Replacing a Stolen iPhone

Yesterday my daughter's 32 GB iPhone 3GS was stolen. She set her purse down for a moment while walking with a friend in a park and when she looked back it was gone.

It contained minimal cash, no credit cards, but it did have a $299 iPhone 3GS 32 GB. We filed a police report and searched the web for the possibilities, finding much contradictory information. What should you do? Here's my experience:

1. The credit card we used to buy it does not offer purchase protection - no luck.

2. Our home insurance deductible is larger than the iPhone price - no luck

3. Apple Care does not cover stolen iPhones - no luck

4. Apple and AT&T do not offer replacement insurance on iPhones - no luck

5. We stopped by the Apple store and found out that the retail price of a 32GB iPhone is really $699, but AT&T subsidizes a new purchase with a 2 year voice/data contract for $299. If the iPhone is stolen, AT&T customers can check the Apple website to find out if they are eligible for"early upgrade pricing": $299 (8GB), $399 (16GB), or $499 (32GB) with a new two-year contract. Thus, to replace a stolen $299 iPhone 3GS 32 GB costs $499. At least that's better than $699. Thanks for the additional subsidy AT&T.

Here's the language from the Apple site

"Requires new two-year AT&T wireless service contract, sold separately to qualified customers; credit check required; must be 18 or older. Existing AT&T customers who want to upgrade from another phone or replace an iPhone 3G should check with AT&T or use www.apple.com/iphone/buy to find out if they are eligible for early upgrade pricing: $299 (8GB), $399 (16GB), or $499 (32GB) with a new two-year contract.

For those who are not eligible for an early upgrade or who wish to buy iPhone as a gift, the prices are $499 (8GB), $599 (16GB), or $699 (32GB). In CA, MA, and RI, sales tax is collected on the unbundled price of iPhone."

Tomorrow we're going to call our home insurance agent to ask if there are any affordable riders to our policy that cover iPhones.

We're going to check on the purchase protection capability of all our credit cards to better plan for future purchases.

We're going to chat with Apple about discontinuing the AppleCare extended warranty on the old iPhone, since we no longer own it.

Thus, if your iPhone is lost or stolen, expect that you can get early upgrade pricing at the Apple store with a partial subsidy from AT&T. Definitely try to buy your iPhone with a credit card that provides purchase protection. Check your homeowner's policy for affordable coverage.

While I'm discussing iPhones, a lesson learned from using an iPhone in Japan. We found the 3G service to be excellent and making phone calls between our US-based phones (2 iPhones and 1 Blackberry) was simply dialing a local US call.

Data roaming, however, is extremely expensive - $5.00 per megabyte. You definitely want to buy a pre-paid international roaming plan which costs about $1.00 per megabyte.

From AT&T

"Purchasing an international data package can significantly reduce the cost of using data abroad. AT&T now offers four discount international data packages. The 20 MB package is $24.99 per month, the 50 MB package is $59.99 per month, 100 MB package is $119.99 per month, and the 200 MB package is $199.99 per month. See the AT&T website for details and international roaming rates."

Also, here a few tips for minimizing international data roaming cost

The iPhone is a great device. Keeping it affordable takes work!

Addendum:

1. We're applying for new credit cards that offer purchase protection

2. Applecare was very helpful and refunded the purchase of Applecare on the stolen iPhone

3. Our insurance agent is investigating options that are affordable. More to come.

Cool Technology of the Week

Before I became the CIO of Beth Israel Deaconess, I was the Executive Director of the CareGroup Center for Quality and Value, responsible for dashboards and business intelligence for BIDMC and several other hospitals. Building dashboards is challenging. Data must be acquired from multiple sources, cleaned up, normalized, and analyzed. Displaying data in a form that is actionable takes talent, such as per the work of Edward Tufte

Analyzing community health data provides policymakers with guidance to prioritize funding and public programs. The Healthy Communities Institute has developed a set of visual dashboards that are my cool technology of the week. Check out

San Francisco

Marin County

Sonoma County

San Bernardino County

Whatcom County

and click on See all Indicators.

You'll find some amazing data on the environment, disease prevalence, safety, and education with speedometer-like gauges.

Marin County has a great environment and quality of life, but does have issues with drug and alcohol use.

Having community snapshots like these for every county in America would make choosing a healthy place to live much easier. Sites like Sperling's Best Places provide cost of living, schools, crime, and climate info, but do not really describe the lifestyle and attitudes toward health in each locale.

Dashboards for healthy living on the web - that's cool.

The Experience of Tea

This is the first of many Thursday blogs about my recent trip to Japan. That trip was an exploration and appreciation of Japanese traditions.

Some of my favorite traditions are tea (cha-no-yū), incense (Kōdō), Japanese textiles (Samue and Farmer's jackets called Noragi), Zen cuisine (Shojin Ryori), and music (Shakuhachi).

Today's blog is about tea. While in Kyoto, I spent an afternoon with Nagahiro Yasumori, owner of Horaido Tea on the Teramachi shopping street in Kyoto. I traveled to the oldest tea store on the planet, Tsuen, located next to the Uji River bridge for the past 850 years. I also walked the hillsides of Uji (photo above) to wander among the bushes that produce the world's finest tea.

I drink 4 kinds of Japanese tea - Sencha, Gyokuro, Genmaicha, and Houjicha. I'll cover Matcha and tea ceremony in its own blog entry.

Sencha is traditional Japanese green tea. The leaves are picked, steamed, rolled, shaped, and dried. It has a grassy aroma and a bitter taste. Sencha Fukamushi is steamed a bit longer than regular Sencha and has a more intense flavor.

Gyokuro is a rare/fine tea grown in the shade rather than full sun. It's brewed in small quantities at lower temperatures and has a sweet, intense taste.

Genmaicha is Sencha mixed with roasted rice. It has a light, mellow flavor.

Houjicha is a roasted tea with a smoky flavor.

To make tea, I use a traditional Japanese ceramic teapot (a Kyusu) made of Banko ware. I preheat the teapot and brew the tea with dechlorinated hot water. I keep all my teas in airtight cherry bark tea caddies. Here are the proportions of water/tea, and the temperature I use:

Sencha

Tea leaves: 3 teaspoons (7 - 8g)

Water temperature: 176F (80C)

Amount of water: 200ml (7.04fl oz)

Brewing time: 1 minute

Sencha Fukamushi

Tea leaves: 3 teaspoons (7 - 8g)

Water temperature: 176F (80C)

Amount of water: 200ml (7.04fl oz)

Brewing time: 40 - 45 seconds

Gyokuro

Tea leaves: 3 teaspoons (7 - 8g)

Water temperature: 104 F

Amount of water: 100ml (3.5 fl oz)

Brewing time: 2 minutes

Genmaicha

Tea leaves: 3 teaspoons (7-8g)

Water temperature: 176F (80C)

Amount of water: 200ml (7.04fl oz)

Brewing time: 1 minute

Houjicha

Tea leaves: 3 teaspoons (7-8g)

Water temperature: boiling water

Amount of water: 200ml (7.04fl oz)

Brewing time: 15 - 30 seconds

Nagahiro Yasumori made us an extraordinary pot of Gyokuro by brewing it for several minutes at a very low temperature. The flavor was sweet, intense and almost wine-like in its persistent finish. We bought Kame-no-yowai Gyokuro and I'm sure I'll be buying from him frequently.

During my travels I consumed many great cups of tea and learned how to choose my tea wisely (buy from Horaido or Tsuen), care for my tea (use only fresh tea, kept in airtight containers), and brew the perfect cup (as above). If you visit me in any of my offices, you can be sure I'll greet you with a fresh pot of Sencha.

Snow Leopard is Up and Running

Over the weekend, I purchased a family 5 pack of Mac OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard and upgraded my wife's Macbook Pro, my daughter's iMac and my Macbook Air.

Although I did the simple automated upgrade for my wife and daughter, I used the opportunity to return my Macbook Air to its original factory settings and start from scratch - call it a technology spa day.

Over the past year, I've added many applications to my Macbook Air including HP printer drivers (which are often unstable and buggy), Office 2008 with Entourage (Entourage is always unstable and buggy), and several versions of Citrix/Webex/Gotomeeting etc.

The end result of adding many applications, many upgrades and many configuration changes during my Mac learning curve resulted in less than optimal performance. Thus, I backed up my important files to a USB drive then booted the Snow Leopard DVD, selected Utilities, Disk Utility and formatted/erased my hard drive by overwriting its contents with zeros.

Snow Leopard installed itself in about 30 minutes without a single error. I installed iWork '09 as my productivity suite and Aperture 2 to serve as my photo manager. I restored my files, added the HP network printer (without having to install HP software), and configured Mail, iCal and Addressbook to work with Exchange 2007.

The end result - a completely stable, fast computer with a very trim OS/application footprint - about 10 gigs, leaving 70 gigs free on my hard drive.

I've been running Snow Leopard/iWork/Aperture for 3 days now. I'm using Safari 4.0.3 as my browser and Preview as my document/PDF viewer - all 100% Apple software. The experience thus far has been a joy - very fast boot times, very fast application launch times, perfect hiberation/wake and seamless Exchange 2007 integration.

One of the great features in Snow Leopard is Screen Recording with automated You Tube uploads - a great feature for creating educational materials. As a test, I created a demonstration video of Google Health/Beth Israel Deaconess Personal Health Record integration.

I highly recommend Snow Leopard. My family gave the home CIO a big thumbs up.

Running Away to Join the Circus

Last night I joined the circus and danced center stage in Cirque du Soleil's Alegria with the White Singer.

My family tells me that the contrast of my all black clothing with her all white clothing looked elegant and refined, making up for my complete lack of ballroom dancing skills.

The story about how this happened is an amazing chain of events, illustrating the powerful forces of fate that shape our lives.

Here's the tale:

In September of 1980, I arrived at Stanford and moved into Granada, a dorm that's part of the Lagunita complex. I met a woman named Kathy Greene who lived in Eucalypto, another Lagunita dorm. She was Korean American, an artist, and could do everything I could not. She had a perfect right brain to complement my clumsy left brain. We've never been apart since and just celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary. She introduced me to Asian culture, food, and traditions. In my youth, I traveled by car throughout the continental United States, but I had no experience with the Orient.

Our daughter, Lara (named after the Dr. Zhivago character, not Lara Croft/Tomb Raider) was born in 1993 and she has always travelled with us around the world. She's been to Japan six times in her 16 years of life and has developed a love of people, the country, and the language.

This summer, she spent 8 weeks in Japan doing intensive language study. While she was there, one of her fellow students was Sam Allen, a high school senior who happens to live in Brookline, Massachusetts. They had great experiences together and shared anime, Akihabara, and Asakusa. After a month they decided to become a couple, going out together.

Which brings us to Cirque du Soleil. Early in the summer, we bought tickets to the August 30 performance of Alegria in Boston.

Lara and Sam are back from Japan and Lara invited him to the show. However, we lacked a ticket. We went online and found a seat available, but it was a single in the front row.

Being a devoted Dad, I volunteered to sit apart in the single seat. When we arrived at the theater, I was amazed to discover the single seat was 3 feet from the stage, next to the main stage entrance, on a corner, making it the most likely seat to host a "volunteer" from the audience.

Having attended Cirque du Soleil performances a few times in the past, I knew the audience members could be picked to join clown routines, magic acts, and various skits.

I waited in the hot seat for my moment of fame. After intermission, all the major characters assembled on the stage and the White Singer walked throughout the audience. She approached my chair and reached for my hand.

She led me to the center of the stage and we danced, surrounded by all the other characters. No photography was allowed, so alas, there is no evidence other than the several thousand people (including my family and Sam) who watched. At the end of our dance, the main character, Fleur, tapped me on the shoulder and motioned me back to my seat. I bowed and waved, then headed off stage.

The moral of the story? There is a direct causal thread between meeting my wife in 1980, developing a love of Japan which I passed on to my daughter, enabling her to meet Sam, resulting in my being placed in the one seat of thousands that would be selected for the on stage appearance.

My professional life is very similar. Becoming a CIO was the culmination of hundreds of events over 20 years that resulted in my being in the right place at the right time with the right colleagues and the right experience.

I believe that life is a wonderful combination of genetics and nurturing, planning and random chance, and a spiritual thread that leads us in and out of various eddies of opportunity throughout our lives.

Last night I joined the circus. I do not know what tomorrow will bring, but I'm looking forward to it!

Quality, Meaningful Use, and Interoperability

A reporter recently asked me to describe the quality measures and standards that are part of meaningful use. Floyd Eisenberg, Senior Vice President, Health Information Technology at the National Quality Forum, summarized the work nicely:

"The National Quality Forum (NQF), with support from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) convened the Health Information Technology Expert Panel (HITEP) to develop a data model for quality measurement. The HITEP developed a framework, the quality data set (QDS), to manage the terms (value set), the context of use (quality data type) and the data flow (data source, recorder, setting, health record field) for each element used to build a quality measure. A quality data element combines the value set with the quality data type to directly express the definition of every term used to calculate a measure. HITEP finalized the quality data types July 31, 2009. During the August 25-27 face-to-face meeting HITSP reviewed all of these data types, defining the standard interoperable segment and taxonomy to represent each. While some areas require harmonization and others represent gaps, a significant portion of data types were sufficiently defined to allow their use in quality measures in the near term. These findings are reflected in updates to the IS 06 Quality Interoperability Specification to be presented to the HITSP Panel September 15. These data type interoperability determinations will also be used in the retooling process for those quality measures recommended for meaningful use by the HIT Standards Committee based on areas for measurement identified by the HIT Policy Committee. Completion of the retooling effort before the end of 2009 will allow time for EHR vendors and local EHR implementations to address these retooled measures in 2010 for reporting in 2011.

HITSP has also established constructs to address two prior gaps in the IS 06 interoperability specifications. There had previously been no standard for reporting of quality measures to a requesting entity. HITSP has now completed public comment for C105 (Patient Level Quality Document Using HL7 Quality Reporting Document Architecture (QRDA)) and revisions will be presented to the HITSP Panel on September 15. This component allows standardization of reporting structure. The HIT Standards Committee elected to allow more testing of QRDA before requiring its use will reconsider it for 2013 based on testing. HITSP also published a provisional component, C106 (Measure Criteria Document) that addresses a currently balloted HL7 to standardize the structure of all quality measures. The HL7 ballot, eMeasure, addresses the HITEP quality data types mentioned above.

In addition to these efforts, under contract from ONC, HITSP has retooled 16 inpatient measures for electronic use, each has also addressed the HITEP data types. A technical note with the details of these retooled measures will be available for public comment in September. Two of these measures are in the list of meaningful use measures suggested by the HIT Policy and Standards Committees. "

Thanks Floyd!

A HITSP Town Hall

Today at 2pm, I'll be running a HITSP Town Hall public webinar about ARRA, health information exchange, and standards.

Here are a few resources I'll reference:

My Slides

The approved HIT Standards Committee Clinical Quality Standards Matrix

The approved HIT Standards Committee Clinical Operations Standards Matrix

The approved HIT Standards Committee Security and Privacy Matrix

The approved HIT Policy Committee Meaningful Use Matrix

The approved HIT Policy Committee HIE priorities which are:

2011
Lab results delivery
ePrescribing
Claims and eligibility checking
Quality & immunization reporting

2013
Registry reporting and reporting to public health
Electronic ordering
Health summaries for continuity of care
Receive public health alerts
Home monitoring
Populate PHRs

2015
Access comprehensive data from all available sources
Experience of care reporting
Medical device interoperability

All of these materials have been transmitted from the HIT Policy and Standards Committees to ONC where they are being used to write the regulations which will be issued by HHS on December 31, 2009.