Recent laws in New Jersey and California represent a disturbing trend that will negatively impact a practice’s ability to collect monies from patients, as well as expose them to significant penalties if the practice does not follow the mandatory guidelines to a T. Please be aware that a similar law may be coming to your state. The time to act is before the law is passed.
The Ever-Expanding Web
Alexa Internet, one of the leading navigation services on the World Wide Web, recently conducted a two-year survey on the size, growth and usage of the Web. Among the more interesting statistics the survey found:1
- The World Wide Web doubles in size every eight months.
- Approximately 1.5 million web pages are created and posted on line daily. At this rate, Alexa estimates that the Web will contain more than one billion pages by the year 2000.
- There are approximately 20 million Web content areas (including top-level pages of sites, individual home pages and large subsections of corporate websites).
- One percent of all Web pages disappear after being posted on line for one week.
Since 1996, Alexa has taken on the arduous task of archiving the contents of the entire World Wide Web. The company has archived more than 12 terabytes (tera=one trillion or 1012) of data, equivalent to more than half of all the information stored in the Library of Congress. For more information on Alexa's ongoing internet project, visit the company's website at www.alexa.com.
Reference
1. Measuring the pulse of the web. The Seybold Report on Internet Publishing November 1998 (www.seyboldreport.com).