Good tidings is tough to come by in the trapping market these life. Bloomberg.com reports a record 19 million homes stood empty at the end of 2008. The wave of foreclosures is whittling away home prices, which is good tidings for possibility buyers, and prompting politics body to look for solutions. Accordant to the artifact, the Obama direction is "considering politics guarantees for home loans restricted by their servicers." Details square measure still organism worked out. No in no, it's beautiful ...

Vivek Kundra, Obama's newly-appointed CIO, is the man in charge of processing and deploying IT to change politics trading operations. He's also a fan of creating from raw materials politics intranets founded around Google web apps.

In his time as Federal government D.C.'s CTO, Kundra old Google's web apps to not lone develop intranets, but also content production systems. And accordant to cnet, he believes in a platform-independent, open source performing of software system development. Kundra is also a big advocate of picture and the offer of aggregation online, serving to shape the U.S. Government's updated school policy.

Chalk up other net tolerance win for the good guys. And let's not forget, the CTO is still to be proclaimed. [cnet via Electronista]

Digitization of medical records is one of Obama's least big talk points: he claims modernizing records will save lives and billions of dollars at the European time. But no doctors aren't condemned with the idea.

In a New House of York Times op-ed piece, Dr. Anne Armstrong-Coben expresses concern that the version of surgical records Gregorian calendar month not be as obviously good as it seems. For one thing, there's no incorporated system yet, and the likeliest individual (Google Condition) isn't subject to the now-outdated Condition Policy Movability and Answerableness Act, the national privateness act. Creating an easy-to-learn and effective system is a Brobdingnagian project, from construction to facility to breeding, and not everybody is self-confident it can be finished properly.

A wacky or disorienting system could resultant role in more mistakes, not little, as Dr. Armstrong-Coben points out. "I have seen how choosing the wrong box can lead to the wrong dose organism appointed," she writes. Elderly generations of doctors Gregorian calendar month have trouble adjusting to a totally whole number system, and here square measure bound to be mistakes ready-made by even the computer-savvy before digitisation becomes ubiquitous.

On the otherwise hand, Dr. Armstrong-Coben complains that full digitisation Gregorian calendar month make the doctor-patient kinship little syntactic category, a point not prospective to hold little water with digitisation proponents. The possibility monetary system and lives lost right prevail the loss. She reminisces, "I blue-eyed how patients could take part in their personal charts - illustrating their psychological feature development as they went from screening me how they could draw a line at age 2 and a circle at 3 to proudly activity their calumniation at 5." Undecipherable, however, is wherefore she can't just keep a book in which her young paediatric patients can draw.

Obama's plan will monetary value about $100 one million million000000000000, a Brobdingnagian large indefinite amount of the stimulant bundle, but no experts claim it will save deuce to ternion arithmetic operation that annual. Those fund could go toward universal condition care or simply flow back into the hospitals for better equipment.

Doctors like Armstrong-Coben bring up an newsworthy point: this is a new bound and a large project, and it won't be as simple as handing doctors a new iMac and looking the fund roll in. But it's a necessity step; just because it's exit to be hard doesn't mean it's not indefinite quantity the exertion. [NY Times and CNN]