The Greater Seattle Area IT Experts

Remote Support: Is It Better?
One of the biggest expenses that comes from looking for IT help is onboarding new technicians, and hiring good ones isn’t cheap. This is why so many small businesses just forego technology maintenance and support in favor of saving that extra money for expenses that can directly influence their profits. Unfortunately, this method goes against every best practice in technology maintenance out there. If you forget about it for too long, you risk security and operational deficiencies that could cripple your business in the long run.

More than this, however, is the lack of IT talent in certain regions. Sometimes a company is located in a place where there aren’t individuals with the necessary qualifications to meet your specific needs. When you hire a third-party organization to manage your IT, you aren’t necessarily limited by your location, and it’s all thanks to remote IT support. While you might not have an in-house IT department at the ready at all times, you do have a remote team working day and night to keep your IT in proper working order.

Help Desk Support
Normally, small businesses would have to pay a local technician to come and fix their broken or malfunctioning IT, as they cannot afford to hire internal technicians to do the work for them. This kind of support isn’t ideal, as you’re seeking out support following a breakdown rather than preventing it outright through preventative maintenance. While managed IT can do a lot to help your business through preventative maintenance, sometimes your employees will need a little extra help to get them through the day.

Help Desk support gives your employees a single point of contact for all of their technology support needs. If they are having trouble logging in to their account, the help desk is their go-to contact. If they are experiencing technology troubles of any kind, again, the help desk can get them back in action. It prevents technology troubles from derailing your employees’ productivity in a way that no other solution can.

If your company would like to take advantage of a quality help desk support team, look no further than Digital Seattle. To get started, reach out to us at (206) 709-9556.

In 2009, U.S. lawmakers mandated the use of information technology as a part of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH Act). The Act, a part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, provides greatly-needed subsidy for healthcare organizations that work to implement IT, specifically electronic health record (EHR) technology, into their service delivery.

For the longest time, many medical administrators considered the use of IT erroneous. That explains why many medical practices just started using IT-fueled systems around a decade ago despite being readily available for the past 25 years. It’s also why it isn’t surprising that as the world around healthcare is inundated with intriguing innovations, the healthcare industry is biding its time. After all, the consequences are literally life and death, and leaving that up to any degree of automation should be handled with pause.

While many of these technologies could be viewed as a fit for the healthcare industry, one has jumped to the forefront and may just be the next big thing in care delivery: machine learning.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the concept, machine learning is the most basic form of artificial intelligence. The concept is that digital systems, especially ones that are so involved like the EHR, create a lot of data. So much data that it would take human analysts years to compile and analyze it. With this breadth of data being produced, machine learning algorithms can take the data and analyze it. Some algorithms in use today are already performing on the level of an average human physician.

This is largely because the information being sorted is all very specific and gives these rudimentary A.I. systems the chance to provide superior care in some cases. For example, a person goes to their doctor for an ailment. Many general practitioners, while surely good care providers, don’t have the capabilities to be in the know about every medical study, every care option, and all prescription medications that could more effectively treat his/her patient. With machine learning algorithms, these systems can quickly scan new research to provide doctors an on-demand resource that would keep them in the know about important and modern findings by research scientists.

Properly diagnosing and finding treatments for patient ailments is the doctor’s job, and a resource that makes them more effective at doing their job benefits them, their practice, and the patients that depend on his/her expertise. So while the doctor is a very human job, providing them dynamic new resources in which to do their job more effectively is exciting for everyone.

Google and IBM have recognized this and are working on solutions that could change the face of healthcare sooner rather than later. IBM, using the Watson A.I., has partnered with world-class oncology center Sloan-Kettering to develop Watson for Oncology. The system will focus on amalgamating the newest and best information for the treatment of cancer, while incorporating individual patient records, family history, and other information to come up with detailed plans to aggressively treat a patient’s cancer.

It’s only a matter of time before this technology will be used in other parts of the medical field. This technology is state-of-the-art, so it’s not out of the realm of possibility that it will eventually be used to help treat patients with all types of ailments. Are you excited for the future of healthcare using modern artificial intelligence systems? Leave your thoughts in the comments and check back to our blog for more great technology information.

Reading into Read-Only
Read-only is an attribute that is stored alongside the file that keeps users from doing more than just reading the contents. This attribute blocks users from changing or deleting the files, which might lead you to believe that “read-only” means that the file is extremely important.

Other files that aren’t necessarily important can also be assigned the read-only attribute. A folder could take advantage of read-only, preventing its contents from being altered unless the attribute is removed from the folder. External storage media can also use this attribute to keep others from messing around with your flash drives and SD cards. Even the CD-ROM, those relics of the past, took advantage of read-only technology (the acronym actually stands for Compact Disk Read-Only Memory), preventing users from overwriting the data stored on the disk.

Why Are Documents Marked This Way?
There are several reasons why a file or folder might be marked as read-only, but the primary one you’ll see is that these files or folders aren’t meant to be seen in the first place. These files are meant to be protected from being changed, as they are often critical files for a computer’s hardware and software. Certain files need to be in specific locations, as well as contain specific information. If the file is altered, the computer simply won’t work properly.

In essence, this functionality is programmed in so that users can’t accidentally disable their computers by deleting the wrong files. Besides, these files are more or less hidden from view anyway, meaning that users wouldn’t be able to delete them in the first place.

You can mark a file as read-only yourself as well, which you can do by accessing the properties. This could be helpful if your business wants to make a certain file available for all to see but without actually giving permissions to edit the file (like your employee handbook). What are some other uses you can think of for a read-only file? Let us know in the comments.