Ariel Farkash

Information technology for healthcare transformation

Rising costs, decreasing quality of care, diminishing productivity, and increasing complexity have all contributed to the present state of the healthcare industry. The interactions between payers (e.g., insurance companies and health plans) and providers (e.g., hospitals and laboratories) are growing and are becoming more complicated. The constant upsurge in and enhanced complexity of diagnostic and treatment information has made the clinical decision-making process more difficult. Medical transaction charges are greater than ever. Population-specific financial requirements are increasing the economic burden on the entire system. Medical insurance and identity theft frauds are on the rise. The current lack of comparative cost analytics hampers systematic efficiency. Redundant and unnecessary interventions add to medical expenditures that add no value. Contemporary payment models are antithetic to outcome-driven medicine. The rate of medical errors and mistakes is high. Slow inefficient processes and the lack of best practice support for care delivery do not create productive settings. Information technology has an important role to play in approaching these problems. This paper describes IBM Researchs approach to helping address these issues, i.e., the evidence-based healthcare platform.

Application-Screen Masking: A Hybrid Approach

Large organizations often face difficult tradeoffs in balancing the need to share information with the need to safeguard sensitive data. A prominent way to deal with this tradeoff is on-the-fly screen masking of sensitive data in applications. A proposed hybrid approach for masking Web application screens combines the advantages of the context available at the presentation layer with the flexibility and low overhead of masking at the network layer. This solution can identify sensitive information in the visual context of the application screen and then automatically generate the masking rules to enforce at run time. This approach supports the creation of highly expressive masking rules, while keeping rule authoring easy and intuitive, resulting in an easy to use, effective system. This article is part of a special issue on Security and Privacy on the Web. The Web extra at https://youtu.be/4u2FLqjaIiI is a short demonstration of a proposed hybrid approach for masking Web application screens that combines the advantages of the context available at the presentation layer with the flexibility and low overhead of masking at the network layer. The second Web extra at https://youtu.be/-Hz3P_H0UnU is a full-length demonstration of a proposed hybrid approach for masking Web application screens that combines the advantages of the context available at the presentation layer with the flexibility and low overhead of masking at the network layer.

A standard based approach for biomedical knowledge representation

The new generation of health information standards, where the syntax and semantics of the content is explicitly formalized, allows for interoperability in healthcare scenarios and analysis in clinical research settings. Studies involving clinical and genomic data include accumulating knowledge as relationships between genotypic and phenotypic information as well as associations within the genomic and clinical worlds. Some involve analysis results targeted at a specific disease; others are of a predictive nature specific to a patient and may be used by decision support applications. Representing knowledge is as important as representing data since data is more useful when coupled with relevant knowledge. Any further analysis and cross-research collaboration would benefit from persisting knowledge and data in a unified way. This paper describes a methodology used in Hypergenes, an EC FP7 project targeting Essential Hypertension, which captures data and knowledge using standards such as HL7 CDA and Clinical Genomics, aligned with the CEN EHR 13606 specification. We demonstrate the benefits of such an approach for clinical research as well as in healthcare oriented scenarios.