Cultivated Compendium

The Concord Monitor reports that the "federal stimulus bill passed in 2008 contained billions of dollars in funding for medical providers to adopt electronic health records." The carrot: the financial incentives to adopt electronic health records. The stick: if healthcare providers do not achieve "meaningful use" in their electronic records, they face deductions from their Medicare payments.

However, some independent physician practices that do not have a lot of Medicare payments find "the incentives haven’t been big enough to justify the costs of meeting the high standards," The Monitor further reports.

Doctors find some benefits from electronic records but they also find the records to be "cumbersome, time-consuming and annoying" than old-fashioned paper charting, The Monitor further reports.

The value of electronic health records will likely improve if healthcare providers become more agile in using them and if the systems also are redesigned and updated to reflect the deficits many users find in them.

I wrote a profile for The Stamford Advocate of Courtney Nelthropp, who left a successful career at IBM to start his own business as the owner of a printing services franchise. Most importantly, Nelthropp has changed the landscape of Stamford, Connecticut's public housing by chairing Charter Oak Communities' board for the last dozen years and leading the authority in taking down its old high-rise housing in favor of state-of-the-art town homes.

A story excerpt: 

Courtney Nelthropp spent 20 years in the corporate world. He says had very little opportunity to do anything to give back to the community as an IBM company man.

But that changed when Nelthropp went into business for himself as the owner of a Sir Speedy printing and marketing services franchise in downtown Stamford.

An old IBM colleague and Stamford resident, Bob Harris, suggested that Nelthropp seek a mayoral appointment to join the board of commissioners for Stamford's public housing authority. GovernorDannel P. Malloy, then mayor of Stamford, appointed Nelthropp to the board. Nelthropp now has been the chair of Charter Oak Communities' board for the last dozen years and has led the authority in taking down its old high-rise housing in favor of state-of-the-art town homes.

Nelthropp's contributions to Stamford have inspired recognition this fall. He was the first person honored by the Truglia Thumbelina Fund for his volunteer work. And he was one of the honorees at the Stamford NAACP's annual Freedom Fund Dinner.

One of Nelthropp's biggest accomplishments, Charter Oak Communities' chief executive officer Vincent J. Tufo said, was his leadership in getting the housing authority to take on the role of developing and revitalizing all its new housing stock itself. The first project the housing authority undertook after Nelthropp joined the board was done with an outside developer. But every project since then Charter Oak has developed itself.

Nelthropp chose this strategy because he was convinced that it was impossible to rely only on financing from the federal and state government and still provide very high-quality housing.

"Very early on we started thinking about how we could be more entrepreneurial and produce more revenue and still do it within the charter of a quasi-public organization," Nelthropp said.

The result was new developments with residents who pay full market price living along side residents in affordable-rate units, Tufo said.

Only five to 10 percent of housing authorities handle all the development of new housing or revitalized housing internally, Tufo said.

Changing Charter Oak from a traditional housing authority managing affordable housing to developing its own housing stock required "a long-range vision and a steady hand" from Nelthropp, Tufo said.

Other housing authorities would have wavered, Tufo said.

The end of `projects'

Christel Truglia, a former state representative and founder of the Truglia Thumbelina Fund that helps Stamford's impoverished children, said that whenever she visited the old Southfield Village housing project -- one of the city's dilapidated public housing projects -- she "just felt sad that anyone's children would have to live in that kind of atmosphere."

That housing project was torn down in 1997 after the shooting of a little girl attending a birthday party there, prompting the city and the residents association to agree on what would replace it.

Now Truglia is so proud of Charter Oak's developments that she takes out-of-town guests to see them.

"You really need true leadership and vision and a passion and that's exactly what Courtney has had," Truglia said.

A federal judge rejected a same-sex couple's lawsuit seeking to establish the right to marry in Louisiana on the grounds that the court does not have jurisdiction over the case, The Washington Blade reports. Only Louisiana Attorney General James Caldwell was named as a defendant and his office has not denied plaintiffs the recognition of their marriage, The Blade reports. The plaintiffs intend to refile their case.

"Suzanne Goldberg, a lesbian and co-director of Columbia University’s Center for Gender & Sexuality Law, said the plaintiffs would be in a stronger position in the case if they sought recognition and then alleged in their amended complaint that the recognition was denied," The Blade further reports.

The Washington Post has an editorial arguing that some progress has finally been made on closing Guantanamo. The Post writes that the Senate voted this month "to preserve language in the pending National Defense Authorization Act that would ease restrictions on repatriating Guantanamo detainees and allow their transfer to the United States for trial, detention or medical treatment." However, The Post reports that the defense bill is in danger of not passing for the first time in 51 years.

Overall, "a legal regime will be needed for the arrest, interrogation and long-term detention of foreign terrorist suspects who cannot be handled by the domestic U.S. justice system" after Guantanamo is closed, The Post concludes.

Fair Trials International argues that international police work is improperly influenced by political motives, The Washington Post reports. Fair Trials International said that Interpol is used by members, including Russia, Belarus, Turkey, Iran and Venezuela, to pursue political ends. FTI cites a case in which a Russian environmental activist was arrested in Spain even though he was accepted as a political refugee in Finland; Pyotr Silaev spent six months in a Spanish jail until a Spanish court ruled that his arrest was politically motivated, The Washington Post further reports.

The New York Times' Charlie Savage reports that Senate Republicans can still block some  of President Obama's judicial nominees despite the elimination of filibusters for most such nominations. Obama's nominees to federal appellate courts can still be blocked because "it left unchanged the Senate’s 'blue slip' custom, which allows senators to block nominees to judgeships associated with their states," Savage reports. The rule change will really only benefit appellate nominees for the influential U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler told Savage.        

The Washington Post reports on the harsh sentences that 21 Islamist women and girls were given for protesting a court decision "that came a day after police beat and terrorized prominent female activists in a crackdown on secular demonstrators under a tough new anti-protest law." They were protesting to demand the reinstatement of President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, who was ousted by the Egyptian military. The Post further reports Egypt has enacted a law barring public political gatherings of 10 people or more without police consent.

The U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari in a case this week on how inherited individual retirement accounts should be treated in bankruptcies, Reuters reports. The Seventh Circuit ruled that creditors could access an IRA inherited by the owners of a failed pizza shop because the IRA ceased to be retirement funds when inherited. However, the Fifth and Eighth Circuits have held that IRAs don't cease to be retirement funds when they are transferred, Reuters also reports.

New York University law professor Burt Neuborne thinks it's a good thing that the U.S. Senate has decided to go nuclear on the filibuster, The Wall Street Journal reports. It's not because Neuborne wants to see more of President Obama's judicial nominees on the bench. It's because he thinks having "the modern filibuster morphed into a de facto super-majority voting rule" made the votes cast by senators mathematically unequal in violation of "'Article V, and the one‐Senator one‐vote principle of the Seventeenth Amendment,"' The Journal further reports.

The Honolulu Star Advertiser reports on a state legislator who argues a 1998 state constitutional amendment did not only allow legislators to decide whether to authorize or ban same-sex marriage--but altogether prevented elected representatives to expand marriage to same-sex couples. "State Rep. Bob McDermott has filed a new motion in state Circuit Court looking to invalidate the state's new law legalizing such marriages," the newspaper reported. However, the judge held that the 1998 amendment "did not restrict the Legislature's separate authority -- under Article III, Section 1 of the state Constitution -- to enact laws that define marriage," the newspaper further reported.