JDL has been on an amazing growth trajectory the past year, and it's an exciting ride!

We've formed a new team of engineers and solutions architects to support our JDL TechWatch Managed IT Services program.

Those additions have bumped us over the 300-year mark in terms of the collective technical experience that we bring to bear on our IT engagements.

We also leverage over 115 certs across a wide range of specializations.  

Virualization is one of our core competencies, from application and desktop to server and storage virtualization.  We partner with a number of really exceptional virtualization companies to make sure we deliver solutions that are right on target for our clients.

It's not surprising that one of the key pubs in the industry, Virtual Strategy Magazine, featured JDL Technologies' win of several IT awards this month.

Check it out!  Then call us!  We can help you virtualize too!

A lot of times organizations think they know exactly what they want in terms of vendors or solutions.  Maybe a CIO has previous experience with Solution A or Vendor Y.  Or the compamy had a less than awesome experience with Vendor X or Solution B.

You go into the account to consult or do an assessment and run up against this or that predisposition....

You know what we're talking about.

Well, very often an effective way to help the CIO out of his or her comfort zone, or move the organization away from a possible mistake, is to conduct a side-by-side comparison of alternative solutions.  

We call this a bake-off -- after the old Pillsbury Bake-Offs where pies and cakes were compared for flavor, moisture, texture, etc.

Today, when so many organizations are looking into the good, the bad and the ugly of desktop virtualization, we see perfect candidates for a bake-off!

JDL Technologies virtualization practice leader, Shane Kleinert, presented "The Ingredients of a Successful Desktop Virtualization Bake-Off" at the prestigious BriForum in Chicago last August. The video has just been released, and we invite you to view this excellent presentation at the link below.  Enjoy!

http://bit.ly/13pGkJX

Doctors 365 is leading the trend in creating expert, convenient alternatives to the traditional hospital emergency room.  The state-of-the-art, full service walk-in medical center provides urgent care for injuries and illnesses for all ages.

With an intense focus on care-giving, Doctors 365 relies on external IT expertise. They had been experiencing slow response times from an IT contractor for their important technology projects.

When cabling and wiring installation services were needed for a local area network, Doctors 365 contacted the IT experts at JDL Technologies.

Now that the health of their LAN is ensured, they’re considering a Managed IT Services program to enable their continued focus on patients—and meeting the demand for their innovative healthcare services!

How Healthcare Technology is Driving Demand for Tech Knowledge

Each day, medical researchers make breakthroughs in surgical procedures, diagnostic testing, pharmaceutical solutions and more, thanks to the role technology plays in healthcare research. Technology is also transforming healthcare delivery all over the world, and in doing so is driving a rising demand for individuals who are trained and skilled in a variety of healthcare technology and health information technology disciplines.

The New Healthcare Provider

In the dynamic healthcare industry, new technology is continually in development, whether in imaging, treatment, or testing.  The instruments doctors use today are light years ahead of those in use just two or three decades ago. In addition: 

• The operating room has evolved dramatically in every aspect, 

• Even small medical practices now employ electronic tablets to capture and maintain medical data, 

• Physicians routinely use smartphones to enhance their convenience and productivity, and

• Lab and imaging results can now be rendered in real time.

The New Healthcare Consumer

The healthcare consumer naturally wants the best care available, which often translates to the most technologically advanced equipment, software, medication, and healthcare skills. In addition, consumers increasingly expect to schedule lab work and medical appointments, provide medical information, and review their medical histories online.  And why shouldn’t they—when they enjoy similar online conveniences in banking, retail, and travel? 

The Pressures of Change

While the ideal might be to equip hospitals, medical centers and private practices with the most advanced technologies available, the reality is such an approach can be prohibitively expensive.  Instead, the spread of technology is increasingly resulting in hospitals, for example, becoming specialists in select areas of medicine.  At the same time, individual healthcare professionals are being pushed to keep up with changes driven by advances in technology as well as pressures from HIPAA and HITECH Act requirements.

From one end of the spectrum to the other, these factors have already driven new healthcare courses and additional training for healthcare practitioners and medical professionals. Demand continues for technicians familiar with new hardware and software, and for nurses, physicians and surgeons with updated skills. Medical informatics—which includes health records, implementation issues, policy implications, and regulatory principles—is now central to many healthcare positions. Technical certifications in medical billing and coding continue to evolve to reflect new regulatory and technological requirements. The list goes on.

Leveraging the Convergence

The convergence of healthcare technology, information technology, and healthcare training is creating exciting new opportunities for the healthcare professional of today and tomorrow. To learn how you can take advantage of this convergence, read more here.

Your network is your business, and lots of issues can affect it. Some you have no control over, others you do. Hardware failures and outdated backups are two top offenders.

A solid business continuity solution can protect your network from the negative impacts of unexpected problems, and should address these critical areas:

Data Backup Services

• Your data is stored locally for fast backup and restore--and is also securely replicated offsite

• No software agents to install or manage

• Supports Windows, Linux and Mac OSX machines at the same time

• Image backup and bare metal restore of laptops, desktops and servers, including VMs

Business Continuity Services

• In event of outage, get your servers and apps running immediately, with a single click

• Configure the frequency of disk image protection

• Create complete server or desktop images to restore to different hardware

• Test failover without affecting production

Disaster Recovery Services

• Data is protected in event of fire, theft, sabotage, hardware failure or natural disaster

• Data and images are sent offsite to secure cloud automatically

• Data is encrypted in transit to and at rest in SSAE-16 datacenter

• No more recording, shipping and storing tapes

Want to Learn More?

When you’re researching business continuity solutions, be sure to look for these attributes as a foundation.  And if you’d like to learn more, register to attend the largest Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity conference in the world—Spring World 2013, this year in Orlando, March 17 to 20. 

Register at the link below and enter Discount Code 'JDL' for a 10-percent discount applied during your online check-out process. Then, visit us in Booth 706 to learn more about business continuity solutions offered by JDL Technologies.  Or contact us at info@jdltech.com or 888-493-7833.
 
Spring World 2013: http://www.drj.com/events/spring-world-2013/homepage.html

The future of medicine is here!  We've just watched a mind-blowing demonstration of how one smartphone is revolutionizing medicine, thanks to the creative vision of Dr. Eric Topol. 

We promise you haven’t seen anything like his demonstration in this nine-minute video. NBC ran the interview with Dr. Topol on its RockCenter website recently and it’s still available at the link below.

This medical technologist uses his smartphone to test and monitor a variety of human conditions and ailments.  The result, in his words, is a more intimate, productive, and cost-effective healthcare experience for his patients, and for himself.
 
This demonstration will give you a whole new appreciation for what technology—combined with vision and creativity—can really do for healthcare.
 
Watch the clip at: http://nbcnews.to/UGZK7e  You’ll have to sit through a 30-second Cadillac commercial first.

By the way, if you're a healthcare provider or practitioner using smartphones in your practice, ask about our Mobile Data Protection solution for smartphones, including iOS, Android and Windows. Email us at info@jdltech.com.

This year alone, 30 healthcare data breaches (20% of them right here in Florida) have potentially compromised over 320,000 records, according to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse report as of February 21, 2013.  That's one club you don't want to join!

More new technology will be enabling classrooms this year, according to demonstrations earlier this week at the FETC in Orlando. Here are a few that caught our attention:

Instacube – A pint-size Android-based digital photo frame that streams photos fed to Instagram from groups of picture takers.  Teachers can now create assignments where students are sent out on campus to take photos, upload them online for sharing, then come back to the classroom to stream them through Instacube while discussing their experiences.
 
Leap Motion – Another tiny (iPod-sized) motion controller using hi-fi infrared LEDs to let teachers control Windows or Mac computers up to eight feet away.  Rock our world!  This gadget senses hand movements so you don’t need a mouse, touchpad, or keyboard. Imagine teaching on your interactive whiteboard without having to touch a thing!
 
Go!Animate – Think short, animated video tutorials.  Teachers pick a couple of characters, write a brief script, and this online service converts your dialog from text to speech … and shows the characters moving and talking with each other.
 
Wufoo – A free service that lets teachers build forms online, on the fly, with drag-and-drop fields, and send a link to others. It can be embedded into other sources and run from a mobile device.
 
InfuseLearning – Assessments are the new tests, and this tool lets teachers create free, quick assessment quizzes with multiple types of questions, monitor responses as they come in, and know who has and hasn't answered the question yet. It's web-based (as long as IE isn’t involved), analytics are robust, and it also has a language translation feature.
 
SoundCloud is a social platform that allows users to create sounds (music, voice) and share them with others, while ThingLink lets you integrate audio, video, and text into images. Together, they enable teachers to create their own multimedia diagrams -- with hotspots -- to explain to students the functions of human organs, for example, or create brief videos.

Technology continues to transform the classroom, and we expect these and other new tools will be adopted quickly by techy teachers eager to engage their students in a new learning model.

On January 17, 2013, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued extensive modifications to the HIPAA Privacy, Security, Enforcement and Breach Notification Rules. In the words of Leon Rodriguez, director of the HHS Office for Civil Rights, the changes "not only greatly enhance a patient’s privacy rights and protections, but also strengthen the ability of my office to vigorously enforce the HIPAA privacy and security protections, regardless of whether the information is being held by a health plan, a healthcare provider or one of their business associates.” Months earlier he had noted that “We have moved into an area of more assertive enforcement.” 

As a case in point, also in January, HHS settled a violation of electronic health information protected under the HIPAA Security Rule for $50,000.  As fines and penalties go, $50,000 is a modest settlement. However, this action established a new precedent—in that it is the first settlement involving a data breach that affected fewer than 500 individuals.  The unfortunate provider was Hospice of North Idaho, whose breach occurred almost three years ago, in June 2010. 

Precedents can be cause for concern, because they open the door to similar actions. 

According to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, 621 healthcare data breaches have been reported since January 2010. They affected more than 11.5 million records and ranged from computer hacks of large health plans to laptops stolen from single-physician offices.  You can only wonder how many of these breaches will result in financial settlements this year imposed by a more forceful HHS? 

This particular precedent should have the undivided attention of smaller practices, smaller medical centers, and the smaller vendors who supply them with everything from adhesive bandages to zinc oxide (as well as copiers, computers and more). 

Given the new, tougher stance by HHS with respect to HIPAA violations, healthcare providers, insurers, and vendors or suppliers who do business with them will need to ensure their compliance sooner rather than later.  The longer they wait, the greater the risk. 

For a copy of the changes implemented by the Final Rule, contact us at info@jdltech.com.

Palm Beach Diabetes & Endocrine Specialists are forward-thinking healthcare providers who've been using electronic medical records (EMR) for more than two years. They currently have almost 100 devices connected to the network to support EMR, including laptops, copiers and ultrasound machines. They were experiencing some customer support issues with a managed services provider, as well as a technical issue with their fax server, which the MSP was unable to diagnose. 

JDL Technologies was able to present an alternative managed solution to PBDES, and is now providing expert managed services for all devices through our JDL TechWatch Managed IT Services program.

We're also providing end-to-end monitoring of their network and endpoints, and a cloud data storage solution for disaster recovery and backup. PBDES has banished IT pain with forward-thinking IT solutions from JDL Technologies.  

Are you experiencing IT pain of your own?  We can help with the diagnosis and treatment!  Call for an appointment today.

You can probably guess some of the reasons, since we're all guilty of at least one of them, if not all. Let us know if you have others to add to the list!

Slacking Off the Backups

Backing up your data is a lot like software patches—it's one of those tasks you know is crucial and yet often seems to take a backseat to more urgent demands: an executive whose laptop is down, an Internet connection that suddenly broke, or any of a dozen other emergencies du jour.  We all know the drill. Slacking off on backups is one of the most common mistakes made in any disaster recovery program.

Not Monitoring Your Logs

Backups can be a time-consuming, boring process which, in a quasi-manual mode, involves staring at a computer screen while enjoying a symphony of continuous whirring. The tendency is to turn away from the logs to work on something more interesting—and that’s when the Backup Failure monster strikes.

Neglecting to Test Your Backups

If you never actually try to restore a file, app or server, you’ll never really know if the data you need will be there when you need it. It’s very common for SMBs, and even enterprise IT shops, to neglect periodic testing, or to short-cut or dilute testing to save time. The fact is that even if you use an automated program that does most everything for you—testing is still the last mile. 

Is There Anything You Can Do?

Absolutely! If you're suffering these issues because your IT staff is on overload, engage an expert IT service provider to manage this task on your behalf. The JDL TechWatch Managed IT Services team performs backups, software patching, equipment support, user help desk service, and many other services for a wide range of satisfied clients—and can do the same for you. 

You can also attend Spring World 2013, March 17 to 20 in Orlando—the largest business continuity conference and expo in the world.  And if you register at the link below and enter Discount Code “JDL” you'll get a 10-percent discount at check-out. To learn more about backup and disaster recovery solutions from JDL Technologies, visit us in Booth 706.  Or reach out to us today at 888-493-7833, or at info@jdltech.com.

Spring World 2013 Registration Link: https://connect.computility.com/form/index.php?id=4b4c72b8adf4d3e9839a52942e34d6b3