Feature Articles
Is the EHR Market Saturated?
“Hey, the EHR market is saturated, we don’t really think there is any play left there,” this comment came from a reputable venture capitalist (VC) in the healthcare industry. And I sat there wondering what it is that he is talking about. Every single day I am taking calls from doctors who want an EHR that suits them, and they are willing to pay for it.
Two Independent Sources of Medical and Mental Health Research Shut Down in Canada
The Canadian Women’s Health Network (CWHN), for two decades a major source of critical, independent research and information on women’s health and mental health, has had to stop all its activities and close its doors indefinitely after the Canadian government took away its funding...The announcement came only weeks after the independent Canadian open-access journal Open Medicine also was forced to shut down. Both blamed declining support for scientific research that does not serve corporate interests.
Ken Banks and FrontlineSMS: How 'Reluctant Innovators' Offer Hope to the World
Ken Banks might, in some respects, be described as a reluctant innovator. In 2005, he created FrontlineSMS, a simple piece of software that enables a cheap laptop to use a mobile phone to send, receive and collate group text messages, effectively creating a communication network. It’s an idea that has helped many NGOs connect with isolated populations.
Turning Mobile Devices Into Emergency Tools
The strongest recorded storm to ever hit land slammed into the Philippines at 195 miles per hour just over a year ago, on 8 November 2013...One of the problems in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan was the failure of mobile phone networks. Many base stations were damaged or ran out of power, rendering the tools — which could otherwise have enabled separated families or health workers to communicate — powerless. But there are simple and affordable tweaks that handset manufacturers could introduce to make their products more resilient and useful in disasters, according to Wladimir Alonso, a global health researcher at the US National Institutes of Health...
Open Source GIS Challenges Proprietary Vendors: Interview with Paul Ramsey of Boundless
In the world of geospatial technology, closed source solutions have been the norm for decades. But the tides are slowly turning as open source GIS software is gaining increasing prominence. Paul Ramsey, senior strategist at the open source company Boundless, is one of the people trying to change that.
Canceling Elsevier Subscriptions Would Pay for Transition to Open Access
A central question for many people involved in Open Access is whether it can, or will save money. Most analyses suggest that a fully OA environment is cheaper (or at worst similar in cost) for institutions...But for research intensive institutions in particular taking the lead by investing in a transition to Open Access while also covering the costs of existing subscriptions could be expensive. At the same time real concerns are emerging about some traditional publishers successfully driving costs higher. How can countries and institutions invest in creating an Open Access environment that serves their needs and brings costs down without spending too much on the transition?
French, German, Dutch and Italian Hackathons Fuel UK ODF Plugfest
Hackathons in Toulouse (France), Munich (Germany), Woerden (the Netherlands) and Bologna (Italy) involving software developers and public administrations, are providing input for the ODF Plugfest that will take place in London on December 8th and 9th. The first four meetings involve developers working on the Open Document Format ODF and the LibreOffice suite of office productivity tools.
5 Open Source Projects That Are Improving the World
One of the strengths of the open source community has been its ability to bring concentrated effort to bear on big problems. When tragedy strikes, or a pressing need arises, there are groups of people who gather together to attempt to solve the problems as a community. You may not have heard of these five open source projects, but they are attacking some of the world's biggest problems and making a true impact in people's lives... Read More »
Halamka's Notes on the November HIT Standards Committee Meeting
The November HIT Standards Committee focused on “asynchronous bilateral cutover” - the compatibility of different CCDA payloads, healthcare IT that supports long term services and support, an update on the Standards & Interoperability projects, a discussion of data provenance efforts, and the HITSC workgroup organization. Read More »
Thoughts on Microsoft Open Sourcing the .NET Platform
Last Wednesday Microsoft announced they are transitioning the server side of their .NET platform to open source. As stated on their website: "Microsoft is providing the full .NET server stack in open source, including ASP.NET, the .NET compiler, the .NET Core Runtime, Framework and Libraries, enabling developers to build with .NET across Windows, Mac or Linux." Read More »
Can India Break the Pattern and Do Open Source Right?
The government of India has recently announced a big push into open source as a part of its Digital Initiative. For a country of more than a billion people and thousands of government organizations, I see this as a long overdue move that will hopefully boost the faltering free and open source software communities in India... Read More »
German eHealth Working Group Reasserts Focus on Interoperability
Interoperability of eHealth solutions is getting renewed attention from Germany’s health care organizations. Trouble exchanging information between medical systems is hindering eHealth reaching its full potential, says the Federal Ministry of Health. The ministry made interoperability a key topic at the eHealth working group meeting, part of an IT Summit in Hamburg in October. Read More »
Jono Bacon Interview-From Open Source Community Management to the XPRIZE
I met up with Jono Bacon at LinuxCon Europe on October 16 this year where he gave a keynote and presented a full day workshop on community management...Read more on community management in open source and at-large in this interview with Jono Bacon.
How Open Source Is Changing the Pace of Software Development
...as new computing architectures and approaches rapidly evolve for cloud computing, for big data, for the Internet of Things (IoT), it's also becoming evident that the open source development model is extremely powerful because of the manner in which it allows innovations from multiple sources to be recombined and remixed in powerful ways. Consider the following examples...
The State of Health IT in Europe
...In the UK, I heard a great deal about misalignment between IT departments and clinicians. IT departments are reluctant to embrace social, mobile, analytics, and cloud, instead insisting on centralized command and control of Windows desktop devices, often running Citrix/Virtual Desktop. Clinicians want mobile devices, universal access to applications anytime from anywhere on any device, and big data visualizations... Read More »