Feature Articles

Legal Issues in Open Source Today from Annual Symposium

On January 23 this year, the Santa Clara High Tech Law Journal had their annual symposium on open source in the legal field at Santa Clara University. Prominent practitioners in the open source community spoke on topics ranging from licensing and compliance to healthcare and entertainment law. For anyone newly learning about open source licensing, this is a great look at some of the issues today... Read More »

Introducing OpenClinica Participate

I’d like to introduce our upcoming product, OpenClinica Participate, a tool tightly integrated with OpenClinica for engaging patients and collecting data directly from study participants. If you took OpenClinica's recent survey, you got a glimpse of what your forms for patient-reported outcomes could look like in OpenClinica Participate. Driven by a powerful forms engine based on proven open-source technology, the participant forms are simple, dynamic, mobile-focused, and platform-independent. But it’s about a lot more than mobile-friendly forms.

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3D Printers Become Viable Tools In Healthcare

3D printing has received a lot of attention for its applications in the health sector, from helping Bespoke prosthetics change patients' lives to enabling huge strides in stem cell research. And with desktop 3D printers becoming increasingly affordable and reliable—and open source software such as Cura being versatile, easy to use, and free to update—barriers to further 3D printing innovation are quickly disappearing. What was once only available to well-funded practitioners has now become genuinely accessible to every patient, nurse, doctor, surgeon, hospital, and teaching facility...

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Extremadura, Canary Islands Pilot eHealth Card

The governments of Extremadura and the Canary Islands, two of Spain’s autonomous regions, are testing the interoperability of an eHealth card, to be used for prescriptions and in pharmacies in both regions. The administrations of the two regions presented the eHealth card on 16 February, at an eHealth conference in Madrid. During the pilot-phase, Extremadura will dispense prescriptions to a fictional patient, to test if the medicines can be picked up at pharmacies on the Canary Islands. Read More »

11 Ways To Get Involved With Humanitarian FOSS

Lending a digital hand for humanitarian projects is just a click away. Whether you have five minutes or a few hours, you can make a difference with a variety of Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software (HFOSS) projects. The level of skills required vary from web search, verification, mapping, translation, training, and open source software development. Along the journey of changing the world, you can meet like minds and hone your skills. The key is to ask yourself: What do I want to do? How can I get started? How can I find the right project and community?

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Wall Street Journal: "ObamaCare’s Electronic-Records Debacle"

This Wall Street Journal (WSJ) Op-Ed could have been entitled "President Sucker: Led Down the Garden Path by The Healthcare IT Industry." It is entitled "ObamaCare’s Electronic-Records Debacle", as below.  First, though: On Feb. 18, 2009 the WSJ published the following Letter to the Editor authored by me...I have a different view on who is deceiving whom. In fact, it is the government that has been deceived by the HIT industry and its pundits. Stated directly, the administration is deluded about the true difficulty of making large-scale health IT work. The beneficiaries will largely be the IT industry and IT management consultants.

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Closed Records, EHR Decertification and the DoD

In anticipation of House of Cards Season 4, and with all due respect to the show’s creators, I think real life is giving us a perfect plotline that includes politicians, corporate interests, their lobbyists and a big fat government contract. Maybe Francis and Claire have me seeing conspiracies everywhere, but it seems a chain of recent health IT events have created intrigue in what is historically our staid, conservative industry. Follow the timeline with me and decide for yourself if I’m hearing black helicopters.

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OPENPediatrics Open Sources Medical Diagrams and Animations

OPENPediatrics (OP), a free online education and best practice sharing community for pediatric clinicians worldwide, has launched a new library of openly licensed medical animations and illustrations, making them available for non-commercial educational use. The new multimedia library draws on the extensive collection of animations and illustrations developed for didactic and procedural videos created for the OP clinician community site.

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Ushahidi Working to Open "Social-Good" Data

Most software produces data, and many data owners are currently working out how to release their data publicly as part of a wider “data for good” movement that includes groups like the Engine Room, NGOs, private individuals, communities, and companies. Ushahidi users are no exception to this, and we’ve been working hard to provide ways to access and release their datasets and on the issues and considerations needed to do that... Read More »

VA Requests Community Input on VistA 4 Product Architecture

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has asked OSEHRA to obtain comments from the open source community on the newly-updated VistA 4 Product Architecture Document (attached).  All members of the community are encouraged to review and comment on this critical document.

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The Future of Devices for Health is not Wearables

Dozens of new self-tracking wearable devices appear every month. They target health and quality of life applications, from sleep to physical activity. And, they are packaged as smart watches or as standalone pieces, launched under the umbrella of startups and industry leaders alike. Currently, there is no shortage of thoughtfully designed wearable devices promising to improve our health and quality of life, but amidst the ongoing technological deluge—do you think the future will be wearable or anti-wearable?...

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The Experience of Interoperability Thus Far

As I travel across the country and listen to CIOs struggling with mandates from Meaningful Use to ICD-10 to the HIPAA Omnibus rule to the Affordable Care Act, I'm always looking for ways to reduce the burden on IT leaders. All have expressed frustration with the health information exchange (HIE) policies and technologies for care coordination. quality measurement, and patient engagement. As a country, what can we do to reduce this anxiety? Read More »

ONC Must End Opposition to Behavioral Health EHRs

Because our policy makers in Washington, DC, wield words as weapons, the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for Health IT has categorized behavioral health providers as “post-acute care,” thus excluding them from MU funding that has driven EHR adoption elsewhere. While the ONC has created one reality by lobbing definitions, behavioral health advocates are promoting THE reality of mental illness as acute and costly; as debilitating as any disease or condition, if not more so; and as a major co-morbidity factor exacerbating acute illnesses and driving up health care costs. Read More »

Top 10 FOSS Legal Developments of 2014

The year 2014 continued the trend of the increasing importance of legal issues for the FOSS community. Continuing the tradition of looking back over the top ten legal developments in FOSS, my selection of the top ten issues for 2014 is as follows...

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Working to Get the United Nations to Adopt Open Source Development Tools

Working at the bleeding edge of global development is about to get more lively. Akvo.org co-founder Mark Charmer argues the world needs the open source movement to assert itself right now.... Read More »