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How African Hospitals Can Be Helped Through Open Source ERP and EHR Software

The daily management and operation of a hospital requires enormous effort. These days, most hospitals utilize Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software to centralize facility operations including inventory, budgets, invoicing, and employee management.Any hospital administrator will tell you that ERP software is essential to efficiently managing their hospital as the software lowers inventory costs and improves efficiencies and quality.

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A Look at the 2014 OpenClinica Conference Program – An Ecosystem of Innovation

The program for OC14 (the 2014 OpenClinica Global Conference) has been posted–what a line-up!..The theme of the conference is “An Ecosystem of Innovation,” and OC14 will help to communicate a number of the innovations available to you and show you how you can take advantage of them for your own work.

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Halamka: Google Glass - the Details

I’m now able to publicly write about the work that Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center has been doing with stealthy start up, Wearable Intelligence. We’ve been working over the past 4 months on pilots that I believe will improve the  safety, quality  and efficiency of patient care through the integration of wearable technology such as Google Glass in the hospital environment. Read More »

O'Reilly Report Explores Open Solutions to Health IT

Although many programmers and public interest advocates come to the concepts of free software, standards, open data, and transparent institutions out of idealism, modern businesses and governments are being driven to these same solutions out of the practical need to meet high expectations with diminishing resources. The ways in which the health care field has been incrementally adopting these paths are the subject of a new report, written by me and released by O'Reilly Media, called The Information Technology Fix for Health: Barriers and Pathways to the Use of Information Technology for Better Health Care. Read More »

State University of New York at Albany Launches VistA EHR Studies Program

The Albany Campus of the State University of New York (SUNY) has launched a new VistA EHR Studies program—the most comprehensive one of its kind in the United States. The program, which began on March 24, provides students the basis to learn and manage VistA’s fast-growing open source electronic health record (EHR) system. The decision to launch the full program follows a successful pilot course taught at the university this past fall. Read More »

Mercy Health Sets Up Drupal and Alfresco for Their Main Portal

Mercy Health supports several hospitals and clinics across many different geographical locations in the US. Each geographical location has historically had its own dedicated intranet site, and these sites were on different technologies and each had a separate support structure. It was determined that a single unified co-worker portal was needed to support the vision of One Mercy, a patient and provider portal. Read More »

VA CIO Stephen Warren on The State of Open Source at the VA

Stephen Warren, the acting VA CIO was recently interviewed on the topic of giving continuity to an open source initiative started by the previous CIO Roger Baker. The VA CIO oversees more than 8,000 IT professionals and manages an annual budget of $3.3 billion. When interviewed at WJLA in the ABC channel, Mr. Warren shared the following insights. Read More »

The Evolving Role of Open Source Software in Medicine and Health Services

In this article, we highlight the barriers to progress and discuss the dangers of pursuing a standardization framework devoid of empirical testing and iterative development. We give the example of the openEHR Foundation, which was established at University College London (UCL) in London, England, with members in 80 countries....We argue that such an approach is now essential to support good discipline, innovation, and governance at the heart of medicine and health services, in line with the new mandate for health commissioning in the United Kingdom's National Health Service (NHS), which emphasizes patient participation, innovation, transparency, and accountability. Read More »

Policy: NIH Plans to Enhance Reproducibility of Biomedical Research

In a recent editorial in the journal Nature, Francis Collins and Lawrence Tabak from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) discuss the concerns that NIH has with current lack of reproducibility in biomedical research, and propose steps for improving the repoducibility records. In their editorial they point out that we have traditionally considered science to be a self-correcting field. Given the expectation that over time, all reported works would be replicated by peers. Read More »

OpenMRS 2.0 Released-Major Milestone for the Open Source EHR

The OpenMRS community is excited to announce the release of OpenMRS 2.0. [This] release brings a new focus to OpenMRS. Instead of just releasing a generic enterprise-grade platform and leaving it up to each implementation to configure, OpenMRS 2.0 includes more functionality “out of the box” that should help you be more productive, faster...OpenMRS 2.0 features a completely new and modern user interface, built from scratch to be much more user friendly. Our new UI is still in its early days, so you may find some missing features. We will be continually improving the UI with your help and feedback. Read More »