagnosis, this doesn't recognize the individuality of people. I think it's fundamentally flawed. We now have the tools to do much better.

The other is this analog world medicine lives in. The field has resisted a truly remarkable digital infrastructure to the nth degree. It hasn't really embraced genomics, wireless biosensors or advanced imaging that could be used to make medicine more precise. Or social networking.

for full interview:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303404704577311421888663472.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Republicans put pressure on wireless health regulators

Last week six Republicans in the US House of Representatives sent a letter to the FDA and FCC that explains the importance of wireless health devices and medical apps, cautions against slow and inconsistent regulations, and asks for a progress report on how the two regulatory bodies are working together to co-regulate these technologies. The six House members that signed the letter were: Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Rep. Joseph Pitts (R-PA), Rep. Greg Walden (R-OR), Rep. Brian Bilbray (R-CA), Rep. Michael Burgess MD (R-TX), and Rep. Phil Gingrey MD (R-GA).

The letter includes a nod to MobiHealthNews’ apps reports series: “Between 2010 and 2011 the number of medical applications (apps) available in the iTunes App Store subject to FDA evaluation under the draft guidance increased by 250 percent. The technology is changing rapidly. We are concerned that applying a complex regulatory framework could inhibit future growth and innovation in this promising market and could preclude tools that help patients better manage their care and allow the health system, as a whole, reduce costs and improve quality.”

“Innovative wireless medical devices play a vital role in addressing our nation’s unsustainable health care costs. These technologies enable physicians to know that a patient’s condition is worsening before the patient feels any symptoms, and provide treatment to keep the patient from having a health crisis that results in a trip to the emergency department,” the letter reads. “Additionally, the popularity of mobile medical applications reflects the desire of many Americans to use technology to actively engage in their own health. The abilities of smartphones and wireless devices to perform complex health and medical functions are increasing and the use of mobile medical applications is becoming more common. As policy makers, we must ensure a regulatory framework that encourages innovation while increasing access to care, protecting patient safety and lowering costs.”

The Congress members note that the FCC and FDA recognized the necessity of working together more closely to regulate wireless health back in July 2010 when it signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU): “We hope that the momentum generated by those actions continues and that collaboration between the agencies remains a priority,” the representatives write.

The representatives have asked the FDA and FCC to respond in writing to a series of questions about their co-regulation efforts by April 17, 2012 “so that [they] can better understand the progress FDA and FCC have made to date, future steps planned by the agencies, and how [they] may best assist the agencies’ efforts.”

more...
http://mobihealthnews.com/16946/republicans-put-pressure-on-wireless-health-regulators/

US Unveils $200 Million Big Data Initiative, The Burrill Report

The Obama Administration has launched a Big Data Research and Development Initiative in conjunction with six federal departments and agencies, making a $200 million commitment to improve the tools and techniques needed to access, organize, and glean discoveries from the huge volumes of data being generated around the world.

“In the same way that past federal investments in information technology R&D led to dramatic advances in supercomputing and the creation of the Internet, the initiative we are launching today promises to transform our ability to use Big Data for scientific discovery, environmental, and biomedical research, education, and national security,” says John Holdren, assistant to the President and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

The National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation will be among the top recipients of funding, along with the Departments of Defense and Energy, and the U.S. Geological Survey. Besides advancing the development of technologies needed to collect, store, preserve, manage, and analyze the growing volume of digital data being generated on a daily basis, the initiative aims to harness the knowledge gleaned to advance scientific discovery, strengthen national security, and transform teaching and learning. Money will also be allocated to expand the skilled workforce needed to make sense of it all.

for more:
http://www.burrillreport.com/article-us_unveils_200_million_big_data_initiative_.html

American Diabetes Association to Collaborate with Quintiles’ Digital Patient Unit

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. -- Quintiles and the American Diabetes Association (Association) today announced a strategic agreement in which Quintiles’ Digital Patient Unit will provide the Association’s millions of website users access to Quintiles’ medication monitoring service.
The Association’s constituents who opt in for the service will receive free safety checks of their medications to identify potential interactions and other risk factors, which are already provided to the 2.5 million registered users of Quintiles’ www.MediGuard.org. Registrants will also be eligible to participate in select direct-to-patient programs to benefit their medical conditions and advance global diabetes patient care.
“We are very pleased to offer this medication monitoring service to improve the lives of all people affected by diabetes,” said Vivian Fonseca, MD, President, Medicine & Science, American Diabetes Association. “This collaboration with Quintiles enables the Association to provide important safety information at no cost to our constituents.”

http://www.sunherald.com/2012/04/04/3862297/american-diabetes-association.html

Read more here: http://www.sunherald.com/2012/04/04/3862297/american-diabetes-association.html#storylink=cpy

FDA Calls For Text-Mining Software.

Modern Healthcare (4/6, McKinney, Subscription Publication) reports, "The Food and Drug Administration has put out a call to vendors for text-mining software that relies on natural language processing. The software will be used by the agency's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research 'to rapidly analyze documents to find therapeutically useful and possibly unknown associations between drugs, disease processes, adverse events and therapeutic agents,' the FDA said in a request for proposals published on the Federal Business Opportunities website." The FDA expects "to choose a vendor based on overall value" and to announce the award in May.

The Processes, Challenges, and Pitfalls of Creating a Large Health Information Exchange

In the world of health information exchange development process and implementation are very slow.

I previous posted here about the Inland Empire Health Information Exchange becoming operational on April  1, 2012.

                             

In an article by Lauren McSherry, California Healthline Regional Correspondent she ably outlines the processes, delays and pitfalls of developing an entirely new entity.

“After two years of planning and negotiation, an information-sharing network linking health care providers throughout Riverside and San Bernardino counties is almost ready to go live.

Health officials say the Inland Empire Health Information Exchange will be one of the largest in the nation, covering a geographic region nearly the size of Maine with a population of 4.2 million. About 15 hospitals and 2,000 doctors are expected to participate in the health information exchange. California has a strategic plan for the mobilization of health care information electronically across organizations within regions, communities and ultimately the state.

"Our challenge in the Inland Empire is that our counties have some of the lowest health outcomes when it comes to some of the more chronic diseases," said Christina Bivona-Tellez, regional vice president of Riverside and San Bernardino counties for the Hospital Association of Southern California. "This is a tool we can use to more expeditiously intervene and make a difference," she said.

In June, supervisors in Riverside and San Bernardino counties passed resolutions recognizing the exchange as the designated HIE network for the region. Each county's department of health will participate in the exchange.

for full article:

http://healthworkscollective.com/gary-levin-md/31079/sustaining-unsustainable-creating-new-institutions-costing-more-spend-less?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+healthworkscollective_allposts+%28Healthworks+Collective%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

The Cloud in Healthcare – Top 10 Takeaways from iHT2 San Francisco

Last week, our media partners, the Institute of Healthcare Technology Transformation hosted their 2 day conference in San Francisco. An emerging leader in the HIT cloud market, Cloud Prime alongside AthenaHealth sponsored the panel, “The Cloud in Healthcare” that discussed the following:

• Benefits and potential risks
• Success stories and best practices
• Challenges and obstacles for implementation
• Integration strategies

The following is CloudPrime’s top 10 takeaways from 2012 iHT2 San Francisco:
1. IHPs (large integrated health providers, like university systems, etc), are by and large going with EPIC for EHR solutions, thereby automatically forgoing a degree of flexibility and any chance of real near-term interoperability.
2. The historical problems of security, reliability, and control with Cloud-based solutions are being rapidly overcome, and the cost savings from hosting data and applications in the Cloud are becoming so compelling that increasingly complex medical organizations and systems will require the Cloud in order to be effective and efficient…..or risk becoming extinct.

for more: http://healthworkscollective.com/fred-pennic/31027/cloud-healthcare-top-10-takeaways-iht2-san-francisco?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+healthworkscollective_allposts+%28Healthworks+Collective%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

5 Buckets to Patient Engagement and the Role of HIT

What is patient engagement?
Patient engagement is a connection between patient, caregiver and health care provider.  A trusted relationship forms and mutual respect is fostered.  Patients and their families are empowered and they are active in health care decisions.  However, patient engagement begins before the initial interaction with health care providers.

When patients and consumers recognize the need to be in charge of their health, patient engagement evolves.  Patients and consumers have a choice to be an active participant in their health care.  Those patients and consumers who choose to be actively involved and in charge of their health, work together with their health care providers to successfully reach their health goals and needs.

A recent study conducted (pdf link) by the National eHealth Collaborative “2012 NeHC Stakeholder Survey,” found that 64% of stakeholders’ survey described “patient engagement” as: “Patient uses educational material and online resources to learn about better health or their own health conditions.”
It’s interesting that most stakeholders surveyed felt that using educational materials and online resources best reflects the definition of patient engagement.

http://healthworkscollective.com/barbara-ficarra/30964/5-buckets-patient-engagement-and-role-hit?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+healthworkscollective_allposts+%28Healthworks+Collective%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

Health IT impact of Supreme Court decision depends on extent of ruling

http://www.fiercehealthit.com/story/health-it-impact-supreme-court-decision-depends-extent-ruling/2012-04-02?utm_medium=nl&utm_source=internal 

When the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments about the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) last week, the news media went a little crazy. Despite the evident skepticism of some justices about the individual mandate to buy insurance, there still is no reason to assume that the High Court will knock down the entire healthcare reform law--or even the individual mandate. One or more swing votes are still in play, and nobody has a crystal ball that can forecast the outcome.

But from the perspective of health IT, whether the court chooses to strike down just the insurance mandate or the entire law is critically important. As the Health Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) pointed out recently, the statute includes provisions related to "quality reporting initiatives, pay-for-performance initiatives, adoption of state HIEs, operating rules and standards, and health IT work force development."

That's just the beginning. The business model for accountable care organizations (ACOs) is based partly on the Medicare shared savings program authorized by the law--and ACOs cannot exist without a robust IT infrastructure. The ACA also authorizes a bundled payment pilot that depends on coordination of care between hospitals and post-acute-care facilities. And another ACA provision requires Medicare to levy penalties for excessive readmissions, forcing hospitals to bolster their ability to communicate with other providers and patients.

Read more: Health IT impact of Supreme Court decision depends on extent of ruling - FierceHealthIT http://www.fiercehealthit.com/story/health-it-impact-supreme-court-decision-depends-extent-ruling/2012-04-02?utm_medium=nl&utm_source=internal#ixzz1qugKrIcw
Subscribe: http://www.fiercehealthit.com/signup?sourceform=Viral-Tynt-FierceHealthIT-FierceHealthIT

Amazon, NIH put 1000 Genomes Project in the cloud

I highly recommend getting their newsletter.-W

March 29, 2012 — 2:57pm ET | By Gienna Shaw

It took 10 years and billions of dollars to sequence and publish the first human genome. Now,

anyone with an Internet connection can, in theory, access 200 terabytes of genomic data,

including DNA sequenced from more than 1,700 individuals.

Amazon and the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced today that the complete 1000 Genomes Project will be available on Amazon Web Services as a public data set. The announcement, made at the White House Big Data Summit, will make the largest collection of human genetics available free of charge, according to a TechCrunch article.

Read more: Amazon, NIH put 1000 Genomes Project in the cloud - FierceHealthIT http://www.fiercehealthit.com/story/amazon-nih-put-1000-genomes-project-cloud/2012-03-29#ixzz1qbaL2qAv Subscribe: http://www.fiercehealthit.com/signup?sourceform=Viral-Tynt-FierceHealthIT-FierceHealthIT

ACA, JOBS Act, National health info, Crowdfunding and the Healthcare Market

HealthWorks Collective - The world's best thinkers on healthcare

Affordable Care Act Hits Two-Year Mark

Last week marked the two-year anniversary of the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). With heightened focus on the ACA continuing this week, especially on the individual mandate, it’s important to take a step back and understand the strides that ...

PharmTech Talk

JOBS Act Passage—A Boost for Biopharma?

Amid one of the most divisive eras in our nation’s political history, one thing we can all pretty much agree on is the fact that our stalled economic engine needs a jumpstart. According to recent *data* from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the ...

American Medical News

National health information network soon will stand on its own

Health care organizations and federal agencies that piloted a data exchange say it’s ready to separate from the government.

How Crowdfunding Affects the Healthcare Market, and Your Walletfrom HealthWorks Collective - The world's best thinkers on healthcare by HerinaAyot

Crowdfunding may have an interesting effect on the healthcare space. Unlike technology, entertainment, retail and other sectors, novel medical technologies and therapeutics take years of pre-development, and require institutional manpower to further growth. Thus, most biotech and pharma companies do not consider their early-stage investors to be the general public, and only in certain cases are they in a position to raise ‘quick capital’ at this juncture.

Todd Park, CTO of Health and Human Services is hosting his third annual Health Data Initiative aka Datapalooza

Third Time’s the Charm!

Sven Patrick Larsen at Pixels & Pills - 18 minutes ago

He’s at it again! Todd Park, CTO of Health and Human Services is hosting his third annual Health Data Initiative aka Datapalooza and this year promises to be the best one yet. In addition to Todd, other P & P favorites like Tom Goetz and former US Senator Bill Frist will be discussing how to utilize [...] more »

Todd Park Was Right…Now What? Getting our heads in the cloud

From The Health Care Blog

Todd Park Was Right…Now What?

© THCB 1995-2012

By JOHN HALLOCK

In March of 2005, I staffed an interview between Todd Park and Steve Lohr of The New York Times in the cafeteria of the old New York offices of the “Grey Lady.” At the time, Park was heading a very small web-based start-up company that was trying to convince medical groups – and on that day, a leading national technology business reporter – that web-based “cloud” technologies would become mainstream in the healthcare IT industry and were the only logical means to get the hundreds of thousands of independent U.S. doctors and their small offices to go digital...

http://thehealthcareblog.com/blog/2012/03/15/todd-park-was-right%E2%80%A6now-wha/

NIST Releases Technical Guidance for Evaluating Electronic Health Records

NIST Releases Technical Guidance for Evaluating Electronic Health Records

From NIST Tech Beat: March 20, 2012
Jennifer Huergo      

An important aspect of any product is how easily someone can use it for its intended purpose, also known as usability. Electronic health records (EHR) that are usable have the potential to improve patient care, which is why the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has outlined formal procedures for evaluating the usability of EHR systems.

NIST releases EHR usability guidelines

Posted by:Anne Steciw

Some critics of the meaningful use EHR incentive program argue that health care providers wouldn’t need incentives to adopt electronic health records if EHR usability would improve. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) published an EHR usability toolkit last year to help providers assess how well an EHR system supports them in delivering safe, effective and efficient care to patients.

And now the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is getting into the game by releasing technical guidance for evaluating EHR usability. The guidance is aimed at EHR developers, with an emphasis on a user-centered approach to the development of EHR systems.

COMMENTARY: Why NIST's cloud definition is fatally flawed, from Government Computer News

Commentary by Michael Daconta

http://gcn.com/articles/2012/04/02/reality-check-nist-flawed-cloud-framework.aspx

NIST’s definition of cloud computing is incomplete in two significant ways: first, by excluding the notion of big data and second, by limiting itself to three out of an almost infinite number of possible “things as a service.”

In relation to big data, GCN’s recent cover story “Taming Big Data” and a recent InformationWeek article on “Hadoopla!” reported on the big data revolution and its explosive growth in both vendor implementations and customer adoption. 

Related coverage:

NIST to tackle big data in 2012

NIST tackles security, privacy of cloud computing