Feature Articles
5 Open Access Journals for Open Source Researchers
While there is no single, quick fix to the problem with the academic journal prices, there is a movement applying the open source way to academic research in an attempt to solve the problem—the open access movement. The goal of open access is to make research freely available upon publication or soon thereafter. Quite often the journal articles are licensed under some form of Creative Commons license or something equally permissive... Read More »
Wikipedia and Facebook for Clinical Documentation
Over the past several years I’ve written about the inadequate state of clinical documentation, which is largely unchanged since the days of Osler, (except for a bit more structure introduced by Larry Weed in the 1970s) and was created for billing/legal purposes not for care coordination...In recent lectures, I’ve called on the country to adopt Wikipedia and Facebook for clinical documentation...
Notes on the October Joint Meeting of the Standards and Policy Committee
Today the future of interoperability was discussed and endorsed by a joint meeting of the Standards and Policy Committees. We began with a preamble clearly stating that the roadmap we’re working on is a process not a finished product. Karen DeSalvo, Jacob Reider, Paul Tang and I offered framing comments for the day... Read More »
Digitizing Maps Of Malaria Hotspots To Save Lives
Mapping collaboration between Europe and Africa has led to the creation of a digitized malaria mapping database that for the first time brings together all available malaria data, helping tackle a disease that kills more than 660,000 people every year.
You know Meaningful Use is Real When...
My 83 year old father-in-law returned from a recent outpatient visit to his primary care provider with two customized handouts - a transition of care summary detailing problems/meds/allergies and an opt-in consent for the exchange of that care summary over the state Healthcare Information Exchange, the MassHIWay... Read More »
Share Your Genetic Story with openSNP
With personal genomics services like 23andMe and deCODEme, we can ship away a cotton swab with some spit on it, and explore our genetic connections even more closely. If we open up and share that genetic data with one another, there's a lot we could discover about human phenotypes: how our height, eye color, and preferences for certain foods connect us and shape our lives and health. Read More »
Visualizing Nanotechnology in 3D with Open Source Software
The new open source project tomviz is helping the 3D visualization of nanotechnology...In this user-friendly, cross-platform application, large volumetric datasets can be rendered, animated, sliced, and analyzed. The platform provides a robust graphical interface where multiple datasets, colormaps, and other visualization settings can be used in combination and these objects can be saved as image or animated video files...
Bad EHR Design and Physician Dissatisfaction: It’s a Matter of Wasted Time.
As reported last year at HIMSS and by many online news and opinion sources since, physician dissatisfaction with EHRs is growing. Indeed, while this blog post doesn’t focus on the broader picture, general physician career dissatisfaction is disconcertingly high. The breakneck push for more and better EHR use as a component of regular medical care is a significant part of that malaise, but it is insufficient as an explanation. Read More »
Across the Border of Interoperability
Some electronic health record vendors are creating challenges for providers by restricting the kinds of Direct messages their customers can receive or making it hard to open their attachments. According to several sources, Epic Systems, the largest EHR company in the U.S., permits its users to receive only Direct messages that have clinical data architecture (CDA) attachments. Read More »
EHR Vendors Put Up Roadblocks to Direct Messaging
Half of U.S. health care providers now have access to Direct secure messaging through 36 health information service providers, according to DirectTrust, a not-for-profit trade association that accredits HISPs. Yet the policies of certain vendors are impeding physicians' and hospitals' ability to exchange Direct messages, HISPs and providers say. Read More »
Mobile Technology Supports Frontline Health Workers in South Africa
Could the Mobenzi telemedicine platform solve challenges facing South Africa’s overstretched healthcare services? Munyaradzi Makoni reports. Read More »
Are Universities Making a Global Shift to Open Source Education?
You've probably heard of MIT's OpenCourseWare program by now; or at least, you will have heard that some universities are offering versions of their courses online for free. But what does that even mean? That anybody with an Internet connection can now get a Bachelor's degree from MIT? The answer is still, more or less, "it's complicated"...
The Apple Platform for Wellness Arrives
Today I’m sitting at the Flint Center in Cupertino where Steve Jobs introduced the first MacIntosh...Now, 30 years later, we’re on the cusp of a different kind of revolution - the consumerization of healthcare middleware that gathers data about your body/activity from multiple sensors and consolidates it into a secure container on your personal smartphone. No cloud storage is used. Read More »
US Hospitals Facing Financial Squeeze-Mass Closures
In the last year, the profitability of U.S. hospitals eroded for the first time since the Great Recession, pushing some closer to and others over the solvency precipice. Revenues are down and costs are up. And these issues appear systemic and entrenched, giving rise to a series of important and relevant questions: How can hospitals adapt? If they do, will they still survive? And, do we as a nation think it’s important to make hospitals accessible, even if they lose money? Read More »
The Next Open Source Frontier Is the Farm
By scaling precision agriculture technologies to smaller sustainable agriculture systems, it should be possible to make many more crops and growing systems economically feasible without compromising environmental health and sustainabilty. This could mean more locally grown, organic food grown profitably in more communities and accessible to more people at lower cost—a huge win for small farmers. And it could mean that change is possible in large-scale farm management practices as well... Read More »