Steven Forage, a metro-DC-based software salesman spends 5 hours per day behind the wheel. Like so many others, he’s closing deals on his cell, drinking coffee and checking email, in addition to driving.

One thing he worries about no more, however, is getting nailed by a speed camera.

That’s because Forage tricked-out his Caddy with PhantomAlert, a system that links all known locations of the cameras with his GPS and warns him when he’s approaching one.

“Fuzz alert!” shouts an electronic voice from his dashboard. “Ding, ding. Ding, ding. Fuzz alert!”

PhantomAlert has subscribers all over the country, including more than 2,000 in metro-DC alone according to it’s owner, Joseph Scott.

Scott’s employees access the locations of speed cameras from government and police Web sites, and receive tips from subscribers as well.

Scott believes cops should dig his device, since after all the cameras are there to slow-down drivers and not generate cash from tickets. “Not only should they support us,” Scott told the Washington Post, “but when they mail out citations, on the back they should say, ‘Get PhantomAlert.’ “

Some officials disagree. “If drivers think they only get a ticket when their little device goes off, that could lead them into a false sense of security, which could cause them to speed,” Lisa Sutter, a District employee who runs camera enforcement operations in DC told the Post.

But in fact others see merit in Scott’s device. Corinne Geller, a spokeswoman for the Virginia State Police, thinks PhantomAlert could create a perception that there is more surveillance going on at any time than is actually the case. “If it’s a deterrent, that’s a good thing,” Geller said.

A version of this post originally appeared in the Practice Fusion Blog.

The US Department of Veterans Affairs will allow clinical investigators to use de-identified patient information contained in its EMR as a means to support clinical research initiatives on subjects ranging from MRSA to posttraumatic stress disorder, heart failure and cancer.

Matthew Samore, an epidemiologist from the VA Salt Lake City will be involved with the project. He opined that the so-called Consortium for Healthcare Informatics Research “will not only inform new guidelines but help resolve some conflicts in current guidelines.”

Only VA-associated investigators will get the keys to the highway.

Samore said he hoped the project would show how data-mining techniques could be used in other EMR systems, but worried that since most EMR systems are so poorly interoperable, it would be quite some time before they could match the VA’s capabilities in this area.

Pam Matthews, a senior director of health care information systems at HIMSS concurred with this prediction. “The VA is a closed system. When you apply (what they are doing) to the commercially available products, their data model, their software model may be different,” she said to AMedNews.

Web-based EMRs eliminate these problems, however, by securely storing patient records in a central repository that is continually available to all health professionals involved with the care of a particular patient. 

The VA begins its initiative under a dark cloud caused by the heist of a laptop containing data on 26 million vets, a bit of a privacy issue that is avoided with Web-based solutions since the data are housed in secure, off-site locations.