Kentucky interests your favorite writers here at WebProNews, as this is where we live and work. We’re jealous of the design of the California site, a straightforward approach that asks for a location, gives a list of hospitals, and visually shows how they rate while allowing visitors to look at more information if they wish.

The Kentucky site is pretty good. It’s been developed with what looks like a bureaucratic sensibility; I’m not saying it needed to have pastel colors and rounded corners, but visually it’s pretty obvious Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive weren’t in the approval chain for the look and feel of it.

People have to know which Area Development District contains the hospitals they want. In WebProNews land, Bluegrass is an instinctive choice. An option for selecting by city or zip code would be a lot easier here.

Choose an Inpatient Quality Indicator, then hit the Run button. Easy, but again, not instinctive even though the site explains the steps to generating a report. Anyone who is used to the typical web form approach with a Submit button at the bottom of a page may be glancing around before finding Run at the top left.

Results of a query appear in a table. Green text means a Risk Adjusted Rate of mortality is significantly lower than the national average. Red means significantly higher. Lower is much, much better.

It’s a good first effort on the part of the state. The site needs a lot more work on its user interface; people shouldn’t be able to pull up ugly Crystal Reports-related options like Prompts from the Refresh Data button link, because they will make no sense to the typical citizen.

The governor was treated for the clot at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Lexington just days after recovering from gallbladder surgery, pancreatitis and a blood infection that kept him in the hospital for almost three weeks.

During the procedure to remove the clot, gubernatorial powers were transferred to Lieutenant Governor Steve Pence, who was in Florida on a personal trip at the time. Pence said he expected the powers to go back to Fletcher some time today.

According to Fletcher spokesman Brett Hall, the governor awoke on Thursday morning with pain in his left arm. He said the arm was swollen and discolored. Fletcher, being a doctor, immediately recognized the signs as a blood clot.

The clot could’ve been quite deadly to the Kentucky governor. Dr. Dale Absher, the interventional radiologist who performed the procedure described the clot as “medium-sized,” and running “from the middle of the vein in the middle of the chest back over to the arm – and there was some in the jugular vein.”

Fletcher had contacted infectious disease specialist Dr. Charles Kennedy, describing his symptoms. Kennedy confirmed the clot and sent him to St. Joseph’s. Kennedy told the Courier Journal of Louisville that this was a “routine procedure when patients are administered very potent, clot-busting drugs.”

The governor is expected to make a complete recovery. Doctors say the clot is no longer at risk for going to the governor’s heart and lungs.

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John Stith is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children was granted United Kingdom copyrights to J.M. Barrie’s classic work Peter Pan by an act of Parliament in 1929, a grant extended indefinitely in 1988. The copyright generates millions of pounds of income for the hospital.

In the United States, Peter Pan is considered a work in the public domain, which gives Google carte blanche to scan and redistribute at will within US borders.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if Google do this, but it will rob the hospital of a major core of its charity revenue,” a hospital spokesman told ZDNet.

Though copyright law may limit Google to providing Peter Pan only on its US site, it is fair to say that it wouldn’t be difficult to access it abroad. Project Gutenberg has already indexed Peter Pan with the disclaimer that use of the book is restricted to within US borders only.

Google has several options in dealing with the matter. The ever-growing search company would be within its rights as an American company to ignore the hospital’s concerns altogether-a response that, from a public relations standpoint, probably isn’t the best course of action.

It could extend the “opt out” program to Great Ormond Street Hospital, allowing them to block access, aside from providing the much talked about “snippets” of copyrighted works, even in the United States where Peter Pan is public domain. This may set a precedent, however, the company would rather not set.

The most likely approach (though it is hard to say as Google did not return requests for comment) is that the scanning and making available of Peter Pan will proceed with the same consideration provided by Project Gutenberg, allowing use only in the US, while giving Great Ormond Street the chance to opt out in the UK.

Lending more support to the notion that persistent and thorough hand washing is the best defense against bacteria, sanitation-services company, Ecolab Inc., reported that even the strongest antibiotics are proving futile in destroying methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).

Dropping samples of MRSA onto keyboard covers, bed linens, and acrylic fingernails, researchers tested the life span of the superbugs. They found that the bugs lived best under the fingernails-up to eight weeks; six weeks on the computer keyboard, and five days on bed linens.

“The results of this study clearly demonstrate the need for frequent hand washing and environmental disinfection in health care settings,” said researcher Kris Owens.

Generally speaking, your garden-variety Staphylococcus aureus is common, living in 30% of the population’s skin and nose. Problems caused are usually minor and include rashes and boils. People often mistake an infection for a spider bite.

In more extreme cases, and more prevalent in hospitals, MRSA causes grave infections like necrotizing fasciitis (flesh-eating disease), resisting all antibiotics except for IV administered vancomycin.

Doctors continue to emphasize thorough hand washing with warm to hot water, anti-bacterial soap, without neglecting under the fingernails, is the best line of defense against illness.

The patient’s chart, for instance, is all paper and hand-done. How many inefficiencies (and opportunities for mistakes) are there there? Tons.

Then I look at the machines hooked up here. There’s a blood transfusion device. An IV device. An oxygen monitor. A heart-rate monitor. None of these machines talk with each other. None report back to the patient’s chart. After all, how could they? That’s all paper stored in a binder by the door of the room.

The whole wing runs by nurses who visit every 20 minutes or so. They manually check on the patients. First they check the chart to see what is prescribed for each patient.

In every place I see inefficiencies. Things that could be improved with better technologies. Opportunities for mistakes that could be removed.

“Technology is too expensive,” I can hear lots saying. Well, how expensive is a malpractice lawsuit? I just watched a blood transfusion. What if a doctor wrote the wrong blood type in the patient’s chart? Why are we still doing things in an analog fashion? Why isn’t there a video camera here to verify what was done to a patient? Why isn’t RFID being used to verify that the right medication is being distributed to the right patient? Why doesn’t each room have a monitor for nurses to watch so that they can check on the patient’s vital signs without entering the room? That’d make them far more efficient, remove waiting times for really serious mishaps (the machine putting fluid into a patient makes the same beep whether it’s out of fluid or has a blockage in the line).

I see all sorts of opportunities to make medical care both more personal as well as remove risk of malpractice lawsuits. Each medical chart should have attached to it 24-hour video of the patient’s care so that it can be verified later on whether the patient really received proper care. That alone would reduce lawsuits and cost.

Insurance companies should start insisting on improvements to the medical system. Our health care costs are going up every year far faster than the cost of living increases yet we’re still putting patient charts on paper. We’re still not making machines that talk to each other. We still aren’t putting new technologies like RFID into use. We have better display systems in our airports than in our hospitals.

And what’s scary is that this hospital is one of the richest in the world. Only a few miles from Bill Gates’ home and from Microsoft’s headquarters (and he’s listed at the top of the donator’s list here).

Why do I work in software? Why do I see growth opportunities for the software industry? All I have to do is look around a hospital room for a while.

What opportunities do you see?

Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.

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NewYork-Presbyterian will use Lawson services to implement Lawson Reporting Suite and upgrade to version 8.1 Supply Chain Management and Financials for Healthcare Suites.

Based in New York City, NewYork-Presbyterian is one of the most comprehensive university hospitals in the world. In July 2004, U.S. News & World Report ranked the New York hospital No. 9 in its list of America’s best hospitals, which were noted for excelling in six or more specialties. The hospital comprises two renowned medical centers, NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center and NewYork-Presbyterian/ Weill Cornell Medical Center, and is affiliated with two Ivy League medical schools, Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons and Weill Medical College of Cornell University. Residents of the tri-state area have convenient access to multiple high quality healthcare services through the entire NewYork-Presbyterian healthcare system.

“Lawson has demonstrated a keen understanding of our business and is committed to providing technology solutions and consulting that enables us to provide our business leaders with the information they need when they need it,” said Mark E. Larmore, vice president, finance and assistant treasurer, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. “We are impressed with how Lawson continues to help NewYork-Presbyterian optimize resources and realize our operational goals.”

Lawson will help NewYork-Presbyterian address the challenges it has confronted with its legacy financial systems. Specifically, the organization’s legacy systems do not provide timely access to financial and operational information due to a lack of integration and Web-accessible user interfaces. In addition, the legacy systems require frequent maintenance and interfacing, complicating efforts to streamline business processes. Another key challenge is lack of access to enterprise-wide information, hampering the decision-making abilities of business unit executives.

Lawson consulting will apply best practices to business processes and leverage Web-based Lawson technology to give NewYork-Presbyterian greater visibility into its operations and timely access to data for more strategic decision-making. Lawson consultants will also guide NewYork-Presbyterian on the efficient use of the new functionality included in version 8.1.

By upgrading, NewYork-Presbyterian’s use of the Supply Chain Management Suite will be greatly enhanced to ensure timely notification of critical purchasing processes, a more streamlined flow of information through the network, and greater visibility into contract compliance and vendor performance. Lawson consulting will coach NewYork-Presbyterian on how to use these tools for better management of procurement processes and support for strategic sourcing initiatives.

The Lawson Reporting Suite will enhance NewYork-Presbyterian’s business intelligence capabilities by enabling employees to gather, report and analyze enterprise-wide information in a single location. With custom-built views, employees can monitor relevant data sources of their choosing and filter extraneous information. With more time on hand, employees are freed to pursue other business-critical activities.

“Lawson project managers and consultants are experienced professionals with years of healthcare expertise and deep knowledge of the critical business issues facing our healthcare clients,” said Angie Franks, vice president of market development, Lawson Software. “Our consultants apply industry best practices in every engagement, and work together to design and implement systems that help clients achieve their business objectives.”

Lawson serves more than 500 healthcare industry clients representing more than 4,500 facilities, including eight of the top 10 integrated delivery networks. The company also serves managed care systems, academic medical centers, hospitals, clinics, physician group practices, home healthcare, long-term care and other health services enterprises. Lawson solutions help healthcare organizations manage their business so they can focus on their patients, automate and streamline materials management for a better bottom line, and overcome the challenges of labor shortages.

From raw materials to the marketplace, SCMNews keeps senior managers educated on the latest supply chain management software solutions.