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Comment Re:How about adding an exception to HIPAA? (Score 1) 371

There are already HIPAA exceptions that allow sharing PHI without consent, and a medical emergency falls under the first one below (if it does not have its own already, and I'm fairly certain it must):

Here are three more:

Patient Treatment: A patient's health information can be shared and viewed by different healthcare providers if it is for the purpose of treatment for a patient. An example would be when a patient is referred to a specialist by their primary doctor and the primary doctor gives the specialist a patient's health information to facilitate treatment of the patient.

Payment for Services: The healthcare information of a patient can also be shared with another healthcare organization without complying to the privacy rules of HIPAA if it is for the purpose of payment of services. An example would be when a doctor needs to file information with a patient's health insurance provider for payment of services.

Healthcare Operations: A patient's healthcare information can also be used without consent of the patient for healthcare operations. Various healthcare operations include internal improvement, review of healthcare professionals, healthcare provider and doctor evaluations, training programs and business development. An example of the healthcare operations exemption would be if the doctor's office were doing an internal review of how they handle patients in order to treat patients better and more quickly. The doctor's office would not need to get the consent of a patient to do this type of internal review even if some of the internal review uses the patient's healthcare information for the process.

Earth

Obama Reveals Climate Change Plan 577

Today President Obama gave a speech outlining the administration's plan to take on climate change. (Video of the speech available on YouTube, and the White House published an infographic as well.) Most significantly, Obama's plan would have the EPA set limits on carbon pollution from all U.S. power plants, a goal already meeting resistance from Republicans. The plan also sets the goal of funding enough solar- and wind-based energy projects on public lands to power over 6 million homes by 2020. By 2030, it aims to use efficiency standards to reduce carbon pollution by 3 billion metric tons. Obama called for new efforts to deal with extreme weather like Hurricane Sandy. He also pointed out the difficulty in getting emerging industrial economies to be environmentally conscious. To that end, the plan calls for the end of U.S. support for financing coal power plants in foreign countries, unless those plants use carbon capture and sequestration technologies. The speech addressed the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry up to 800,000 gallons of oil per day from Canada into the U.S. Obama indicated that approval for the pipeline would be tied to emissions goals.
Science

Research Reveals Low Exposure of Excellent Work By Female Scientists 245

An anonymous reader writes "Scientists at the University of Sheffield have found that high quality science by female academics is underrepresented in comparison to that of their male counterparts. The researchers analyzed the genders of invited speakers at the most prestigious gatherings of evolutionary biologists in Europe — six biannual congresses of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (ESEB) and found that male speakers outnumbered women. Even in comparison to the numbers of women and men among world class scientists – from the world top ranked institutions for life sciences, and authors in the top-tier journals Nature and Science - women were still underrepresented among invited speakers."
Transportation

Adafruit's Smart Helmet Helps Navigate to NYC's Citi Bike Stations 37

coop0030 writes "Add GPS, compass navigation & visibility with LEDs to a helmet that helps you find your way to the closest Citi Bike station in New York City. It's powered by Adafruit's FLORA, a wearable electronics platform. With a detailed tutorial, you can build the helmet, and customize it to work in most cities with a bike share as well."
Robotics

Cat-like Robot Runs Like the Wind 69

DeviceGuru writes "Researchers at the Biorob lab at Switzerland's École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), have announced a cat-like robot that is claimed to be the fastest quadruped robot under 30 kilograms. The Cheetah-cub Robot, which runs real-time Xenomai Linux on an x86-based RoBoard robot control board, mimics the biomechanics of a cat to increase the speed and stability of it quadroped legs, helping it achieve speeds of 1.42m/s. The goal of the still-early-stage project is to encourage research in biomechanics, with an aim toward building faster robots for search and rescue, or ground exploration. More info is available on EPFL's Cheetah page."
Graphics

NVIDIA To License Its GPU Tech 111

An anonymous reader writes "Today in a blog post, NVIDIA's General Counsel, David Shannon, announced that the company will begin licensing its GPU cores and patent portfolio to device makers. '[I]t's not practical to build silicon or systems to address every part of the expanding market. Adopting a new business approach will allow us to address the universe of devices.' He cites the 'explosion of Android devices' as one of the prime reasons for this decision. 'This opportunity simply didn't exist several years ago because there was really just one computing device – the PC. But the swirling universe of new computing devices provides new opportunities to license our GPU core or visual computing portfolio.' Shannon points out that NVIDIA did something similar with the CPU core used in the PlayStation 3, which was licensed to Sony. But mobile seems to be the big opportunity now: 'We'll start by licensing the GPU core based on the NVIDIA Kepler architecture, the world's most advanced, most efficient GPU. Its DX11, OpenGL 4.3, and GPGPU capabilities, along with vastly superior performance and efficiency, create a new class of licensable GPU cores. Through our efforts designing Tegra into mobile devices, we've gained valuable experience designing for the smallest power envelopes. As a result, Kepler can operate in a half-watt power envelope, making it scalable from smartphones to supercomputers.'"

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