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...Every web surfer, in the course of his or her browsing, has been forced to stop and perform this weird little task: look at a picture of some wavy, ghostly, distorted letters and type them into a box. Sometimes you flub it and have to retype the letters, but otherwise you don't think about it much. That string of letters has a name; it's called a CAPTCHA. And it's a test. By correctly transcribing it, you have proved to the computer that you are a human being...
...CAPTCHA caught on, and now it's all over the Web. Luis von Ahn, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon who was part of the original CAPTCHA team, estimates that people fill out close to 200 million CAPTCHAS a day. But you should pause when you see one--it's one of the rare moments when the invisible war being waged between spammers and programmers becomes visible to you, the prey. "Of course," says Von Ahn, "this has been a little bit of an arms race with spammers, because now there's a huge incentive for spammers...
...technology at every level of patient care. The medical charts of nearly 5 million patients have been digitized, more than 3 million electronic prescriptions have been filled, and more than 120,000 patients regularly access their full health records online. And along the way, the team of doctors, nurses, Web developers and software engineers has improved safety, cut costs and given patients more control over their care. The transition away from paper, says chief information officer Dr. C. Martin Harris, "has allowed us to use technology to transform the practice of medicine...
With the rest of the world living and working on e-mail and the Web, an electronic health record (EHR) might seem like an obvious step. But it is, in fact, a revolution. American physicians have been notoriously slow to adopt digital record-keeping--only 14% of U.S. medical practices keep electronic records, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. When Harris began Cleveland Clinic's technology push in 1999, the hospital's 1,800 M.D.s were equally resistant to change, he says. "We had to prove that this effort was going to make their job easier...
Harris, a practicing general internist and a Wharton M.B.A., has used his clinical experience to foster innovation that directly benefits patients. The hospital's 3 million--plus patients can schedule appointments online, for example, and fill out paperwork on the Web before they get to the waiting room. Cleveland Clinic's specialists supply second opinions to patients worldwide who enter symptoms into an Internet form and then send test results to doctors via FedEx. Cardiologists silently, invisibly monitor patients' pacemakers and other implanted devices remotely to make sure they're functioning correctly. Soon robotic carts will transport supplies and sanitary...