Vindicated against my guilty conscience

It's been two years since I last hauled all my shreddables to the industrial shredder.  I've had boxes of retired paper taking up space in my apartment throughout that time.  I probably should have gone last year, but, you know, bright shiny objects and all...

So everytime I passed those repurposed cardboard boxes filled with insurance solicitations, credit card statements, random coupon flyers, small racoons, thermal receipts, and assorted travel confirmations I could feel the growing stack of cardboard and packing tape mock me as I went out the door.  I let it grow and felt the metaphorical weight of it on my shoulders as my floor felt the physical weight on its carpet.

Last week things changed.

I got an email from the Accounts Payable department saying the couldn't find any record of the receipts for an expense report I submitted in April of 2009.  Granted, I would have appreciated it if they hadn't waited 15 months to let me know there was a problem, but these things happen. I searched my hard drive because I usually scan everything, but I couldn't find them either.  (So I guess the fault was mine rather than Accounts Payable.)

I pulled a box from the middle of the pile, cleared off the coffee table, fired up an episode of Eureka on the Tivo and dove into the layers of paperwork like the lamest archeologist ever.  Layer by layer I went -- August, July, June, May -- and finally April.  I slowed down and went through all those pages with a sieve. 

Finally, there they were -- all the receipts for that expense report, stuck in one fat envelope. 

I'm still not sure how they escaped my scanner the first go around, but once again, laziness and inaction proves victorious over ruthless efficiency.

And my conscience no longer feels guilty about the boxes.

Healthcare Reform 04: EMR

Electronic medical records are becoming increasingly possible.  And it makes sense.  So much medical history and documentation is scattered about the country on paper getting lost and damaged n decades old filefolders in non-descript medical facilities.  Significant cost reductions and the potentila for better, faster, and cheper healthcare are possible by replacing much of that paper with standardized, electronic documentation.

This article from the Seattle PI is brief discussion about this field.  The VA is the medical organization making the most progress on this front.

The electronic medical records system at the Department of Veterans Affairs' Kansas City Medical Center gives Sanders and his staff almost immediate access to medical histories, allowing them to seamlessly treat veterans from other states. But when patients aren't in the VA's system, it could mean hours or days before doctors have crucial information to properly care for patients.

"It's increasingly frustrating for us and other providers that it's difficult to find a workable interface," said Sanders, chief of staff for the Kansas City veterans hospital. "Our systems don't talk to each other."

Interoperability, or allowing providers to share records and view them from anywhere, is a requirement for facilities to receive some of the more than $17 billion in stimulus funding that the government is offering to encourage the adoption of electronic medical records. Congress will likely penalize providers who aren't doing so by 2014, cutting their Medicaid and Medicare payments, the Obama administration said.

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Healthcare Reform 02: Electronic Medical Records

This week seems to have turned into Healthcare Reform week at Cromely's World. Or more specifically, Unresearched Healthcare Reform week. I'm not sure how that happened.

I'll be responding to the comments on yesterday's post tomorrow. But as I think more about some of the issues we encounter, Medical Records is a big one.

The volume of paper work generated by the health care and insurance industries is mind-boggling. We spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year in administration. I don't want to call that waste because without it, so many things simply wouldn't get done, but there has to be a better way.

Besides the cost, there is the hassle for the patients. When you move to another doctor, you either need to get your records transferred or start from scratch. And if a new doctor uses a different system than an old doctor, there is the transition to deal with.

If a patient needs medical care away from home and is unable to speak, ER physicians may also need to start from scratch.

We hear about deaths every year related to mistakes with prescription drugs. A pharmacy may misunderstand a doctors instructions, or a doctor may prescribe a drug that has deadly interactions with something else that patient is already taking and is prescribed by another doctor.

Friends in the medical industry have told me about different electronic medical records system. In my own job, I tangentially have dealt with the issue as well. Thousands of people are involved in various, diverse ways of attacking the paper problem.

Moving all the records off paper and into bits is part of the solution. But it's the next step that I get concerned about.

From a practical standpoint, it makes sense to me to have all medical providers creating patient records in one electronic format that is readable instantly by any other medical professions. I believe Google and other companies are already pursuing this.

The records should be comprehensive. Everything should be in one place, so every healthcare provider knows what the other is doing. And it should be easily accessible for the patient, and easy for an authorized medical provider to access should a patient arrive incapactitated. Information should be easily exportable to the appropriate health insuarnce providers to effectively manage coverage and payments.

Theoretically, such a system could save hundreds of millions of dollars, thousands of lives, and hours of incovenience for patients.

And it scares the heck out of me.

The privacy implications of such a system are staggering. Collecting that much information in one place could put people at risk with employers. It could expose embarrasing information to firends and family. And if it fell into the wrong hands, it is ripe for abuse by conartists.

And if incorrect information makes its way into such a file, it could be painfully difficult to remove and could compromise care for years to come.

In other words, if humans were not involved in the process, I would feel much better about it. But once you factor in human error and greed, the system becomes potentially dangerous.

So I'm torn on whether I want to see such a system in place. There are trememndous cost- and life- saving benefits to such a system. But is it worth the risk to freedom and privacy?

And is such a system inevitable despite such concerns?

Pen scanner recommendation

I'm always looking for a tool to make it easier to do my book reviews. I'm hoping someone can offer a recommendation.

As I read a book, I keep 20-30 book darts on the back page (TSA sometimes thinks they look like a saw on the X-Ray). When I find a passage that is interesting, funny, well written, or potentially useful, I flag it with a book dart.

When I finish the book, I go back through and type all of those paragraphs out into OneNote. This is the part I hate.

Rather than type them out, I'd like to find a good pen scanner that I can use to digitize those passages and save the hour or more I spend typing.

To use a pen scanner, a user holds it like a highlighter and drags it along the text.

Unfortunately, while there are a bunch of them listed on Amazon, the reviews are incredibly mediocre. Most of them seem to earn about 3-4 stars. On top of that, it looks like they were mostly released between 2001 and 2005. Some of them even connect through a serial port.

I find it amazing that tech products that seem to barely work haven't been updated in 3+ years.

So can anyone recommend a pen scanner that works well, with decent OCR? Ideally, I would not need to have it connected to the PC while scanning, though I could give up on that feature.

Does anyone make a good one? Do they even try? Or have I just stumbled across my million dollar idea?

I lost 154 pounds...

... of paper.

Today I hauled 10+ boxes of paper down to American Data Guard in Seattle. It was 154 pounds of paper to shred and completely filled a 4 foot tall industrial trash can.

I began using ADG about 3 years ago for my shredding needs. It's safer than just recycling paper. And it means they do all the work. It cost just $33 for them to take all that paper off my hands and destroy it on an industrial scale.

I could shred it all myself, I suppose, but I hate doing that. The trash can always fills up too fast. The shredder jams. The process takes too long. The time I would most want to do it is 1:00 AM, and I don't think the neighbors would appreciate that.

154 pounds may be a bit excessive for one year, but it does include a years of back files that I just scanned to PDF. Plus, since I don't have to shred stuff myself, I end up sticking just regular paper in the shred box. Not sorting it means I can avoid one more hassle.

If you have stuff you should be shredding but aren't, or if you are just tired of shredding stuff on your own, check out commercial shredding services in your area. It's worth the cost.

War on Paper 01: Fujitsu Scan Snap S510

My mother gave this scanner for Christmas. Due to my travel I haven't had a chance to set it up until tonight.

I will do a more detailed review in a few weeks, once I get to know it better, but my early opinion is that it is awesome.

It took about 45 minutes to install the software that it comes with, but it makes up for that with how fast it chews through scans. This is by far the fastest and most flexible document scanner I have used. It's much faster than my most recent stalwart, an HP Officejet 7130xi. And the Fujitsu doesn't jam like the HP does.

There are some quirks about the software I have to understand betters, but it does scan directly to the industry standard PDF format, minimizing the chances I'll scan my documents to a format that's unreadable 5 years down the road.

I expect this small scanner to be a valuable ally in my ongoing war against, paper. Thanks, Mom.

A Wall of Books Part 05: Amazon Kindle

Three years ago, we set out to design and build an entirely new class of device—a convenient, portable reading device with the ability to wirelessly download books, blogs, magazines, and newspapers. The result is Amazon Kindle.

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Amazon.com just announced their new e-Book reader, the Kindle.

It's an intriguing product, that has me torn. The "War on Paper" side of me thinks it's about time we saw a compelling e-Book solution. The "Book Whore" side of me can't imagine giving up my precious tomes.

The Kindle website had plenty of detail and comments from authors extolling the virtues of the Kindle. It's and impressive site.

The prouduct does some interesting thing. It uses digital paper which has a completely different look than a laptop or PDA screen. I've seen these displays on the Sony e-Book reader and it is impressive technology. It's designed to be as clear as paper even in full sun.

The Kindle also includes built-in Sprint EVDO that you don't pay for. It's used to buy e-Books from Amazon, or to download subscriptions to newspapers, magazines, or blogs. There is not monthly or one time charge for the online service. Presumably, Sprint get a piece of the sale when you buy something from Amazon, or subscribe to a magazine or blog through the Kindle. The benefit here, though, is that you can get a new book in a couple minutes anytime you happen to be on the Sprint network.

You can also annotate content on your Kindle, and apparently access those annotations on your PC. I like the idea of this feature a lot. When I read books and review them for this blog, I mark passages while I read, then I have to transcribe them into a word processor, then trim them down, and finally incorporate them into my content. The Kindle could make this easier.

But I like holding my books. And I like seeing them on the shelf. And I like the look of the covers and the feel in my hands. At the same time, if I could have a simple, light weight, and small device in my bag, that would simplify things, too.

So I'm torn on the question of using it for books.

Magazines, however, have a much stronger appeal. When I finish reading a magazine, I throw it out. I already read several magazines on my Tablet PC, so switching to the Kindle would be easy.

The problem with magazines, though, is that the Kindle doesn't do color. The smaller screen is great for text, but graphics intensive magazines like Wired wouldn't translate well onto the Kindle screen. For more text focused magazines, like the Atlantic Monthly, it would be a great choice.

It also supports newspaper subscriptions. If I regularly read a news paper front to back, this would be a great option. It will also automatically download subscriptions as soon as the issues come out. If I had a subway or train commute, this would be a great feature.

The biggest problem, though, may be the price point. It's $400. That's a bit much for my taste right now, especially since I would have to buy content for it, too, and it still wouldn't stop me from buying books.

I would be interested if Amazon combined this with a book purchase. For example, if when you purchased the paper based book you had the option of buy the electronic version as well, for just a dollar or two more. Then it's more compelling.

For now, though, I would find it most useful for my transitory reading. And I don't do enough of that to justify the cost.

Beyond my use, though, I do see tremendous potential for success.

The college text book market has struggled with electronic content for years. They don't want to offer all their books in electronic format because students could put it on multiple PCs. So they continue to charge outlandish prices for text books student might only need for a few months.

A product like the Kindle makes electronic text books simpler to implement. Instead of selling a CD student might copy onto multiple PCs, or offering a file on line that might be copied several times, students can purchase the book through Amazon and it will be available only to their Kindle. It would still be backed up on Amazon's servers, but this might be the way to address text book companies' concerns about piracy. If you can't get the book out of that Kindle, it's easier to make sure each student buys their own.

School text books will ultimately drive the adoption of e-Book technology. The launch of the Kindle may not be the event that does it, though. I've been predicting a lawsuit for a while though, that may boost the e-Book industry.

Kids in grade school and high school are carrying heavy loads. It's not uncommon for kids to have 20-40 pound of books on their backs. That may not be a big deal to an adult, but some of these kids may only weigh 50-100 pounds. Those text books represent a significant percentage of a kid's body weight. Someone will get injured and sue the schools and text book makers. Similar suits will pop up, possibly reaching class action status.

And the e-Book, in whatever flavor it's in at that point, will be the solution.

I applaud Amazon for the Kindle. It's a great step forward. I'm just not sure it's the step I want to take yet.

Paperless -- From the Archives

I found this on my hard drive tonight, and, while a bit dated,it still makes me smile. This is the short version. I'll post the long version another time.

Ten years ago, you might have found this document at www.cyberhighway.net/~cromely. That was the personal web page I had back in 1996, when those things were all the rage.

A Call To Arms

For years, pundits talked about the paperless office and how great it will be. Do you remember "Paper free by 83?" Neither do I, but it would have been a cool slogan.

Access toinformation in the paperless office and society would be easy and universal. Paper would gradually disappear on its own as the world gleefully embraced the digital age. Those pundits were wonderfully positive.

They were fools.

The early proponents of the paperless environment were just that - proponents. What my paperless crusade calls for is zealots.

We must be virulently anti-paper. It is time to attack paper with anger - hatred - even violence. Shredders must replace store rooms. Data files must replace file cabinets. Email must replace snail mail. When a single CD can replace an entire filing cabinet, it makes no sense to adhere to paper.

• Paper is bulky.
  
• Paper is heavy.
  
• Paper is difficult to back up.
  
• Paper fades.
  
• Paper cuts.
  
• Paper clutters.
  
• Paper tears.
  
• Paper gets lost in the mail.
  

Today we have the tools to fight the abomination of the printed page. Join me today. Star expunging paper from you life today.