Latest News

The New 'Open Imaging' Lung Cancer Research Site Goes Live

Give A Scan is the world's first people-powered, publicly available archive of images and clinical data on lung cancer patients and those at risk for the disease. All of the images and data have been donated by people who have been diagnosed and undergone treatment or screened in order to encourage more researchers to focus on lung cancer and to accelerate progress in the early detection, diagnosis and treatment of this leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide. The new site is powered by Midas, Kitware’s open-source data management system. Read More »

Penn Research Study on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)

A new study, published last week by University of Pennsylvania researchers in the journal Nature, shows that students who have taken Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) on Coursera are highly educated and career-oriented. In addition to being well-educated, the students who enrolled also tend to be young, male and employed. About 44% of all students surveyed said they had made the decision to sign up in order to gain specific skills to do their job better. Read More »

"European Directory of Health Apps" re-launched as MyHealthApps.net

The first edition of the web site, the "European Directory of Health Apps", was launched back in October, 2012, at the European Health Forum 2012. The Directory contained information on hundreds of smartphone health apps capable of helping patients self manage their medical conditions. The site was recently re-launched as an online international website called MyHealthApps.net Read More »

Open Health News (OHNews) 2013 Readers Choice - Top Picks

The numbers on the 'Open Source' movement and solutions continue to climb and go through the roof - whether its about usage of 'open source' operating systems, browsers, content management systems, market share, job opportunities, new companies, open data, mobile apps, open hardware products, and more. Just do your own web search for the numbers. This trend also holds true for the healthcare industry and 'open' health IT systems. Check out the most viewed 'Open Health' projects, systems, publications, and resources by Open Health News (OHNews) Readers in 2013. Read More »

canSAR and other Information Portals, Data, and Tools used in the fight against Cancer

canSAR is a new cancer database launched earlier this week by the U.K. Institute of Cancer Research. It contains 1.7 billion experimental results and utilizes artificial (AI) intelligence technology to discover the cancer treatments of the future. It is an integrated knowledge-base that brings together multidisciplinary data across biology, chemistry, pharmacology, structural biology, cellular networks and clinical annotations. The goal is to further improve cancer research and drug discovery by providing free access to the knowledgebase and associated resources by researchers from across different disciplines. There are a growing number of available cancer databases and information portals. Read More »

The Growing OpenEMR Business Community

The OpenEMR community has been very active over this past year.  This 'open source' electronic medical record (EMR) system continues to be enhanced by developers around the globe, the number of healthcare providers that have installed and begun using the system (over 15,000 sites world-wide) continues to grow, and a fairly robust business community of companies offering services and support is now in place. Read More »

U.S. Peace Corps Adopts OpenEMR for use in 77 Countries World-wide

The U.S. Peace Corps recently awarded a five-year contract to EnSoftek to implement OpenEMR in its field offices around the world. OpenEMR is one of the most widely implemented electronic medical record (EMR) systems in the world with more than 15,000 installs around the globe and translations into 19 languages. The total solution will also includes Dynamics CRM, SharePoint, BizTalk, SQL Server, and other software applications and will be known collectively as PCMEDICS. Read More »

EMR Direct Now Integrated with OpenEMR

is on a mission to modernize medical work flow and improve patient care by simplifying healthcare interoperability. The company is committed to developing technologies that protect patient privacy, improve the quality and coordination of care, increase productivity, and reduce costs. Recently, EMR Direct donated its code to OpenEMR which integrated their solution into OpenEMR version 4.1.2  They have also  announced their participation in the Tennessee Health eShare program, facilitating access to Direct messaging for healthcare providers across that state. Read More »

Bloomberg Health Care Summit on "Connecting Healthcare Policy with Next Century Innovation"

Earlier this week, the Bloomberg Government Health Care Summit appropriately named "Mind the Gap: Connecting Healthcare Policy with Next Century Innovation", was held in Washington, D.C. It was convened to discuss perspectives of healthcare innovators, medical professionals, and government officials who are helping to redesign U.S. healthcare during a time of innovation. About 150 healthcare industry representatives were in attendance. One of our Open Health News (OHN) correspondents was there. Read More »

Intel's 'open source' Galileo computer is now on sale

Intel’s Galileo, an 'open source' computer hardware solution for the do-it-yourself (DIY) crowd, is scheduled to ship at the end of this month.  It is about the size of a credit card and uses Intel’s extremely low-power Quark processor. It is priced at around $65 per unit.Intel has decided to tap into the 'maker' community to help figure out how to best use its new line of Quark chips. It will be a great tool for  prototyping projects from building robotic devices, wearable systems, health sensors, micro-PCs, automating home appliances and much more. Read More »