Most public health information technology projects rely on strong collaboration to be successful, especially across vendor-client boundaries. Here are some successful strategies: Clear vision. A concise and clear vision focused on public health outcomes is embraced and articulated by all participants in the project; Strong support and leadership from senior management. Without strong support from senior management, projects are rarely given the priority to enable success. This prioritization includes both agency and vendor commitment.Feature Articles
Code Alliance Connects Nonprofits with Open Source Tech Volunteers
By Deep Datta | July 1, 2016
Code Alliance is a Benetech initiative that connects technology professionals to volunteer opportunities with open source software projects for social good. On the first day of the CHI4GOOD conference, we brought over 40 projects to the San Jose Convention Center to participate in a hack4good Day of Service event. More than 100 developers, UX designers, and researchers came together to help our nonprofit cohort with their technological needs. The nonprofits benefitted from expert technical development work, and the volunteers were gracious, skilled, and excited to leverage their professional skills to give back...
Successful Public Health IT Project Collaboration
By Noam H. Arzt, Ph.D. | June 30, 2016
Most public health information technology projects rely on strong collaboration to be successful, especially across vendor-client boundaries. Here are some successful strategies: Clear vision. A concise and clear vision focused on public health outcomes is embraced and articulated by all participants in the project; Strong support and leadership from senior management. Without strong support from senior management, projects are rarely given the priority to enable success. This prioritization includes both agency and vendor commitment.Prepare to Be Hacked: Information Security for Small Organizations
By D Ruth Bavousett | July 3, 2016
Information security is challenging, and can be breathtakingly expensive in money and staff energy. Smaller organizations may not have the money or staffing expertise to do the job right, even when the need is the greatest. At OSCON 2016, Kelsey Gilmore-Innis of Sexual Health Innovations (SHI) gave a really interesting talk on how her small nonprofit has done some creative thinking about security, and how that influences the deployment and operation of their application. Callisto is an online reporting system designed to provide a more empowering, transparent, and confidential reporting system for college sexual assault survivors...
Avoiding Bad Practices in Open Source Project Management
By Julien Danjou | July 2, 2016
During OpenStack Summit Austin, I had the chance to talk to some people about my experience on running open source projects. It turns out that after hanging out in communities and contributing to many projects for years, I may be able to provide some hindsight and an external eye to many of those who are new to it. There are plenty of resources explaining how to run an open source project out there. Today, I would like to take a different angle and emphasize what you should not socially do in your projects. This list comes from various open source projects I encountered these past years. I'm going to go through some of the bad practices I have spotted, in a random order, illustrated by some concrete examples...
A First Look at Google's Science Journal App
By Marcus D. Hanwell | June 29, 2016
Google recently announced the release of its Science Journal app, a tool intended to "inspire future makers and scientists." All you need to get started is an Android phone—it will make use of the sensors on your phone and offers a digital science notebook to record your findings. The app is free and slated to be released open source later this summer. Google has already released microcontroller firmware for Arduino-based sensors on GitHub. You can start experimenting and making notebook entries once you have downloaded the app, and the interface is friendly and approachable. There are a number of experiments I intend to do with my 7-year-old son, and the Arduino kits look like something he would love too...
An EHR Implementation of The Checklist Manifesto
By John D. Halamka, MD | June 29, 2016
Boston Physician Atul Gawande wrote The Checklist Manifesto in 2009 stressing that medicine should adopt “pilot’s checklists” to ensure that operating room teams are “ready for takeoff” before a scapel is ever opened. BIDMC implemented The Checklist Manifesto ideas in software in 2010. Here’s the “Time Out” done among all OR team members before a case beings - it includes a list of staff participating in the timeout, the agreed upon procedure, the verification of consent, appropriately marked operative site, patient identity verification, and best practices for prophylaxis...
Guess What: Docs Don't Like EHRs
By Kim Bellard | June 29, 2016
It's kind of "dog-bites-man" type news, but there is even more evidence that physicians not only don't think EHRs are helping them but actually see them as contributing to burnout. Researchers at the Mayo Clinic found that use of EHRs (or computerized physician order entries -- CPOEs) was associated with lower satisfaction with time spent on clerical tasks, with nearly half of physicians saying the amount of time spent on clerical tasks was unreasonable. No wonder the AMA CEO recently complained that physicians were turning into the "most expensive data entry force on the face of the planet."
Consumer Access to Health Care Data: Still a Challenge
By Noam H. Arzt, Ph.D. | June 22, 2016
Consumers continue to be frustrated with lack of access to their healthcare data, even as wearables and other consumer-targeted devices and services continue to sprout. Recently, ONC launched a Consumer Health Data Aggregator Challenge to spur the development of new applications and partnerships to provide aggregated health data to patients. While the financial “prize” for this effort is meager, recognition by ONC might be the real brass ring. This challenge focuses on the use of FHIR exclusively to support interoperability between systems and present data to consumers. I suspect that applicants will have some trouble meeting the requirements of the challenge effectively, and this is indicative of the broader challenge in supporting this type of data access.
Preparing for 2017: Four Important Reports
By Noam H. Arzt, Ph.D. | December 27, 2016
With so much transition ahead of us at the Federal, state, and local levels in 2017, it is important to begin to plan for what the Health IT landscapes will look like for the coming year (and beyond). Several key reports have come out – mostly from government sources – which are worth serious consideration for any Health IT planner...There are no easy answers here, and it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the information presented in these reports. But they cannot be ignored and can help form the basis of a solid organizational or governmental strategy.
7 Myths About Open Sourcing Your Company's Software - The Real Story
By Amanda Folson | July 4, 2016
Many companies benefit from open source, and countless companies have opted to open source components of their infrastructure (or even their bread and butter) in an effort to give back. However, there are a lot of misconceptions about what happens when you open up your business' code and workflows to the public, and as companies delve into how to apply open principles within their organization, it's easy to get lost in the weeds. Here are some common misconceptions about what happens when you open source your code...
Top 7 Open Source Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools
By Robin Muilwijk | June 27, 2016
In this article, I review some of the top open source business intelligence (BI) and reporting tools. In economies where the role of big data and open data are ever-increasing, where do we turn in order to have our data analysed and presented in a precise and readable format? This list covers tools which help to solve this problem. Two years ago I wrote about the top three. In this article, I will expand that list with a few more tools that were suggested by our readers. Note that this list is not exhaustive, and it is a mix of both business intelligence and reporting tools...
DAISY: A Linux-Compatible Text Format for the Visually Impaired
By Kendall Clark | June 24, 2016
If you're blind or visually impaired like I am, you usually require various levels of hardware or software to do things that people who can see take for granted. One among these is specialized formats for reading print books: Braille (if you know how to read it) or specialized text formats such as DAISY. DAISY stands for Digital Accessible Information System. It's an open standard used almost exclusively by the blind to read textbooks, periodicals, newspapers, fiction, you name it. It was founded in the mid '90s by The DAISY Consortium, a group of organizations dedicated to producing a set of standards that would allow text to be marked up in a way that would make it easy to read, skip around in, annotate, and otherwise manipulate text in much the same way a sighted user would...
Lessons Learned for Building an Open Company with Transparent Collaboration
By Jos Poortvliet | July 6, 2016
In the first part of this two-part series, Building a business on a solid open source model, I described how an open source business needs to provide a solid ground for all stakeholders, users, contributors, employees, customers, and of course investors. Foundations, licenses, and trademarks can be helpful in building an open ecosystem. Open source communities need supporting organizations to work transparently, otherwise there are barriers to contribution. Code might be public, but code dumps (like Google tends to do with Android) don't always facilitate collaboration. To encourage collaboration, you must go one step further and be proactive...
Millennials Are (Not) So Different
By Kim Bellard | June 23, 2016
Millennials get a bad rap. If we believe conventional wisdom about them, they like to live with their parents, at least until they can move into their urban-center condo. They hate to drive. They're maddening in the workplace, demanding lots of frills and constant praise yet returning little loyalty. They're hyperconnected through their various digital devices. And, when they deign to think about health care, which isn't often, they want all digital, all the time. There's some truth to the conventional wisdom, but not as much as you'd think. A new study from Credit Karma flatly asserts that "everything you thought you knew about Millennials may be wrong," finding that they still have aspirations to much of the same "American Dream" as previous generations...
Clinical Trial Design Management: Best Practices for Small Budget Studies
By Sophie McCallum | August 22, 2016
ClinCapture hosted the 12th BioTalks in Park City, UT, on the topic of Clinical Trial Design & Management: Best Practices for Small Budget Studies. This was the first event in the series hosted in the biotech hub of Salt Lake City. The panel discussion gathered experts from CROs and sponsor companies to conduct quality clinical trials in a cost effective manner. Industry experts shared their knowledge on running high quality, small budget clinical trials covering clinical operations to clinical data management and biostatistics...
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