The enormity and severity of the West African Ebola epidemic that began in 2014 is hard to fathom. The outbreak resulted in more than 11,000 deaths, and hundreds of thousands of people affected by loss. Providing adequate care for any medical condition depends on information, but even more so when dealing with an epidemic that is as severe, dangerous, and fast-moving as Ebola. This is the story of how a dispersed global health IT community banded together to solve the enormous, unique information challenges presented by Ebola.
Without realizing it, I joined the open source movement in 1999 during the midst of the Kosovo refugee crisis. I was part of a team helping route aid supplies to local humanitarian organizations running transit camps across Albania. These are the camps that refugees often arrived at first before being moved to larger, more formal camps. We found that refugees in the transit camps were not being registered or provided with any way of alerting family members of their whereabouts...
With all the changes happening to Meaningful Use, Quality Measurement, and MACRA in 2016, I’ve been asked many questions by many organizations to help them plan for the future. As I’ve said many times, one of the great challenges we have is that the 2015 Edition final rule has an enormous scope extending beyond Meaningful Use with the notion that it can be coupled to every government healthcare IT program. Standards need to be based on requirements and specific use cases with little optionality, so creating a broadly scoped rule before the use cases are known just doesn’t work...
Open Source | Health ITHealthcareGovernment |
The OSEHRA community today submitted a response...
INASP has launched its Open Access Week Competition for 2015...