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Despite advancements in the development of the artificial pancreas, barriers in the form of proprietary data and communication protocols of diabetes devices have made the integration of these components challenging. The Artificial Pancreas Standards and Technical Platform Project is an initiative funded by the JDRF Canadian Clinical Trial Network with the goal of developing device communication standards for the interoperability of diabetes devices. Stakeholders from academia, industry, regulatory agencies, and medical and patient communities have been engaged in advancing this effort. In this article, we describe this initiative along with the process involved in working with the standards organizations and stakeholders that are key to ensuring effective standards are developed and adopted. Discussion from a special session of the 12th Annual Diabetes Technology Meeting is also provided., (© 2013 Diabetes Technology Society.)

Security is a key issue in healthcare information systems, since most aspects of security become of considerable or even critical importance when handling healthcare information. In addition, the intense need for information exchange has revealed interoperability of systems and applications as another key issue. Standardization can play an important role towards both these issues. In this paper, relevant standardization activities are briefly presented, and existing and emerging healthcare information security standards are identified and critically analysed. The analysis is based on a framework which has been developed for this reason. Therefore, the identification of gaps and inconsistencies in current standardization, the description of the conflicts of standards with legislation, and the analysis of implications of these standards to user organizations, are the main results of this paper.

The advent of computer-based technology has led to a consideration of change in research methods that exploit the advantages of computer-mediated communications. In survey research, electronic mail (e-mail) has anecdotally shown particular promise as a data collection tool. This article compares traditional postal and nontraditional e-mail surveys within the context of a larger listserv evaluation project in terms of overall return rate, distribution of survey returns over time, response to initial and follow-up mailings, representativeness of respondent groups, thoroughness of survey completion, and the likelihood of respondents to include additional written comments. In summary, whereas postal surveys were shown to be superior to e-mail surveys with regard to response rate, all things being equal, the decision of which to use may be situation-specific, dependent on issues such as survey cost, desire for convenience and timeliness in data collection, and need for higher response rates, among others.

The quality of dietary information on the World Wide Web (WWW) is determined solely by the organizations and individuals who publish it. To evaluate the accuracy of nutrition resources on the Internet, a survey of WWW sites that provided dietary recommendations were reviewed and compared to the "Canadian Guidelines for Healthy Eating and Nutrition Recommendations for Canadians." Web sites were accessed using "diet," "food," and "nutrition" as keywords in searches. Of the 365 documents accessed, 167 contained dietary recommendations. Forty-five percent (n = 76) of these provided information that was not consistent with one or more of the Canadian eating standards and included information in the forms of advertisements recommending supplements, herbal remedies, weight-loss products, and promotion of specific diets. The total number of web sites that provided information that was inconsistent with Canadian guidelines per each keyword search was 25 (29.8%) for "diet," 11 (13.1%) for "food," and 48 (57.1%) for "nutrition." Sources of differing information included individual web pages (n = 31, 40.8%), private vendors (n = 44, 57.9%), and health organizations (n = 1, 1.3%). Because Internet resources continue to increase at an incredible pace, health professionals need to take an active role in this technology and develop strategies to address inconsistent dietary information provided through this avenue.