Information Technology Ecosystem Research Articles

Research on Collaborative Defense Method of Hospital Network Cloud based on End-to-end Edge Computing

This research introduces a groundbreaking collaborative defense mechanism that utilizes end-to-end edge computing to bolster the security of decentralized hospital cloud systems. By integrating intrusion detection systems, firewalls, anomaly detection, and threat intelligence in a unified manner through the efficiency of edge computing, this approach marks a significant advancement in healthcare cybersecurity. Through rigorous testing with a substantial dataset, the system demonstrated exceptional performance metrics, including a remarkable 95% accuracy in threat detection, a low false positive rate, and a swift response time of merely 0.25 seconds. Notably, the system effectively mitigates computational overhead, thereby optimizing resource utilization. Comparative analysis with existing methodologies underscores the superiority of this novel framework, particularly in terms of geolocation accuracy, the minimization of false positives, and expedited reaction capabilities. This study’s collaborative defense strategy, underpinned by end-to-end edge computing, presents a holistic and innovative solution to the escalating cyber threats facing healthcare infrastructures. By redefining the parameters of security in medical settings, it paves the way for a safer and more resilient healthcare information technology ecosystem.

Pengembangan Sistem Seleksi Proposal Penelitian Berbasis Web Service Menggunakan REST API

Web service-based application development has become a vital component of the modern in-formation technology ecosystem. The implementation of web services facilitates interoperability among diverse systems and platforms. REST API (REpresentational State Transfer Application Programming Interface) is one of the most popular architectures for creating efficient and scalable web services. This study examines the implementation of REST API in the development of web service-based applications. The case study focuses on the creation of a Web service-based Research Proposal Selection System. The REST API implementation method in this study adheres to the system development life cycle (SDLC) to ensure that the developed API meets business needs while being efficient, secure, and reliable. The analysis phase is conducted to gather both functional and non-functional REST API requirements. During the design phase, the REST API architecture is designed in detail, including how data will be transferred and processed, and how the API will interact with databases and other systems. Furthermore, in the implementation phase, the REST API is developed, ensuring that each endpoint operates correctly. In developing the Proposal Selection System, the implementation of web services integrates data from various existing sys-tems, including employee, academic, and research data. The system encompasses various features, such as proposal import, proposal mapping, proposal review, proposal assessment, proposal se-lection, and reporting. The research findings indicate that implementing the REST API simplifies the development of web service applications. The test results reveal that the average response time is relatively stable, measuring 31 ms without iterations and 29 ms with five iterations.

Asset Performance Management: current status and future development

This investigation aims at discussing the current status of Asset Performance Management in its functionalities to enable decision support and to lead towards Asset Management excellence. The current status is drawn building from academic and industrial sources, and relying on a conceptual model aimed at providing an interpretative scheme of the Asset Performance Management functionalities in the information technology ecosystem for Asset Management. The key opportunities and future development paths are then identified. Overall, the findings of this study are meant to contribute to a clarification of the Asset Performance Management concept, together with a verification of the alignment on the meaning of the concept within the scientific and the industrial arenas.

Use of Information Technology Systems for Regional Health Care Information-Sharing and Coordination During Large-Scale Medical Surge Events.

Medical surge events require effective coordination between multiple partners. Unfortunately, the information technology (IT) systems currently used for information-sharing by emergency responders and managers in the United States are insufficient to coordinate with health care providers, particularly during large-scale regional incidents. The numerous innovations adopted for the COVID-19 response and continuing advances in IT systems for emergency management and health care information-sharing suggest a more promising future. This article describes: (1) several IT systems and data platforms currently used for information-sharing, operational coordination, patient tracking, and resource-sharing between emergency management and health care providers at the regional level in the US; and (2) barriers and opportunities for using these systems and platforms to improve regional health care information-sharing and coordination during a large-scale medical surge event. The article concludes with a statement about the need for a comprehensive landscape analysis of the component systems in this IT ecosystem.

Mental Health and Information Reporting Assistant: technological innovation including low- and middle-income countries - an update

Introduction According to the World Health Organization, addressing the mental health care gap for adolescents, especially in low-resource contexts, is a priority. Evidence-based assessment is crucial for selecting treatment strategies and for quality management.ObjectivesTo develop a digital platform for evidence-based assessments and implement it in different low-resource settings.MethodsThe project operates according to the principles of digital development (https://digitalprinciples.org/), including designing with the user, user testing, understanding the ecosystem, resusing software and being open source, think about sustainability and addressing privacy and security.ResultsDifferent implementation contexts (in Tanzania, Kosovo and Chile) will be presented.The learned lessons will be presented to the audience.ConclusionsMHIRA is a promising tool that helps bridge the gap regarding adolescent mental health in low-resource settings. Challenges include the clinicans attitude towards evidence based assessment, sustainability of the project and integration with the existing information technology eco-system and regulations.DisclosureNo significant relationships.

Editorial “Industrial IoT as IT and OT Convergence: Challenges and Opportunities”

During the last decade, the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) and its quick and pervasive evolution have significantly revolutionized the Information Technology ecosystem [...]

The Early IT ecosystem: Re-envisioning dual credit, college access and affordability, and teachers as professionals

The Early Information Technology ecosystem (Early IT) developed at a large R1 university in the Midwest has created a direct linkage between K-12, higher education, and industry, eliminating barriers throughout the pipeline for students. The program was created within a unique policy window, with the shortage of IT talent in the workforce converging with both the call for computer science education at the K-12 level and for dual credit options to reduce the cost of higher education. The limited capacity of K-12 schools to meet these demands on their own resulted in a window of opportunity for disruptive policy innovation. This opportunity resulted in a program that is broadening participation in computing and meeting the call for a scalable and sustainable talent pipeline, but that also serves as evidence for the potential of transformational change across various education policy domains. We use early successes in the program to highlight potential futures in the areas of dual credit, college access and affordability, and teacher professionalism.

Aspectos destacados de la industria de tecnologías de la información en Uruguay

Uruguay has outstanding achievements in Information Technology (IT) Industry. For example, it is the country in Latin America with the highest USD export rate of IT per capita and integrates Digital 9, the international forum of the nine governments who lead in pioneering digital practices to improve citizens' lives. This short article analyzes aspects of the history, infrastructure data and key indicators of the IT industry in Uruguay. It also addresses the challenges that the IT ecosystem faces for the future.

Spillover Effects of COVID-19 on Essential Chronic Care and Ways to Foster Health System Resilience to Support Vulnerable Non-COVID Patients: A Multistakeholder Study

ObjectivesLittle empirical research exists on how key stakeholders involved in the provision of care for chronic conditions and policy planning perceive the indirect or “spillover” effects of the COVID-19 on non-COVID patients. This study aims to explore stakeholder experiences and perspectives of the impact of COVID-19 on the provision of care for chronic conditions, evolving modalities of care, and stakeholder suggestions for improving health system resilience to prepare for future pandemics.DesignQualitative study design.Setting and ParticipantsThis study was conducted during and after the COVID-19 lockdown period in Singapore. We recruited a purposive sample of 51 stakeholders involved in care of non-COVID patients and/or policy planning for chronic disease management. They included health care professionals (micro-level), hospital management officers (meso-level), and government officials (macro-level).MethodsIn-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted. All interviews were digitally recorded, transcribed verbatim, and thematically analyzed.ResultsOptimal provision of care for chronic diseases may be compromised through the following processes: lack of “direct” communication between colleagues on clinical cases resulting in rescheduling of patient visits; uncertainty in diagnostic decisions due to protocol revision and lab closure; and limited preparedness to handle non-COVID patients’ emotional reactions. Although various digital innovations enhanced access to care, a digital divide exists due to uneven digital literacy and perceived data security risks, thereby hampering wider implementation. To build health system resilience, stakeholders suggested the need to integrate digital care into the information technology ecosystem, develop strategic public-private partnerships for chronic disease management, and give equal attention to the provision of holistic psychosocial and community support for vulnerable non-COVID patients.Conclusions and ImplicationsFindings highlight that strategies to deliver quality chronic care for non-COVID patients in times of public health crisis should include innovative care practices and institutional reconfiguration within the broader health system context.

Gaps in standards for integrating artificial intelligence technologies into ophthalmic practice.

The purpose of this review is to provide an overview of healthcare standards and their relevance to multiple ophthalmic workflows, with a specific emphasis on describing gaps in standards development needed for improved integration of artificial intelligence technologies into ophthalmic practice. Healthcare standards are an essential component of data exchange and critical for clinical practice, research, and public health surveillance activities. Standards enable interoperability between clinical information systems, healthcare information exchange between institutions, and clinical decision support in a complex health information technology ecosystem. There are several gaps in standards in ophthalmology, including relatively low adoption of imaging standards, lack of use cases for integrating apps providing artificial intelligence -based decision support, lack of common data models to harmonize big data repositories, and no standards regarding interfaces and algorithmic outputs. These gaps in standards represent opportunities for future work to develop improved data flow between various elements of the digital health ecosystem. This will enable more widespread adoption and integration of artificial intelligence-based tools into clinical practice. Engagement and support from the ophthalmology community for standards development will be important for advancing this work.

IoT: A New Open Access Journal for Internet of Things

During the last decade, the Information Technology ecosystem has been significantly revolutionized by the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) and its pervasive and quick evolution [...]

Using Health Information Technology to Support Use of Patient-Reported Outcomes in Rheumatology.

Technology can help health care providers understand their patients' experience of illness in a way that was previously impossible. Experience in using health information technology (IT) to capture this information through PROs within rheumatology suggests that careful attention to human centered design, including detailed workflow planning, consideration of patient and physician burden, integration into the health IT ecosystem, and delivering information to the right person at the right time are all important. Technology applications must be tested in diverse health systems and populations to ensure they are simple to interpret, useful for clinical decision making and effective in impacting outcomes.

An Architecture Framework for Orchestrating Context-Aware IT Ecosystems: A Case Study for Quantitative Evaluation †.

With the emergence of various forms of smart devices and new paradigms such as the Internet of Things (IoT) concept, the IT (Information Technology) service areas are expanding explosively compared to the provision of services by single systems. A new system operation concept that has emerged in accordance with such technical trends is the IT ecosystem. The IT ecosystem can be considered a special type of system of systems in which multiple systems with various degrees of autonomy achieve common goals while adapting to the given environment. The single systems that participate in the IT ecosystem adapt autonomously to the current situation based on collected data from sensors. Furthermore, to maintain the services supported by the whole IT ecosystem sustainably, the configuration of single systems that participate in the IT ecosystem also changes appropriately in accordance with the changed situation. In order to support the IT ecosystem, this paper proposes an architecture framework that supports dynamic configuration changes to achieve the goal of the whole IT ecosystem, while ensuring the autonomy of single systems through the collection of data from sensors so as to recognize the situational context of individual participating systems. For the feasibility evaluation of the proposed framework, a simulated example of an IT ecosystem for unmanned forest management was constructed, and the quantitative evaluation results are discussed in terms of the extent to which the proposed architecture framework can continuously provide sustainable services in response to diverse environmental context changes.

Providing Personalized Energy Management and Awareness Services for Energy Efficiency in Smart Buildings.

Considering that the largest part of end-use energy consumption worldwide is associated with the buildings sector, there is an inherent need for the conceptualization, specification, implementation, and instantiation of novel solutions in smart buildings, able to achieve significant reductions in energy consumption through the adoption of energy efficient techniques and the active engagement of the occupants. Towards the design of such solutions, the identification of the main energy consuming factors, trends, and patterns, along with the appropriate modeling and understanding of the occupants’ behavior and the potential for the adoption of environmentally-friendly lifestyle changes have to be realized. In the current article, an innovative energy-aware information technology (IT) ecosystem is presented, aiming to support the design and development of novel personalized energy management and awareness services that can lead to occupants’ behavioral change towards actions that can have a positive impact on energy efficiency. Novel information and communication technologies (ICT) are exploited towards this direction, related mainly to the evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT), data modeling, management and fusion, big data analytics, and personalized recommendation mechanisms. The combination of such technologies has resulted in an open and extensible architectural approach able to exploit in a homogeneous, efficient and scalable way the vast amount of energy, environmental, and behavioral data collected in energy efficiency campaigns and lead to the design of energy management and awareness services targeted to the occupants’ lifestyles. The overall layered architectural approach is detailed, including design and instantiation aspects based on the selection of set of available technologies and tools. Initial results from the usage of the proposed energy aware IT ecosystem in a pilot site at the University of Murcia are presented along with a set of identified open issues for future research.

XMPP-based infrastructure for IoT network management and rapid services and applications development

The information technology ecosystem is today facing many radical and methodological changes driven by the Internet-of-Things (IoT): those innovations impact at various levels, ranging from the device-to-device communication paradigms to the value-added services built on top of them. Though several IoT platforms addressing IoT design requirements have recently been raised in State-of-the-Art (SoTA), there is still a lack of platforms and tools which can help end-users to easily develop IoT applications and to configure and manage IoT infrastructures. In order to address these challenges, this work introduces the system development platform (SDP) developed within the IMPReSS project and specifically one of its components, namely, the IoT Platform’s Infrastructure for Configurations (IoT-PIC). It supports developers and users in arranging, configuring, and monitoring the various components of an IoT platform. Specifically, the paper highlights the solution adopted to face two services: IoT Network Management (NM) and platform commissioning. The proposed infrastructure, based on the eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP), provides means for device discovery and IoT network monitoring, enabling also the mash-up of the platform entities. The platform commissioning tool leverages this feature to compose available modules and services, to implement the desired IoT application. This paper also describes the Resource Adaptation Interface (RAI), which virtualizes physical devices within the IoT platform.

Monitoring Progress and Adherence with PAP Therapy for OSA: the Roles of Telemedicine and Mobile Health Applications

Given the challenge of optimizing continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) therapy adherence in patients with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), this paper discusses implementation of telemedicine-based mechanisms and other health-related technologies in order to develop a comprehensive and cost-effective solution for OSA management. Technology is changing every aspect of health care by empowering patients while changing the approach of providers and the health system of delivering care. Key elements include the use of electronic messaging, remote monitoring, automated care mechanisms, and patient self-management platforms. Follow-up care mechanisms involving automated remote monitoring and direct patient messaging have been proven to improve therapy adherence. Additional sleep-related telemedicine platforms that can be practically adopted include the use of web-based educational programs, patient applications that promote self-management, and peer-based patient-driven platforms. This paper discusses sleep-related telemedicine mechanisms that can be used to improve CPAP adherence and discusses emerging trends within the health information technology ecosystem, including electronic health record integration and their potential impact on OSA and clinical outcomes.

Crossing the health IT chasm: considerations and policy recommendations to overcome current challenges and enable value-based care.

While great progress has been made in digitizing the US health care system, today's health information technology (IT) infrastructure remains largely a collection of systems that are not designed to support a transition to value-based care. In addition, the pursuit of value-based care, in which we deliver better care with better outcomes at lower cost, places new demands on the health care system that our IT infrastructure needs to be able to support. Provider organizations pursuing new models of health care delivery and payment are finding that their electronic systems lack the capabilities needed to succeed. The result is a chasm between the current health IT ecosystem and the health IT ecosystem that is desperately needed.In this paper, we identify a set of focal goals and associated near-term achievable actions that are critical to pursue in order to enable the health IT ecosystem to meet the acute needs of modern health care delivery. These ideas emerged from discussions that occurred during the 2015 American Medical Informatics Association Policy Invitational Meeting. To illustrate the chasm and motivate our recommendations, we created a vignette from the multistakeholder perspectives of a patient, his provider, and researchers/innovators. It describes an idealized scenario in which each stakeholder's needs are supported by an integrated health IT environment. We identify the gaps preventing such a reality today and present associated policy recommendations that serve as a blueprint for critical actions that would enable us to cross the current health IT chasm by leveraging systems and information to routinely deliver high-value care.

Book Review: The Librarian’s Legal Companion for Licensing Information Resources and Services

The Librarian's Legal Companion for Licensing Information Resources and Services. By Thomas A. Lipinski. Chicago: Neal-Schuman, 2013. 734 p. $130 paper (ISBN: 9781-5-5570-610-4). The Legal Advisor for Libraries, Educators, & Information Professionals. When the electronic publishing revolution launched with CD-ROM based abstract and index services (AI he seemingly cannot repeat this enough, but given the widely and wildly variant contexts in which he makes this point, the admonition does not come off as hectoring. The Librarian's Legal Companion for Licensing Information Resources and Services has much to recommend. For starters, the title signals Lipinski's acceptance that the line between databases and software is often arbitrary. Indeed, he makes clear that software has always been licensed, with licensing and copyright existing side-by-side in tension and contradiction from the first stirrings of the information technology ecosystem. For every named mention of a database platform, e.g., Cengage, there is another to a software colossus like Microsoft. As if to underscore the difficulty in unraveling software's inevitable entanglement of content, he introduces a third element, hardware in the form of the e-reader. The Kindle is sold, and under the doctrine of first-sale, libraries may lend them. But Amazon's software is licensed, restrictively. Books for the Kindle are nontransferrable. Can libraries lend Kindles even if they have not set up a complicated arrangement with OverDrive? Lipinski himself is unsure, but anyone who reads his analysis will find it less than exhaustive and illuminating. Lipinski ventures beyond the right to distribute gadgetry, boldly venturing into the property regime of the web itself. He dissects the multiplicity of terms of use (TOU) and end user license agreements (EULA) proliferating throughout the web generally. Their language binds individuals accessing web-enabled services through any library or institution of higher education, but few patrons read these agreements and fewer understand them. Fortunately, as Lipinski points out, courts have sometimes, perhaps with surprising frequency, sided with plaintiffs claiming unconscionability (148), i.e., bullying by contract. His chapter on the open source movement and the development of the Creative Commons and General Public (GNU) licenses could stand alone as an essay. This is not to suggest there is any false advertising by Lipinski or his publisher, the American Library Association; this is a legal guide, after all. But the few librarians who will approach this as narrative are likely to make it to the end only if they possess more than a layperson's grasp of US copyright statute and theory. …

Privacy in the clouds

Informational self-determination refers to the right or ability of individuals to exercise personal control over the collection, use and disclosure of their personal data by others. The basis of modern privacy laws and practices around the world, informational privacy has become a challenging concept to protect and promote in a world of ubiquitous and unlimited data sharing and storage among organizations. The paper advocates a “user-centric” approach to managing personal data online. However, user-centricity can be problematic when the user—the data subject—is not directly involved in transactions involving the disclosure, collection, processing, and storage of their personal data. Identity data is increasingly being generated, used and stored entirely in the networked “Cloud”, where it is under control of third parties. The paper explores possible technology solutions to ensure that individuals will be able to exercise informational self-determination in an era of network grid computing, exponential data creation, ubiquitous surveillance and rampant online fraud. The paper describes typical “Web 2.0” use scenarios, suggests some technology building blocks to protect and promote informational privacy online, and concludes with a call to develop a privacy-respective information technology ecosystem for identity management. Specifically, the paper outlines four fundamental technological approaches to help assure widespread and enduring online participation, confidence and trust in the information society.

The Information Technology Ecosystem: Structure, Health, and Performance

The Information Technology Ecosystem: Structure, Health, and Performance