Nursing Informatics Newsletter: NI News Vol 1 No 2, Summer 2003

P A G E 2

NI News SUMMER 2003

News Stories (continued from page 1)

House Bill Would Expand Rural Telemedicine Services

Rural telemedicine programs would get $40 million a year in grants through 2008 under proposed legislation introduced in the House last week. The bill also expands Medicaid reimbursements for telemedicine services to include inpatient services. .

The bill, introduced by Rep. Doug Ose (R-Calif.), would allocate funds to develop and expand telemedicine systems to help improve preventive and diagnostic care access in the nation’s rural areas. The legislation (H.R. 1940) also expands technology beyond demonstration projects and would ease licensing barriers for physicians practicing in multiple states. Read the full story at ATSP.

AMA adopts new guidelines to
help physicians ensure safe and
secure Internet prescribing

The new guidelines state that physicians should obtain medical history information and perform a physical examination before prescribing medications online. Prior to today’s action, AMA policy supported Internet prescribing, but stressed the need for appropriate safeguards to ensure that online communications did not replace any interpersonal aspects of patient-physician relationships. To protect patient safety and privacy, the new guidelines also suggest physicians transmit prescriptions over a secure network that includes features such as password requirements and prescription encryption. read the full story at AMA

UW receives $10 million for cancer communications research

Researchers from several schools and colleges at UW-Madison, including the College of Engineering, the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, the College of Letters and Science, the Medical School, School of Human Ecology and the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, will work together to enhance an interactive cancer-communication system. Much of their work will focus on the Comprehensive Health Enhancement Support System, or CHESS, a computer-based health resource designed to educate and equip people facing a health crisis. - read entire article at UW-Madison

Connecting For Health Unites Over 100 Organizations To Bring American Healthcare System into Information Age

Connecting for Health, an extraordinary collaboration of more than 100 public and private stakeholders representing every part of the health care system, today released the results of their efforts to bring electronic connectivity to healthcare to improve patient care, lower costs and protect privacy.. Their achievements in just nine months toward the adoption of healthcare data standards represents progress that has eluded the healthcare industry for more than a decade. Despite a pace and a set of goals that many thought hard to achieve, Connecting for Health announced unprecedented progress in several key areas - read entire press release at E-health Initiative

Design Corner

HTML version 3.2 - The Birth of Wilbur

June Kaminski HTML Highlights Series: Part 2 HTML Versions

by June Kaminski

In the Beginning

The first rather primitive versions of HTML, used in the early days of cyberspace were replaced with version 3.2 in 1996. HTML 3.2 or Wilbur was released by the W3 Consortium and is, in essence, a SGML application (Standard Generalized Markup Language) which conforms to International Standard ISO 8879. HTML was first invented in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee, a young software engineer at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics or CERN.

Both SGML and HTML documents are really simple ASCII text files with presentational tags embedded within them. Many consider HTML more of a "computerese" rather than a true computer language. The first two generations of codes, versions 1.0 and 2.0 contained relatively few tags. With version 3.2, HTML tags have developed from an initial thirty or so to close to one hundred possible coding tags, introducing some fresh new creative abilities to the web development process.

HTML is one of the easiest languages you can learn. It is rooted in English, with a vocabulary made up of basic mnemonic abbrevations, based within a simple document structure. HTML is not a programming language, but rather is a content-based or structural one. The codes describe the contents of a document, and include reference to various parts of the document, such as the headings, paragraphs, lists, and so on. .

Version 3.2 added Flexibility and Aesthetics

With the advent of HTML 3.2, a web designer could customize and create web pages that provided distinct web documents, allowed the manipulation and embellishment of text, the insertion of images, sound, video and other multimedia presentations, hyperlinking to other websites, lists, tables, image maps, cascading style sheets and forms all with quite simple and straight forward codes. The easiest way to hand code HTML 3.2 was by using tools such as Note Pad on Windows or Simple Text on a Mac. When saved as an html file, these hand-coded text files became transformed into web pages within the software tools of a web browser. - read entire article

This is the second article in a series of five on the critical topic of HTML for designers. The series will look at the importance of mastering HTML, & review HTML v 3.2 & 4.0 plus XHTML and DHTML. Pt. 3 coming in the next issue. .

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