Patti's Blog - Advocate for Elders, People with Disabilities and Their Families

Phone applications for medicine

 

Helping Seniors Learn New Technology

Excerpt from: New York Times (click for full article)

 

In an era when everything, from personal health records to nursing home quality ratings, is moving online, when the best way to stay in touch with grandchildren may involve texting, this amounts to slow progress. The tech analyst Laurie Orlov of the Aging in Place Technology Watch blog has called for a national campaign to bring 100 percent of seniors online.

Teaching skills only addresses part of the problem, of course; the costs of devices and of Internet service also keep older people offline, and so do physical limitations or cognitive impairment.

Still, learning the technology is key. As Mr. Phillips pointed out, “the Internet was a whole new world for me.” Everyone exploring a new world needs a guide.

Though lots of communities offer computer classes for older adults, the response has been mostly local and small-scale. But since my previous post brought lots of comments from frustrated adult children, I thought I’d pass along some time-tested national and about-to-be-national programs. Researchers have learned a fair amount about the ways seniors learn and have documented that computer and Internet training works well when it incorporates those findings.

Could Social Media Ruin Your Company?

Excerpt from: The Legal Intelligencer (click for full article)

 

The question is no longer whether your company should be involved with social media — it already is, whether you're leading or following. The skyrocketing popularity of these services is undeniable and the potential reward — for engaging, expanding and strengthening relationships with your key communities — is enormous. So are the risks. Risks come in many forms, and the prudent organization will assess its specific situation and take appropriate preventive steps to manage both risks created by others as well as risk created internally. Social media is a shockingly effective catalyst for both.

The key is understanding the nature of this new medium. The company and its counsel must be familiar not only with the rules, but with the culture of the online community. Social media is not just a new way to disseminate your message; it's a conversation taking place on a massively multi-person scale, worldwide. But just like any face-to-face conversation, it must be a two-way process (albeit on a massively multi-person scale) or it dies.

Here are the most frequent areas where companies can get in trouble, as well as some ideas for how to stay on the right side of the risk/reward curve.

Aerohive Healthcare Solutions Gain Significant Momentum

Excerpt from: Wall Street Journal (click for full article)

 

Aerohive Networks(R), the pioneer in controller-less Wi-Fi and cloud-enabled enterprise networking, today announced that one-third of the top 50 long-term healthcare providers in the United States rely on Aerohive to provide a robust wireless platform for their state-of-the-art patient care solutions. Aerohive's products have enabled some of the nation's largest facilities of regional healthcare and remote clinics to implement critical medical applications. The technology has allowed these facilities to improve patient satisfaction and clinical outcomes by leveraging Aerohive's 'mobile first' networking solutions.

App Could Transform How Autism Is Diagnosed

Excerpt from: Disability Scoop (click for full article)

 

With too few autism specialists, it can take months or even years for a child to be diagnosed. But a new app that’s being developed with federal grant money may change that.

The idea is that pediatricians without experience diagnosing autism will be able to recommend the smartphone software to families with a child they suspect of having the developmental disorder. Then, parents would take a series of videos of their child and submit the footage to autism experts who could remotely assess — and potentially diagnose — the child. Ultimately, results would then be relayed back to the child’s doctor to communicate to the family.

Testing of the app — a collaboration of the Southwest Autism Research and Resource Center in Phoenix, an Idaho medical technology company and the Georgia Institute of Technology — is expected to begin this summer and a final product could be available by 2014. The National Institutes of Health provided a $2.2 million grant for the project.

Those behind the effort say the app could lead to diagnosis within a month. “This could really change the face of how autism is diagnosed,” one of the app’s developers told The Arizona Republic.

Shooting victim creates app to save lives

Excerpt from: CNN (click for more information)

Kristina Anderson was 19 years old when she was shot three times during the Virginia Tech massacre. Now she's committed to building life-saving technology that she wished she had that day.

 

Google Lets Users Plan ‘Digital Afterlife’ By Naming Heirs

Excerpt from: Wall Street Journal (click for full article)

 

Google on Wednesday became one of the first major Internet companies to put control of data after death directly into the hands of its users.

The Internet giant unveiled a dashboard for users of its Gmail, Google+, cloud storage Drive, Picasa albums, YouTube and other services that lets people identify what they’d like to happen to their data after they pass away or become inactive for an extended period of time. You can choose to delete some or all of the data after three, six, nine or 12 months of inactivity, or pass data from the accounts along to one or more other people.

Call them your Google heirs. Google, for the record, calls the offering its “Inactive Account Manager.”

Online Habits Coming Slowly to Older Adults

Excerpt from: The New York Times (click for full article)

 

Older adults hit a digital milestone last year: For the first time since the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project began conducting surveys, a majority (53 percent) of people over age 65 used the Internet. The proportion has since inched upward, to 54 percent.

Which certainly represents progress. When Pew first began tracking Internet use in 2000, only 13 percent of seniors were online. But it remains a fairly anemic number compared to the rest of the adult population, more than 80 percent of whom use the Internet.

And among the older old, those over age 77, only about a third are online. Yet that’s the cohort most likely to become isolated by physical limitations, poor transportation and the loss of social connections — the group, in other words, who might particularly benefit from being able to interact with the world digitally, for everything from banking and ordering groceries to e-mailing faraway friends.

Using Technology to Increase Law Firm Profits

Excerpt from: Lexis Nexis (click for full article)

 

As consumers, we all prefer to pay a fixed price.  While some legal practice areas are billed as flat fees, the majority of legal work is still billed hourly.

When the economy was better, the sting of legal fees was less.  In today’s environment, clients are negotiating to get the best hourly rates or flat rates. Insurance companies and corporate clients have hired third party auditing companies to analyze their law firm’s work with the goal of decreasing legal costs by allowing them to compare one law firm’s efficiency to others.

Law firm billing systems include many tools to enable firms to better monitor their billable work and revenue.  Often, however, firms fail to use these reports to identify problems or inefficiencies.  Many small firms are informal and do not have minimum billable hours requirements for their associates or paralegals.  Even when they do, they are not enabling those timekeepers to easily track their own progress.

Social Media Affects Your Website's Search Ranking

Excerpt from: Find Law (click for full article)

 

Social media is a great tool for communicating with clients, but it can also have a secondary benefit for your practice by boosting your website's search ranking.

The way most clients will find you is by searching on the Internet for a lawyer. Hopefully they'll narrow their search by area of law and location, but even then there are lots of competitors out there. Having a professional and informational website can be a great way to get clients, but it doesn't work if no one sees it.

Getting a professional consultant to manage your website's search engine optimization can be a valuable way to improve your rankings. But you can also help yourself by stepping up your social media presence.

To prove that claim, we have some insight into how Google and other search engines rank web pages.