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The use of government information in an online environment is vital to citizens and researchers. Trust in the validity of digital government information is a key issue. As agencies make digital government publications available online, preservation of those documents for future generations is an important access component. Online government information does not always guarantee equal access for all. The following articles examine these issues and more concerning government information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There remains concern among solicitors about the evidential weight of electronic documents, including document systems that are used to execute high value transactions. This article considers the meaning, in electronic terms, of document, book or paper, instrument, writing, record and map – both in terms of legislation and case law. Consideration is also given to primary evidence, original document and certified copies, the requirement that an agreement or communication be in writing and what is mean by a signature. The discussion then considers execution as a deed and the requirement for signing in the presence of a witness, including where the witness is remote. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our genomic sequence constitutes the most sensitive and personal of information: uniquely identifying us, revealing our propensity to develop certain diseases and conditions, and exposing familial connections of close genetic relatives. Big Data enables consumer-genomics companies to collect, store, and electronically share genomic-sequence data in conjunction with numerous pieces of private health and personal information. Consumer curation of data currently occurs largely outside pertinent federal regulations ordinarily governing the handling of private health information, which means consumers may not fully understand the implications of the transaction during the process of submitting their genomic and health information. This article describes 23andMe's corporate model, including relevant terms contained in its consent and privacy policies of which consumers should be aware, and discusses practices currently permitted by law that pose significant informational risks to individual privacy, including exposing the consumer and his close family members to stigma, bias, discrimination, and criminal investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online access to medical records and linked services, including requesting repeat prescriptions and booking appointments, enables patients to personalize their access to care. However, online access creates opportunities and challenges for both health professionals and their patients, in practices and in research. The challenges for practice are the impact of online services on workload and the quality and safety of health care. Health professionals are concerned about the impact on workload, especially from email or other online enquiry systems, as well as risks to privacy. Patients report how online access provides a convenient means through which to access their health provider and may offer greater satisfaction if they get a timely response from a clinician. Online access and services may also result in unforeseen consequences and may change the nature of the patient-clinician interaction. Research challenges include: (1) Ensuring privacy, including how to control inappropriate carer and guardian access to medical records; (2) Whether online access to records improves patient safety and health outcomes; (3) Whether record access increases disparities across social classes and between genders; and (4) Improving efficiency. The challenges for practice are: (1) How to incorporate online access into clinical workflow; (2) The need for a business model to fund the additional time taken. Creating a sustainable business model for a safe, private, informative, more equitable online service is needed if online access to records is to be provided outside of pay-for-service systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Smith-Lever Act of 1914 established the Agricultural Extension Service to disseminate agricultural research to farmers. An unintended by-product of this work was a huge rural history archives: Federal Record Group 33, the Records of the Extension Service, which provides a granular record of life on farms and in rural communities. This article illustrates the use of the Extension Service's annual reports for researching local history and genealogy and evaluates access to these archival materials and their depictions of rural communities. The study finds that the rural communities documented in the Extension Service materials often are unaware of this resource because of limited local finding aids and online access. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BACKGROUND: Electronic health records change the landscape of patient data sharing and privacy by increasing the amount of information collected and stored and the number of potential recipients. Patients desire granular control over who receives what information in their electronic health record (EHR), but there are no current patient interfaces that allow them to record their preferences for EHR access. OBJECTIVE: Our aim was to derive the user needs of patients regarding the design of a user interface that records patients' individual choices about who can access data in their EHRs. DESIGN: We used semi-structured interviews. SETTING: The study was conducted in Central Indiana. PARTICIPANTS: Thirty patients with data stored in an EHR, the majority of whom (70 %) had highly sensitive health EHR data, were included in the study. APPROACH: We conducted a thematic and quantitative analysis of transcribed interview data. KEY RESULTS: Patients rarely knew what data were in their EHRs, but would have liked to know. They also wanted to be able to control who could access what information in their EHR and wanted to be notified when their data we re accessed. CONCLUSIONS: We derived six implications for the design of a patient-centered tool to allow individual choice in the disclosure of EHR: easy patient access to their EHRs; an overview of current EHR sharing permissions; granular, hierarchical control over EHR access; EHR access controls based on dates; contextual privacy controls; and notification when their EHRs are accessed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is based on the material created in the framework of the National Programme of the Cultural Heritage - project "Management of electronic publications in the network of the libraries in the Czech Republic" (DF12P01OW006). It brings a brief overview of normative documents of legal deposit of electronic publications - namely, the digitally-originated e-publications distributed online. It focuses on the documents which form both „hard“ and soft-law framework for this field of the library activities, in particular of the national anes, for the latter of which this field of activities is the coreone. The text brings examples of legal deposit legislation in various countries, in particular the EU Member States. Then the author formulates conclusions for legislative framework for the legal-deposit based collecting, preservation and access to the online electronic publications. His intent is to minimize - at least in principle, with a gradual implementation in the course of the time-the segment of the publicly distributed contents that would stay out of the system of the intentional deposit and preservation of the cultural heritage created in the Czech Republic or in other countries related to the former. This broad concept which would allow for gradual implementation has not been chosen for realisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

El artículo presenta una entrevista con Juan José Moreno, el fundador de INTEGRADOC, una compañía que gestiona documentos de negocios privados. Comenta sobre los desafíos asociados con la digitalización de trámites, especialmente en cuanto a la seguridad. También discurre sobre la penetración de estas innovaciones tecnológicas en Uruguay.

This work describes the analysis, design, and implementation of a secure scheme for storage, retrieval, and fine-grained sharing of digital documents in cloud computing using mobile devices. Confidentiality of digital documents stored in public clouds from a mobile device is achieved by implementing the digital envelope concept. Data are encrypted using AES, and the session key is encrypted using ciphertext-policy attribute based encryption (CP-ABE). CP-ABE also provides access control mechanisms at a fine-grain level, allowing the decryption of the AES key only to those users having the correct set of attributes. The encryption and decryption processes are carried out in a mobile device that interacts with a cloud provider, a trust server, and a key server. For practical implementation of CP-ABE, the Tate pairing was used on elliptic curves type A and F over prime fields, using affine and projective coordinates for the security levels 80, 112, and 128 bits. After evaluating the proposed system for different CP-ABE implementation options, it was observed that the elliptic curves type A allow execution times 18 times faster compared with the use of elliptic curves type F, achieving processing times that ensures the deployment of the proposed secure scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present the findings of one of the 16 research teams of the third phase of the InterPARES (International Research on Permanent Authentic Records in Electronic Systems) project, that is, TEAM Canada. As with all other national teams, TEAM Canada aimed at building solutions for continuing accessibility of digital records in a variety of organizations. Design/methodology/approach – All research teams, including TEAM Canada, utilized action research as their methodological framework. Findings – The most significant finding of TEAM Canada is its discovery of the serious situation with the foundation of continuing accessibility of digital records, that is, the insufficiency of, or even the lack of, digital records management in organizations participating in the project. Originality/value – The study described in the paper is unique for a number of reasons. First, it was guided by a theoretical framework featuring digital diplomatics, which concentrates the development of the InterPARES project of its 12-year investigation. Second, it observed the principle of open inquiry, which encouraged researchers to identify research design and methods according to suitability, not to any particular epistemological perspective. Third, a comparatively large number of organizations were studied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines user access to the dissertation collection of Higher National Institute of Popular Education and Sport in Dakar, Senegal (INSEPS) on the Internet. The author applies log analysis of the consultations made on the Apache server which hosts Electronic libraries in partnership's website BEEP and evaluates the online use of INSEPS's electronic collection through the website. He makes conclusions about the users' variety their geographic distribution and volume of visits.

The article discusses a project developed by the German Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems to expand the German Digital Library. The project was promoted by the German government and is aimed at metadata management and content delivery. It also mentions that an option for access control and long-term archiving of electronic records will eventually be made available.

An essay is presented regarding the challenges faced in creating a postcolonial digital archive in the rural northwestern part of Australia. It explores one of the problems that confront the archive, which is the document preservation. Meanwhile, it mentions that mixed reality technology is being incorporated in the archive in which it is expected to give Indigenous partners the chance of using new information technologies to their economic and social advantage.

The article offers information on rationale design, and implementation protocol of an electronic health record integrated clinical prediction rule (iCPR) randomized trial in primary care. It states that CPRs represent well-validated but underutilized evidence-based medicine tools at the point-of-care.

We investigated agency satisfaction with an electronic record management system (ERMS) that supports the electronic creation, archival, processing, transmittal, and sharing of records (documents) among autonomous government agencies. A factor model, explaining agency satisfaction with ERMS functionalities, offers hypotheses, which we tested empirically with a large-scale survey that involved more than 1,600 government agencies in Taiwan. The data showed a good fit to our model and supported all the hypotheses. Overall, agency satisfaction with ERMS functionalities appears jointly determined by regulatory compliance, job relevance, and satisfaction with support services. Among the determinants we studied, agency satisfaction with support services seems the strongest predictor of agency satisfaction with ERMS functionalities. Regulatory compliance also has important influences on agency satisfaction with ERMS, through its influence on job relevance and satisfaction with support services. Further analyses showed that satisfaction with support services partially mediated the impact of regulatory compliance on satisfaction with ERMS functionalities, and job relevance partially mediated the influence of regulatory compliance on satisfaction with ERMS functionalities. Our findings have important implications for research and practice, which we also discuss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides information on the accessibility of digital collections particularly sound recordings and their delivery system through rights management project at the National Library of Australia. It says that the system provides direct access to parts of the collection, and that online delivery makes easier for onsite researchers, while protecting restricted content of the rights holder. Meanwhile, it also discusses audio delivery system in accessing digital copies of recordings.

Abstract: Objectives: Maintaining proper access control to Electronic Medical Records (EMR) is essential to protecting patients’ privacy. We aim to develop mechanisms and tools that can support fine-grained and adaptable access control for EMR. Method: This paper presents an aspect-oriented design and implementation scheme to providing adaptable access control for Web-based EMR systems. In our scheme, access control logic is decoupled from the core of the EMR application and collected into separate aspect modules which are automatically synthesized from access control rules in XML format and properly designed aspect templates. The generated aspect modules will then be compiled and integrated into the underlying EMR application using standard aspect tools. At runtime, these binary aspect modules will be executed to enforce the required access control. Future changes of access control rules can also be effectively realized through these mechanisms without actual coding. Results: A structured form of access control rules based on the Taiwan Electronic Medical Record Template, a suite of abstract aspects and templates for enforcing access control and a translator for synthesizing the complete access control code in AspectJ from such access control rules and aspect templates. We have also built a Web-based EMR prototype implementation to demonstrate our approach. Conclusion: Our approach can not only accommodate a wide range of fine-grained access control requirements but also enforce them in a modular and easy to adapt manner without incurring extra performance overhead due to rule interpretation. The use of aspect-oriented technology to provide adaptable access control for EMR is a promising approach. We have further enhanced our scheme with a mechanism for dynamic adjustment of access control rules. Other tools for authoring and analyzing the access control rules are the main parts of our future work. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Mercy Medical Center - North Iowa implemented electronic health records (EHR), computerised provider order entry (CPOE) and event tracking systems in the emergency department (ED) as part of hospital-wide implementation of clinical information systems. This case study examines the changes in outcomes and processes in the ED following implementation. Although the system was designed to enhance efficiency, there was a significant increase in the mean length of stay (about 17 minutes, or 15%) in the ED after implementation. This surprising finding was examined in relationship to the multiple process-of-care changes in the ED. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The staff of an organization often uses a personal classification system to organize the electronic administrative records over which they have control, making it difficult for other members of the same organization to find these documents. There is also the risk of loosing documents. The objective of this doctoral research project was to describe the characteristics of 21 classification systems used to organize and classify the electronic administrative records by the employees of the Université de Montréal. The characteristics of these personal classification systems allowed a better understanding of their structures, logic and semantics. The results show that several of their characteristics are shared by a majority of systems, namely their extended macro-structure, the fact that they are shallow, complex and unbalanced, and that they use thematic grouping and alphabetical order of classes. The identification of shared traits suggests a gap between the characteristics of personal classification systems and institutional classification systems developed by records management professionals and archivists. This gap explains the resistance of certain employees when it comes to using institutional systems for the electronic administrative documents under their control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: In spite of succesful adoption of electronic patient records (EPR) by Norwegian GPs, what constitutes the actual benefits and effects of the use of EPRs in the perspective of the GPs and patients has not been fully characterized. We wanted to study primary care physicians' use of electronic patient record (EPR) systems in terms of use of different EPR functions and the time spent on using the records, as well as the potential effects of EPR systems on the clinician-patient relationship. Methods: A combined qualitative and quantitative study that uses data collected from focus groups, observations of primary care encounters and a questionnaire survey of a random sample of general practitioners to describe their use of EPR in primary care. Results: The overall availability of individual patient records had improved, but the availability of the information within each EPR was not satisfactory. GPs' use of EPRs were efficient and comprehensive, but have resulted in transfer of administrative work from secretaries to physicians. We found no indications of disturbance of the clinician-patient relationship by use of computers in this study. Conclusion: Although GPs are generally satisfied with their EPRs systems, there are still unmet needs and functionality to be covered. It is urgent to find methods that can make a better representation of information in large patient records as well as prevent EPRs from contributing to increased administrative workload of physicians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Undertaken at the École de bibliothéconomie et des sciences de l'information (EBSI) of the Université de Montréal, this research project examines the digitalisation policies, the preservation and the access to electronic documents in Québec. The purpose of this project was to study the existing policies regarding the scanning of heritage collections in Québec. Our project was anchored in a methodology composed of three stages. Firstly, we examined the UNESCO documents (1972, 1989 and 2003) regarding heritage documents in general and scanned heritage documents in parti- cular. Theoretically, this study allows us to highlight certain basic concepts, such as "heritage collection" (Turcan, 2003), "digitalised heritage" (UNESCO, 2003 and Molinaro, 2005) and the construction of a heritage (Micoud, 2005). Secondly, we analysed the contents of the documents and the proceedings of the cultural institutions involved in numerical information, both federally and provincially in Canada, Finally, we suggest a theoretical model for the policies governing scanning programmes and we examine the scanning of heritage collections at the Bibliothèque and Archives nationales du Québec. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diplomatic analysis, which comprises the study on the authenticity of rather inactive records like those of the Ottomans, can also be applied to recent records, and among them the electronic type of records. The study aims at the discussion of principles of special diplomatic analysis, and an exemplification is brought by through a sample application out of the correspondence of Ministry of Health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses the need to improve the quality and capacity of academia on informatics research for the quality of eHealth research in Great Britain. The author stressed that the National Health Service (NHS) National Program for Information Technology (NPfIT) faced the challenge on how to provide electronic patient records for health care delivery. The author has identified a limited number of developments to improve the quality, usefulness and transparency of reporting eHealth research.

Developments in biometric technology are increasingly driving frictionless interaction. In practice, this means that biometric measurements are taken from individuals for authentication or access control purposes, without any need for people to interact actively with the technology or even to know that biometric technology is being used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on use of Electronic Record Data to encourage care. Topics discussed includes targeted chemotherapy can drugs save lives. It also mentions applied to additional clinical situations beyond hypothyroidism. It also discusses benefits and importance of automatic electronic surveillance.

The author offers his insights on the innovative program toward a totally electronic medical record (EMR) in the U.S. He shares his own decision of advancing to electronic in his profession as a physician. He considers his template-driven notes inaccurate as patients to not speak template. However, he realizes his task to accurately and comprehensively understand his patients rather than merely documenting them.

The article presents news briefs on the use of electronic technology in health care. A survey of nurses found that they believe that their employers' wireless networks are inadequate for patient documentation and clinician communication. Johns Hopkins Children's Center in Baltimore, Maryland, sends text message reminders to patients about their medications and blood testing schedules. A survey of physicians found that electronic record keeping has raised serious privacy concerns.

The article reports on Cass Hartnett's presentations at the Society of American Archivists meeting. The presentations include rethinking some government documents as records in any format, connecting the rhetoric of libraries as the bastions of democracy and understanding the implication of the Electronic Records Archives (ERA). It states that there are additional resources that may be of interest to government information librarians.

The article reports on the regulations issued by the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) regarding meaningful use of electronic health records (EHRs). The regulations aimed to help implement the EHR incentive programs enacted under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA). The regulations are open to public comment and are said to be closely linked.

The article focuses on the issue on who would own the electronic medical records of patients (EMR). The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) signed by U.S. President Barack Obama in 2009 allocates 20 billion U.S. dollars to improve the networking system of physicians records. The ARRA has failed to settle as to who will own the EMR. It states that to collect and digitalize all information will entail people, time and also the needed finances. Improvement is needed so that the records could be used by several providers.

The article presents the corporate profile of Clinical Ink, a North Carolina-based company which developed the first electronic source record (ESR). The company's SureSource solution maintains the mobility of paper, its workflow, and ease of use. It notes that its portal sponsors, monitors, and sites user access a Web portal reviewing the actual electronic source documents. It also eliminates the cost and time of Source Data Verification (SDV), monitor sites, and reduce data queries.

Memorial Hospital, a not-for-profit independent community hospital of Union County, Marysville, US, has selected the DigitalPersona Pro biometric authentication solution to help meet the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) requirements for secure access to electronic health records (EHR). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reflects on the goal to implement electronic health record (EHR) in primary care offices. He comments that vendors' identification and selection may obstruct integration and health information exchange substantial health information exchange in bigger referral networks. The author suggests in capitalizing on free technical assistance, to be cautious in health information technology investment, and to assess impact of EHRs implementation from colleagues.

The article explores the advantages and disadvantages of electronic health records (EHR) in the U.S. Electronic record systems have an audit trail, which is required by the privacy regulations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Under the provisions of HIPPA, people had the right to ask for an accounting of disclosures of medical information for a period of six years prior to the date of the request. However, the legislation remained unclear on defining the responsibilities of business associates.