Feature Articles

One Decade on, gvSIG Offers Powerful Open Source GIS Tools

Ten years after gvSIG’s start by the government of Valencia (Spain), the open source geographic information system (GIS) offers a broad range of GIS solutions. The software tools are used in sectors such as town planning, public transport, health care and environment management. “Software has become of strategic importance. All the more reason that we need to be free to use this technology however we want”, says Álvaro Anguix, general manager of the gvSIG association. “Freedom is central to gvSIG, right from the start.”

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On the Lack of Good Medical Evidence for the New $100,000 Hepatitis C Drug Treatments

As we wrote, most recently last week, the hepatitis C screening and treatment bandwagon keeps rolling along.  There is constant public argument whether about the prices of treatment regimens, which approach $100,000 per patient in the US...However, starting in March, 2014, we have posted about the lack of good evidence from clinical research suggesting these drugs are in fact so wondrous...

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Is Health Insurance Itself the Problem with the System?

I worked in the health insurance industry for a long time.  I helped introduce consumer-driven/high deductible plans to help foster cost-awareness.  I bought into the protection-against-big-expenses meme.  I personally have never not had health insurance.  So, by most standards, I should be biased in its favor.  But I'm beginning to wonder if health insurance itself is the problem, or at least a big part of the problem. I've written before about some of the new entrants into health insurance; more power to them, and the more the merrier.  What I continue to be disappointed by is that we're not really seeing fundamentally new approaches to what health insurance is.

John Halamka Looks Back at 2014

2014 was quite a year. Thinking back to December 2013, I cannot believe that so much has happened. Let’s take a look at the major HIT events that shaped 2014 and what they portend for 2015 Read More »

VistA EHR Community and OSEHRA Experiences Extraordinary Growth in 2014

We have recorded a robust year of growth during 2014 and have laid a solid foundation for market expansion in 2015. OSEHRA corporate membership doubled during 2014. Corporate Members include large, medium and small corporations, nonprofits, academic institutions and international organizations that are leaders in health information technology...our primary open source electronic health record product, VistA, was rated by a MedScape survey as the most preferred EHR by physician users again in 2014. Further, our corporate members collaborate on policy, marketing, education and software initiatives. We expect the business opportunities for corporate members to grow considerably next year as the marketplace for open source health IT continues to expand. Read More »

UK Open Document Plugfest Showcases Innovations on Document Collaboration

The ODF Plugfest that took place in London on December 8th and 9th showcased innovative ways to work with electronic documents. The most striking idea is the borrowing of techniques commonly used in software development, promising many news ways to create and collaborate on documents.

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Open Data Portals Should Be API [First]

Not long ago, I was speaking at the National Association of Government Web Professionals. At the same conference, Mark Headd was speaking. We were speaking on different open data topics. My discussion was about the difference between open government and open data and his talk was about API [First]. Luckily they had us scheduled at different times, so I had the opportunity to see him speak on the API [First] strategy for website development using open data. His subtitle was "Open Data as a Foundation for Better Websites"...

Spain's Cenatic to Focus on Open Source Reuse and Certification

In 2015, Cenatic, the open source software resource centre of the Spanish government, will campaign to get enterprises to implement, share and re-use open source solutions. The centre wants to help companies select the right free software solutions. It will also promote sharing and re-use, and reinforce the network of free software service providers. Read More »

Gates Foundation’s Strict Open Access Policy may have Domino Effect

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a major supporter of health and development research, is to introduce an open access policy next month for the studies it funds that goes further than most other research funders. The policy “will enable other researchers to access the latest evidence and draw on it to advance their own research” to help tackle malnutrition, infectious diseases, and child and maternal mortality, writes Trevor Mundel, the foundation’s president of global health, on the organization's website.

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Jim Zemlin: 2014-The Open Source Tipping Point

For the last ten years open source has expanded into more and more segments of the computing industry. But as we review 2014, a new story emerges: software development has fundamentally shifted toward an open source model. Especially for the infrastructure software used for scale-out computing, open source is the de facto choice; in fact, it’s virtually impossible to find examples of scale-out infrastructure that is not open source. Read More »

The Argonaut Project Charter

Yesterday, a group of private sector stakeholders including athenahealth, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Cerner, Epic, Intermountain Health, Mayo Clinic, McKesson, MEDITECH, Partners Healthcare System, SMART at Boston Children’s Hospital Informatics Program, and The Advisory Board Company met with HL7 and FHIR leadership to accelerate query/response interoperability under the auspices of ANSI-certified HL7 standards development organization processes.

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Second annual Healthcare IT Marketing Conference (HITMC)

Prolific blogger and health IT media magnate, John Lynn and I are teaming up again for the second year to produce and deliver a marketing conference focused on helping digital health, health IT, and medical device  innovators. We’re going to be providing actionable advice and specific techniques you can use to cut through the noise when trying to market healthcare and medical tech products to physicians, hospitals, health systems, ACOs, patients, and similar customers. Read More »

Halamka's Notes on the December HIT Standards Committee Meeting

The December HIT Standards Committee included a review of the draft Federal Health IT Strategic Plan, recommendations about identity management from the Transport and Security Workgroup, an overview of the Prescription Drug Monitoring Program, and a discussion of upcoming task force work as we all prepare for the publication of the ONC interoperability roadmap and the Meaningful Use Stage 3 Notice of Proposed Rulemaking.

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European Commission to Update its Open Source Policy

The European Commission wants to make it easier for its software developers to submit patches and add new functionalities to open source projects. Contributing to open source communities will be made central to the EC’s new open source policy, expects Pierre Damas, Head of Sector at the Directorate General for IT (DIGIT). “We use a lot of open source components that we adapt and integrate, and it is time that we contribute back.”

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True Interoperability: Public API’s Provide the Open Platform Health IT Requires

Do we finally have the spark? Interoperability is the current health IT buzzword because it’s the essential ingredient in creating a system that benefits patients, doctors and hospitals. Almost everyone in healthcare is pressing for it and is frustrated, though probably not surprised, that Meaningful Use did not get us there. Read More »