July 2015

The Department of Veterans Affairs is running several new medical technology pilots, including systems that could let patients receive healthcare without leaving their homes or neighborhoods, VA Deputy Secretary Sloan Gibson said. With the rapid development of virtual care, or telemedicine, “what we’ve seen is a transformation from primarily an inpatient model to primarily an outpatient model," Gibson said.

For instance, the VA's Center for Innovation is developing an app that would let technicians adjust patients' hearing aids via a Bluetooth connection, Gibson said. Another developing tech project, called the One-VA Pharmacy, would let pharmacists anywhere access the VA's health IT system and fill a veteran's prescription. According to Gibson, nearly one-third of veterans have volunteered to participate in virtual care delivery, up from about 18 percent two years ago. For those patients who don't have broadband connections in their homes, VA is beginning to issue mobile devices, tablets and netbooks with high-speed connections, Gibson added. "More and more of our care is going to be delivered virtually," he said.

LinkedIn has gotten a lot of mileage out of the free content that famous people like Richard Branson write for the social network. Now it wants to get more: The company wants to syndicate that content for publication on other sites. LinkedIn is e-mailing the 500 people it calls its “Influencers” and asking them for permission to automatically hand their stuff to other sites that want to republish it in full.

Sites like Quartz routinely publish LinkedIn posts, but right now each article has to be manually approved by the author, which makes it a multistep process. There’s no money trading hands here -- Influencers write for LinkedIn for free, and LinkedIn lets other sites use those posts for free -- but there’s still an obvious value exchange: Influencers get more distribution for their names and ideas, along with the notion that LinkedIn says they are “influencers.” And LinkedIn gets to advertise LinkedIn. Still, assuming LinkedIn gets most of its heavy hitters to opt in to this, it could be a good head start on what might be an interesting content syndication business, with obvious opportunities for revenue share and other money-making schemes.

The Federal Communications Commission is trying to calm the nerves of lawmakers about the legality of their telephone town hall outreach. The agency issued a set of FAQs on July 31 clarifying that nothing in a recent FCC ruling to strengthen robocall restrictions will change how lawmakers are allowed to reach out to constituents through virtual town halls. “As long as vendors for tele-town halls continue to adhere to the decades old rules, use of these services should pose no issue,” the agency wrote.

Confusion was expressed earlier when FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler suggested lawmakers were violating FCC robocall restrictions if they called constituents without their prior consent. Chairman Wheeler’s statement at the end of a three-hour House hearing shocked the lawmakers still left in the room, and the agency quickly clarified that Chairman Wheeler meant to make an important distinction between robocalls to mobile phones vs. landlines. Lawmakers and others have for decades been allowed to make “informational” robocalls -- including outreach for a telephone town hall -- to landline telephones. But those same calls to a mobile phone are prohibited, unless a lawmaker or vendor gets prior consent. That has been the case since mobile phones began to be covered by the Telephone Consumer Protection Act.

Internet service providers filed a 95-page brief in the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit outlining their case that the Federal Communications Commission’s new network neutrality rules should be overturned. One of the central arguments is that the FCC cannot impose common carrier rules on Internet access because it can’t be defined as a “telecommunications” service under Title II of the Communications Act. The ISPs argued that Internet access must be treated as a more lightly regulated “information service” because it involves “computer processing.”

“No matter how many computer-mediated features the FCC may sweep under the rug, the inescapable core of Internet access is a service that uses computer processing to enable consumers to ‘retrieve files from the World Wide Web, and browse their contents’ and, thus, ‘offers the ‘capability for... acquiring,... retrieving [and] utilizing... information.’ Under the straightforward statutory definition, an ‘offering’ of that ‘capability’ is an information service," the ISPs wrote. "If broadband providers provided only pure transmission and not information processing, as the FCC now claims, the primitive and limited form of 'access' broadband customers would receive would be unrecognizable to consumers," the ISPs also wrote. "They would be required, for example, to know the IP address of every website they visit. But, because Domain Name Service ('DNS') is part of Internet access, consumers can visit any website without knowing its IP address and thereafter 'click through' links on that website to other websites." The fact that Internet service providers offer e-mail accounts and cloud storage further proves the point that Internet access is an information service, according to this argument.