We at DSC Secure Networking are proud to offer your business  this Free Computer Class.  We hope to help you find answers to your current computer problems by giving you the latest information to help your business operate smoothly.

           When your system is running slow, your business is running slow.  When your computers are down, your business is down.  And in this economy who can afford to lose time or money? 

           Correctly designed, engineered and supported systems result in greatly reduced overhead, increasing your bottom line.  Let us demonstrate how we can increase your quality of service, security and hardware.  We can show you how to cut your IT costs in ways you’ve never thought of, all without compromising your level of support.

          Join us and discuss all of your computer related questions. Wait until you hear how our Free Network Analysis can benefit your business! 

Sign Up Now

The class will be held on Monday March 8th, 2010 from 5:30-6:30PM at the North Port Family YMCA.

Date: Monday March 8, 2010

Time:  5 : 30 PM — 6 : 30 PM

North Port YMCA

5930 Sam Shoppes Way

North Port, FL 34287

Phone: 941-429-2269

R.S.V.P to reserve your seats as seats are limited!!! (941)564-6513 – jennifer.mccabe@dscnetworking.com

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Pros

Lower hardware cost due to the fact you won’t need a server on site.

Lower PC system requirements.

Lower on site costs due to the support is all on the hosted server side.

The vendor is responsible for all upgrades to the software and hardware.

Cons

You never really own the software you rent it.

Application Service contracts will start low to entice new users but I expect them to soar after a time and this format becomes more mainstream.

It will be very difficult to change from this platform once you go down this path.

The internet is very unreliable in our region and what this would mean is when your internet connection  goes down so will your system (hard to process customer without a working computer these days, give it a try)  You can add a second internet connection  from a different ISP to help prevent this problem if the outage is cause just by your ISP being down and not the main trunk lines.

Some vendors have you install an emergency server on your site that will cache transactions locally at your site if their servers are down or the internet connection fails. When it comes back online it will sync the two. Looks like we have lost one of the Pros with this option as you now are buying a server and software anyway.

Hosted applications will have a reoccurring monthly or yearly fee along with the initial start up costs.

This is one I would like everyone to think about for a real long time. If your Vendor’s business fails for any reason and they do all the time, how would you get your data back from them and in the event of a bankruptcy could you ever get it back at all? If companies as large as banks and car manufactures can fail small software companies in comparison can and do fail as well.

Many vendors as we all know may not call you back for hours or sometimes days and now your only IT support will be located in some other state. There will not be a option to call someone locally to help get you back on line.

The safety and integrity of your data has always been a key concern, now you would be leaving it up to someone else. It has not been unheard of that even the largest of the cloud computing companies like Microsoft, AOL, Google and Yahoo do at least lose data for a time or even  permanently as it has been reported on the news from time to time. Google Danger, the creator of the Sidekick smartphone. They just lost a load of customer data.

Hopefully this will help you make a smarter decision on whether or not cloud computing is a smart choice for your business.

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UPDATE: Not just one, but apparently there is quite a selection!

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Why is this done? The main reason is cost. Leaving out the “brains” of the printer can cut $50-100 off the price, making them more attractive, but causing a nightmare for IT in organizations with more than 5-10 users. Unfortunately this is not well documented in printer marketing materials and makes it very hard to tell if the printer you are buying is host based or not.

How to tell? The best way to go to the printers support page and see what kind of drivers are available. If the drivers say something in them like PCL5/6 or Post Script/PS, then your printer is more than likely not host based. Another way is to dig into the printers specifications, if the print processor has some speed value (i.e. 500 mhz) then it is most likely not host based.

Having these problems at your company? Be sure to contact us, and we will find a non host based solution that will work for you!

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Everyone had a great time!  We would like to give our thanks to Seminole Gulf Railway for giving us a great night, and to our own Jenni McCabe, who worked hard planning the whole night.

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When you refer a business to us, just make sure they know to mention you and we will do the rest. We appreciate your business and hope this finds you saving even more every month.  This is just our way of saying thank you for the positive word of mouth you already give to us.

If you have any questions regarding the Customer Referral Program, call or email us and we will  be happy to explain it further. 

We appreciate you all and look forward to continuing to do business with you.

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If you are a medical establishment, HIPAA guidelines require that you have an offsite back-up of all your data. Do you currently back-up your data remotely?  We have a very affordable solution.  In case the unthinkable happened and you lost all your data and could not retrieve it, you would still be protected with this solution.  If you are depending on your back-up tapes to retrieve your data, we would like to let you know that in our experience 50% of the time the tape drives do not work.

HIPAA requirements, a theft of your computer system, a fire at your location, a natural disaster (i.e. hurricane) in your area, your sprinkler heads going off, a leak in the ceiling leading to water damage, your server failing:  All are examples of why you should have this solution to be able to retrieve your data.

The system requirements you need are a high speed internet connection.  If you do not have a high speed internet connection, we can come out to you and see what kind of alternative solution we can come up with.

Please feel free to call us with any questions you have concerning Offsite Back-Ups.

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So you are thinking about upgrading to Windows 7, but are wondering, “how well will it run my programs?” With the new feature called Windows XP mode built into Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate Editions, program compatability promises to be almost a non issue!

Windows XP mode is built around the new version of Virtual PC, simply called Windows Virtual PC. If you own a copy of Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise or Ultimate, you will be able to download a virtual hard drive image of Windows XP Professional for use with Windows Virtual PC.

The new version of Virtual PC will bring a long awaited feature to the table, which is USB support. As of the beta which is a free download for the Windows 7 RC, it doesn’t work quite well yet, but since it is only a beta, hopefully they will have all the issues hammered out in time for the October 22 release. Now that the final version is out, the USB support is absolutely flawless. To be able to use a USB device, you click the USB button at the top of the Virtual PC window and select attach.

On to how windows xp mode works. Those of you familiar with virtual pc will know that when you install a program inside a virtual machine, you have to first start the virtual machine, then run the program. The new windows virtual pc, however, watches the programs that are installed inside it, and makes them available on the Windows 7 start menu. When you click the start menu link to start the program, the program will launch in its own windows xp style window. The program will even be able to open files located within Windows 7! You do not have to save them inside the Windows XP virtual machine.

For the system requirements, Obviously Windows 7, and 15gb of hard drive space. Microsoft also recommends your computer have at least 2gb of ram. The final requirement, which may also be the most difficult, is that your processor support hardware assisted virtualization. This greatly speeds the performance of virtual pc, but you would be suprised as to which processors support it.

Supported processors are:

Intel:Desktop CPUS

Core 2 DuoE4300/4400/4500/4600/4700 NO
E6300/6320/6400/6420/6540/6550 YES
E6600/6700/6750/6850 YES
E7200/7300/7400/7500 NO
E8190 NO
E8200/8300/8400/8500/8600 YES

Core 2 ExtremeQX6700/6800/6850 YES
QX9650/9770/9775 YES
X6800 YES

Core 2 QuadQ6600/6700 YES
Q8200/8200S/8300/8400/8400S NO
Q9300/9400/9400S YES
Q9450/9550/9550S/9650 YES

Core i7/Core i7 ExtremeI7-920/940 YES
I7-965/975 YES

Pentium D/Pentium EE805/820/830/840 NO
915/925/935/945 NO
920/930/940/950/960 YES
955/965 YES

Pentium for DesktopE2140/2160/2180/2200/2220 NO
E5200/5300/5400 NO

Mobile CPU products

Core 2 Duo Mobile

L7200/7300/7400/7500 YES
P7350/7450 NO P7370 YES
P8400/8600/8700/9500/9600 YES
SL9300/9400/9600 YES
SP9300/9400/9600 YES
SU9300/9400/9600 YES
T5200/5250/5270/5300/5450/5470 NO
T5500/5600 YES
T5550/5670/5750/5800/5850/5870/5900 NO
T6400/6570 NO
T7100/7200/7250/7300/7400 YES
T7500/7600/7700/7800 YES
T8100/8300 YES
T9300/9400/9500/9550/9600/9800 YES
U7500/U7600 YES

Core 2 Extreme Mobile

QX9300 YES
X7800/7900 YES
X9000/9100 YES

Core 2 Quad Mobile

Q9000 YES
Q9100 NO

Core 2 Solo

SU3300/3500 YES
U2100/2200 YES

Core Duo

L2300/2400/2500 YES
T2050/2250 NO
T2300/2400/2500/2600/2700 YES
T2300E/2350/2450 NO
U2400/2500 YES

Core Solo

T1300/1400 YES
T1350 NO
U1300/1400/1500 YES

Source

Intel to Add support for Intel Virtualization for

Core 2 Quad Q8300,
Core 2 Duo E7500,
Core 2 Duo E7400,
Pentium E5400 and
Pentium E5300.

AMD is a lot easier, as all cpu’s shipped in the last few years, with the exception of semprons and pre revision e turion and pre revision f athlon desktop processors will support it.

If you are in doubt, or your processor is not listed, you can use this tool to tell you if the chip supports hardware assisted virtualization. Note that if you are running a 64bit version of windows, the tool will only tell you if hardware assisted virtualization is available, not whether or not it is enabled. It must be enabled in your computers bios in order to function.

Thats it for windows xp mode! Next, I will go over the more technical aspects of Windows 7, including the “under the hood” changes.

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DSC Secure Networking is a one stop shop IT company that can help you choose your EMR software, implement your hardware requirements, and support your system. Below is an article informing you of money that you are entitled to from the government, deadlines, and penalties.

HIPAA EMR security and the stimulus plan
Written by Patricia King, JD

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the ARRA, commonly known as the stimulus bill) included $19 billion in funding for adoption of electronic medical records (EMRs). Proponents of health information technology believe that widespread adoption of EMRs will help control health care costs and enhance quality, especially as providers begin to share patient information electronically. However, privacy advocates worry that as more and more patient information is kept electronically, we will see more instances of patient information getting into the wrong hands. While the security of paper records can be far from perfect1], most large-scale security incidents in recent years involved electronic records (such as lost laptops containing unencrypted protected health information (PHI), and PHI improperly secured in web-based applications and exposed online). So as the stimulus bill, with its incentives for EHR adoption, moved through Congress, privacy advocates sought to strengthen security protections for electronic PHI.[2] They succeeded – and as a result, practices will need to dust off their Health Information Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) privacy and security manuals, and strengthen protections for electronic PHI.

What to do first about HIPAA security
The practice’s first priority should be to review and update HIPAA security procedures. The ARRA provides for greatly increased penalties for security breaches involving electronic PHI, and these are in effect now.

Under the HIPAA enforcement rule published in 2006[3], providers who violated HIPAA could be assessed a maximum civil monetary penalty of $100 per violation, up to $25,000 during a calendar year for identical violations. Under the ARRA, there will be a three-tier system for determining the penalty. The previous rate of $100 per violation/$25,000 per year will apply for innocent mistakes (if the provider did not know, and would not have known if exercising reasonable diligence, that the violation occurred). If it was not an innocent mistake, but the provider was not guilty of willful neglect, the penalty goes up to $1,000 per violation, not to exceed $100,000 per year. For violations due to willful neglect, the penalty can be as much as $50,000 per violation, not to exceed $1.5 million per year.

Suppose a laptop with unencrypted information on ten patients is lost. Under the previous HIPAA enforcement rule, the maximum penalty would have been $1,000. Under current law, the maximum will be either $10,000 or $500,000, depending on whether the loss of the laptop was considered “willful neglect”. This is a significant liability that is likely not covered under the practice’s insurance.

There is another change in enforcement that may increase the likelihood that health care providers will encounter these penalties. While enforcement of HIPAA was previously the exclusive domain of HHS, the ARRA now allows state attorneys general to bring enforcement actions. HHS had been criticized for alleged lax enforcement of HIPAA, because the agency had not conducted regular security audits of providers but had focused on responding to patient complaints.

In addition to the substantial increase in penalties for HIPAA violations, the ARRA introduces a requirement to notify the Secretary of Health and Human Services and affected patients, if there is a breach of unsecured PHI. PHI is considered unsecured if it is not secured through use of a technology that renders the information unusable, unreadable or indecipherable to unauthorized persons. Some states have had a security breach requirement for years, but in most cases, this applied only if the information disclosed was the type that could be used for identity theft (such as the social security number). The notification requirement under the ARRA is much broader, since it applies to improper disclosure of any PHI. This requirement will apply to business associates as well as covered entities (providers, health plans and clearinghouses). The security breach notification requirement will come into effect when HHS has published regulations, but no later than September 15, 2009.

If there has been an inappropriate disclosure of unsecured PHI, the provider must notify the patient by mail. If the disclosure affected more than 500 persons in a state, a notice must be published in a local newspaper, and will also be published on the HHS website. This would be, of course, a public relations nightmare for a practice that has to notify patients that their private information has been disclosed.

If you haven’t reviewed your HIPAA policies since they were first adopted, now is the time to revisit them, especially in light of problems encountered by other providers. Here are a couple of suggestions:

Make sure any PHI contained on laptops, PDAs or other portable devices is encrypted or password-secured.
If any web-based services are used to transmit PHI (for example, some types of electronic billing), make sure the service uses secure encryption technology and follows state-of-the-art security practices.
See “Computer security for physicians.”

Next steps: revising HIPAA policies
The next task for practices should be to revise HIPAA policies, in light of some new patient rights provided under the ARRA. Under HIPAA, providers were permitted to disclose PHI for purposes of patient treatment, payment, or health care operations. Patients had the right to request restrictions on such disclosures, but the provider was not obligated to grant the patient’s request. Under the ARRA, patients will now have the right to prohibit disclosure of information to the payor, if the patient pays out-of-pocket for a service. This provision will take effect February 17, 2010. In the intervening months, practices should revise their HIPAA and medical record policies to specify how, if a patient makes this request, information on a procedure paid out-of-pocket can be flagged or segregated so it is not inadvertently disclosed to a payor auditing the record for other reasons.

Future developments in HIPAA regulations
The ARRA provides for other enhancements to patient rights, but allowing some lead time for HHS to develop regulations, and for developers of electronic medical records to build into their systems the capability to comply. HIPAA currently gives patients the right to request an accounting of disclosures of their PHI, but there are several exceptions. Currently, health care providers do not have to include disclosures for treatment, payment or health care operations in the accounting. The ARRA will now require providers with EMRs to produce an accounting that does include these disclosures. Because the EMR itself will probably have to be modified to capture this information, the effective date is delayed. Providers that already have an EMR must be able to produce an accounting covering disclosures for treatment, payment and health care operations made after January 1, 2014. This date may be extended by HHS, but to no later than 2016. Providers that acquire an EMR after January 1, 2009 must provide an accounting of disclosures after the later of the acquisition date, or January 1, 2011. Again, the law permits HHS to extend this deadline, but no later than 2013.

The ARRA also changes the definition of “health care operations” to remove some disclosures for marketing and fund-raising purposes. Since under HIPAA, disclosures for health care operations did not require the patient’s authorization, the effect is that greater restrictions are imposed on these disclosures.

The ARRA also prohibits the sale of PHI without the patient’s authorization, with certain exceptions, such as research. Privacy rights advocates were concerned that providers were selling patient data to pharmaceutical companies and other commercial interests. HHS will develop regulations to implement this restriction by no later than February 17, 2010.

HIPAA Expansion
Finally, the ARRA greatly expands the reach of HIPAA. Previously, HIPAA applied only to “covered entities”: health plans, clearinghouses, and health care providers that used electronic transactions. HIPAA will now apply directly to business associates of covered entities, such as billing companies, record storage companies, and other firms that handle PHI.

While vendors of personal health records will not be covered under HIPAA, they will be required to notify individuals of a security breach affecting their personal information. The Federal Trade Commission will be responsible for enforcement of this requirement.

Patient privacy issues clearly have Congress’s attention. They will likely be a focus of regulatory interest for HHS in coming years.

——————————————————————————–

Footnotes
[1] A significant recent enforcement action under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was the $2.25 million penalty recovered from CVS Pharmacy, Inc. CVS was found to have disposed of patient information, such as old prescription labels, in unsecured dumpsters.

[2] Many of the privacy and security provisions adopted in the ARRA were originally proposed in a bill introduced in the last Congress, known as the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (the HITECH Act).

[3] 71 Fed. Reg. 8389 (Feb. 16, 2006).

About the Author
Patricia King is a health care attorney in Illinois, and principal of the web-based business Digital Age Healthcare LLC (http://www.digitalagemd.com/).

Link to article: http://www.netdoc.com/Physician-Practice-Articles/General-Medical-Practice/HIPAA-EMR-security-and-the-stimulus-plan/

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For all you gamers and autocad/3dsmax users out there, Windows 7 will ship with the new version of direct x, direct x 11. One of the new big improvements is that now 2d stuff like text and pictures are now hardware accelerated. DirectX can now emulate a graphics card with its software rasterizer. Another huge change is the GPGPU support. GPGPU stands for general purpose graphics processing unit. This allows you to run programs on your graphics card! Unlike a cpu, which may have 1-4 cores, graphics cards can have as many as 800 cores, making them perfect for things like video transcoding. Several other applications, like folding@home, can take advantage of this. Many other applications, like adobe photoshop and premier, can also take advantage of hardware accelerated graphics. The new window manager runs a lot more efficiently if you have a DirectX 10 graphics card with a WDDM 1.1 driver. The window manager will use significantly less memory and the amount of memory used will remain constant despite the amount of windows open. Cards with only a WDDM 1.0 driver will operate in the same fashion as Windows Vista.

Now for the core operating system changes. Windows 7 can now support up to 256 logical processors. I would like to see the system they tested that on! Another great new feature is multifunction device containers. Now those of you with your all in one printers can find all of its functions in one location, rather than having to navigate all over the operating system. I’m sure some of you have heard about the upcoming USB 3.0 specification, however Windows 7 will not initially ship with support. Support will come through an update when the specification is released.

For storage changes, Windows 7 can now recognize solid state drives. It will turn off the windows disk defragmenter as this can have a detrimental effect on your solid state drive. It will also physically erase deleted data more aggressively, making it easier to write back data over the deleted sectors. Windows 7 will also format an SSD differently than a mechanical hard disk drive. Windows 7 Ultimate and Enterpries support mounting and booting off virtual hard drives, the ones virtual pc use.

Boot times are drastically improved. Microsoft dedicated a team of developers solely to improve the boot time. They found that most of the causes of the lengthy boot times are caused by services that load on startup but are not needed immediatly. They were also able to improve the parallel loading of device drivers and reduce the amount of necessary system services.

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