Cool Technology of the Week

Every Memorial Day, I plant my summer vegetable garden with those species that do not tolerate cold - eggplant, cucumbers, corn, and peppers. I clear out the spring planting beds that were filled with numerous kinds of lettuce, turn my compost pile, and use fresh compost to amend the soil before planting.

In the Spring, I start making compost by using greens (cut grass, weeds, trimmings) and a few browns (leaves, twigs, kitchen trimmings). I add a bit of baking soda to reduce the acid content of the mix, add compost starter and moisten the mixture to the consistency of a wet sponge - not too wet, not too dry. Everything goes into my rotating compost bin.

Thus, as Memorial Day approaches I have compost on my mind, which leads to the Cool Technology of the Week - Composting Toilets.

I'm a big fan of green technologies and living off grid, which I hope to do someday. Here's how composting toilets work.

Composting is a natural process through which organic material is decomposed and used to produce a valuable soil conditioner. In a composting toilet, water is not used at all, and human waste and other organic materials are deposited into a chamber where aerobic bacteria decompose solid portions. The liquid portion (the water content of urine, feces and added organic matter) is left to evaporate through a specially designed ventilation system.

The digestion chambers fill up over time. Once full, the chamber is left to compost over a period of weeks. During this time a second chamber is used. Finished compost is rendered sterile by the heat of the composting process and can be safely removed.

Here's detailed overview from the EPA.

Waterless, green, natural composting toilets - that's cool.

The Leiter Lecture

Yesterday after the HIT Standards Committee meeting, I had the honor of delivering the 2010 Leiter Lecture at the National Library of Medicine.

My topic was the grand challenges and proposed solutions as we implement healthcare information technology in support of meaningful use with a special focus on the role of Medical Librarians and Informaticians that provide knowledge services.

Here are my slides.

My grand challenges included

1. Managing Consent for data exchange

2. Engaging Patients and resolving the National Healthcare Identifier issue

3. Accelerating use of Standards, especially vocabularies

4. Aggregating Data for population health, registries, and research

5. Providing Decision Support

Here's the streaming video.

The May HIT Standards Committee Meeting

Today, the HIT Standards Committee held their May meeting via teleconference and discussed several important topics.

1. The National Information Exchange Model Standards and Interoperability Framework continues to make progress. 11 RFPs have been issued (I will post updates next week) and 8 will be funded shortly. Coordinating 11 different contracts which support standards harmonization, specification writing, testing etc. requires masterful orchestration. A Concept of Operations (ConOps) document will detail the processes by which all these efforts will intertwine. At the June Standards Committee meeting, we will review the ConOps document, ensuring alignment between the NIEM effort and the HIT Standards Committee work.

2. NHIN Direct continues to make substantial progress. There is much confusion in the industry about NHIN Direct. It's a project, not a product. It's a pilot, not a regulation. There is no guarantee that NHIN Direct implementation guides will be formally incorporated into the NHIN project. NHIN Direct is an agile development project with 4 development teams creating software that demonstrates SMTP/TLS, REST, SOAP, and XMPP (Jabber) protocols for transmitting data and metadata between two points. To ensure oversight, review, and comment by the HIT Standards Committee, NHIN Direct has asked for a working group to evaluate the 4 workstreams and comment on which is best to be the focus of early pilots. The HIT Standards Committee agreed to take on this task, delivering an evaluation by June 10.

3. Privacy and Security work has many threads at ONC - the HIT Standards Committee P&S Workgroup, the HIT Policy Committee P&S Workgroup, the NHIN Coordinating Committee etc. To align all the efforts, Joy Pritts, the new ONC Chief Privacy Officer, will create a Privacy and Security Tiger Team, staffed by experts from all the other workgroups. They'll work hard for 6 months to accelerate policy and technology work to support privacy and security efforts in such areas as NHIN Direct, Consent and segmentation of various parts of the healthcare record.

4, The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Healthcare Reform) contains a section (1561) on healthcare IT standards for enrollment. A new multi-stakeholder workgroup will be chaired by US CTO Aneesh Chopra and California Healthcare Foundation's Sam Karp. Its initial work products are due in 120 days, covering the secure standards and protocols that facilitate enrollment of individuals in Federal and State health and human services programs.

5. The Implementation Workgroup will provide online resources to accelerate interoperability using some of the tools to be provided by the NIEM RFP contracts.

While the above work is going on, the HIT Standards Committee will continue its efforts on Vocabulary and Quality.

A great discussion. The many simultaneous ONC standards efforts have been aligned to ensure the involvement HIT Standards Committee every step of the way.

Gas Fueled Power Systems

This Spring, many houses in Massachusetts suffered flooding due to failed sump pumps. This motivated me to replace our existing sump pump and install a back system.

When I think about home disaster recovery in general, an electrical power is a single point of failure. When does power fail - during a storm, when you need heat, water pumping, and humidity control.

The likelihood that gas (natural gas/liquid propane) will fail at the same time as electrical is very remote, so natural gas powered electrical generators seem like a reasonable choice for creating home electrical redundancy.

Home Depot sells the kind of unit that is needed.

Yes, it must be professionally installed, but if you live in an area with frequent storms and power outages, natural gas fueled standby and backup power systems make sense.

Speaking of "natural" gas, the New York Times recently published an article about using methane from cow manure to power data centers. Since many new data centers are being built near inexpensive hydroelectric power in rural areas where manure is prevalent, this may be a reasonable alternative energy source.

Here's the opinion of our power experts on using manure to power infrastructure:

*Similar in some ways to a co-generation plant but using farm waste instead of natural gas.

*Natural gas in the streets only has a small amount of methane, because methane is a low pressure gas.

*High pressure gases need to be used to generate significant amounts of power via gas turbines & steam.

*Methane being a low pressure gas does not burn as hot and cannot handle sudden increases in loads.

*Typically farmers burn the cow patties directly to produce heating for their homes.

*The NY Times article did not describe the step needed to store methane in a high pressure form that can support power generation.

* Bird manure has a higher energy content and has been used more successfully.

A few thoughts specific to data centers:

*Natural gas back-up generators typically do not have on-site storage since stored natural gas can be highly explosive

*Storage of liquified gas is allowed on ground level floors, but it is stored at 0-degrees Kelvin and a large containment area needs to be established because if a leak were to occur, everything it comes in contact with would be frozen instantly and become brittle.

*The diesel generators at datacenters typically have 48-72hrs. of fuel available on site to run stand alone.

*Natural gas turbines are twice as expensive as diesel engines.

*Reliability and redundancy are always important, therefore the methane power plant would need a utility back-up line to supplement the methane plant during sudden increases of electrical load and back-up the plant in the event of failure or maintenance downtime. The utility line would have to be sized to feed the entire datacenter.

*When a gas leak is detected in the street the utility provider will shutdown the entire line affecting all users until the leak is found and repaired. Therefore, redundant pipes from different sources would be needed to maintain uptime of the gas feed.

Thus, manure is not an easy solution to the problem of growing data center power needs. However, as energy costs rise and carbon footprint becomes more important, it's worth keeping in mind.

The best quote from the article - “Information technology and manure have a symbiotic relationship.”

Digital Signatures with SAFE-BioPharma

In the recent TISH meeting I attended, one of the discussants emphasized authentication/securing the endpoints/identity management as one of the great enablers of healthcare information exchange.

SAFE-BioPharma is a multi-stakeholder effort that uses digital certificates with private keys held on a smartcard or a USB device to provide electronic signatures which the FDA has determined meet 21 CFR Part 11 requirements, and also to authenticate securely among the stakeholders and Federal government agencies. The effort uses public key infrastructure and enables all of the stakeholders to have a common trust relationship with Federal agencies using the Federal government’s own federated security mechanisms.

As we think about strong authentication methods - biometrics, hard tokens, and smart cards, the SAFE-BioPharma approach is another option to consider.

How does it work?

SAFE-BioPharma member companies are using the SAFE-BioPharma standard in ways that achieve numerous goals including streamlining processes, protecting intellectual property and reducing costs. The standard is a convenient way to apply legally binding (and regulatory compliant) digital signatures to electronic documents. The identity of the signer is clearly verified and the integrity of each digitally signed document is cryptographically guaranteed. SAFE-BioPharma digital signatures are being used to sign electronic laboratory notebooks, electronic regulatory submissions, contracts and a wide variety of forms. Member companies also use the SAFE-BioPharma standard for a variety of identity management functions including employee access, external partner authentication, etc.

For details on the companies involved, the actual systems in production and the business processes used to implement SAFE-BioPharma in production, see this summary.

SAFE is achieving federated identity management using digital certificates on inexpensive smartcards or USB devices. Definitely worth adding to our strong authentication armamentarium.

Cool Technology of the Week

As readers of my blog know, I'm a big fan of flexible work arrangements , virtual presentations, and telepresence.

One limitation of all these approaches is that you lose the "over the cubicle effect" - the ability to wander around the office and chat with your colleagues.

The Texai robot is an attempt to merge teleconferencing with mobility and it's under development at Willow Garage . I encourage you to watch this video demonstration.

The project began as a solution to a problem. Two Willow Garage engineers, Dallas Goecker and Curt Meyers, working 2000 miles apart, needed a more efficient method of interacting and collaborating throughout the day. Skype and conference calls hindered the casual conversations more representative of day-to-day, in-person interactions around the office. Seeking a better solution, Dallas and Curt applied their knowledge of building battle bots and the PR2 to create Texai.

A teleconferencing solution that enables you to wander from meeting to meeting and cubicle to cubicle without having to worry about Skype, Webex, or ISDN lines. That's cool!

My Parents

I've written about being a parent, a husband, and a son.

It's time to write a blog about my parents and their impact on my development, my day to day thinking, and my future.

I was born in Des Moines, Iowa to Dagmar Vanags and John E. Halamka, who were both 20 at the time (typical parenting age for Iowa in the 1950's and early 60's). They are approaching their 50th wedding anniversary. I've blogged about our family history going back to the 1800's. When I was 0-2 years old, we lived with my father's parents as my father finished college. He joined the Air Force and we moved to Colorado Springs, Levittown (Willingboro) New Jersey, and finally Southern California in the mid 1960's. He worked for Aerospace contractors such as CSC, Aerojet General, and TRW.

His engineering work meant that our apartment was filled with tools, various electronic/mechanical surplus, and a culture of inventiveness. On weekends, we went to surplus stores and we built things together including a working wooden model of Da Vinci's catapult, a minibike, and a metal detector.

My father arranged access to the TRW timesharing system via a 110 baud acoustic modem and we worked on FORTRAN, COBOL and BASIC programming. Thus, by 14 I had already spent hundreds of hours developing software (in 1976). As Malcolm Gladwell describes in Outliers, having this much computer science and engineering experience in the mid to late 1970's prepared me for success when the personal computer revolution occurred in the early 1980's.

My father became a patent attorney and when I wrote software, he patented the work itself and the business processes, such as my 1984 patent of the electronic greeting card.

In my adult life, he's provided legal advice, financial advice, and feedback on the various career threads I've pursued. His perspective from the eyes of an engineer/attorney is always welcome.

My mother has been a life long teacher/professor and attorney. She arranged for me to attend a community college physics course when I was in elementary school. She ensured there were books in the house and I learned to read at a very early age. There was no significant family time spent around the television (except watching the original airing of Star Trek from 1966-69). I went to Broadway plays by the time I was 4. I visited major national parks and monuments throughout the country by car by the time I was 6.

If my father brought me love of science/technology/engineering/math, then my mother brought me love of learning, writing and public speaking.

Throughout high school I entered every essay contest I could find and spoke at every speaking competition offered. The ability to think fast on my feet in front of an audience is my mother's skill.

In my adult life, she's provided legal advice, academic career advice, and parenting advice. Her perspective as a teacher, public speaker, and gregarious social person is always welcome.

Today, my parents are retired and have recently moved to a great one story house. They continue to stay in touch with friends, former students and colleagues. Over the next few years, I'm sure they will do volunteer work, cultural events, gardening, reading, and travel. We talk every week and they continue to stay involved with everything going on in our extended family.

I look forward to many more years of sharing our journeys together!