data silos

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Accelerating Identification and Tracking of Pandemic Disease Outbreaks

A national biosurveillance program requires the collaboration of multiple federal, state and local agencies to provide a comprehensive view of a health-related event. Bitscopic's Praedico™ biosurveillance platform breaks down the data barriers among organizations with an extensible architecture that can incorporate any kind of data. The platform also delivers high performance by incorporating the latest technologies such as big data, NoSQL databases, and machine learning. Read More »

From Data Silos to Black Holes...the Story of America's Healthcare System?

The scary thing about black holes is that their gravity inexorably drags in everything within its reach. Unless you are very far away or have sufficient escape velocity, you will get pulled in, and, once you are sucked in, you are never getting out. We call it our "healthcare" system, but usually what we mean is medical care. It treats illnesses, it puts us under the care of medical professionals, it turns us into patients. A doctor's visit begats prescriptions, and perhaps some testing. Testing leads to procedures. Procedures lead to hospital stays. Hospital stays lead to....you get the idea. What we might once have thought of as "health" -- or never thought about at all -- becomes "health care," a.k.a. medical care. And once you transform from a person, whose health belongs to you, to a patient, your health is never quite your own again. You've been sucked into the medical care black hole.

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Hurricanes Harvey and Irma Draw the Line - Time for the US to Embrace Open Source Emergency and Disaster Response

For nearly 20 years now the global open source community and applications have been a keystone to disaster relief efforts around the world. The enormous number of disaster relief applications and knowledge that has been developed through all these years, should, and needs to be leveraged in the current crisis. For that reason, Open Health News is starting a series of articles to highlight some of the most important solutions. A substantial portion the open source applications for emergency and disaster response that exist are actually already on the news website in the form of articles and resource pages.

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Moving healthcare into a new state of openness

John D. Halamka, Jonathan Bush | Modern Healthcare | February 13, 2015

The future of healthcare belongs to social, mobile, analytics and the cloud. Although most industries have embraced these technologies, the healthcare IT industry has been slow to adopt them. The country has taken good first steps to digitize the paper-based medical industry, but now it is time to build on what we've done, enhancing usability, better engaging patients/families, and preparing for the future of reimbursement, which is based on value, not more healthcare.

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Should ONC Decertify EHRs That Block Interoperability?

Jennifer Bresnick | EHR Intelligence | June 23, 2014

Interoperability is at the top of the list of industry-wide health IT goals, yet commercial EHR offerings with expensive add-on modules, proprietary data standards, and black-box systems that perpetuate data silos continue to be used to meet important goals like meaningful use attestation.

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Using the Latest Advances in Data Science to Fight Infectious Diseases

One of the most dramatic shifts in recent years that is empowering epidemiologists to be more effective at their jobs is occurring due to improvements in data technologies. In the past, the old "relational" data model dictated that data had to be highly structured, and as a result treated in distinct silos. This made it difficult, if not impossible, to analyze data from multiple sources to find correlations. Epidemiologists would spend many minutes or even hours on each query they ran to get results back, which is unacceptable when you need to test dozens of hypotheses to try to understand and contain a fast-moving outbreak. (Imagine how you would feel if each one of your Google searches took 45 minutes to return!) By contrast, using newer technologies, the same queries on the same hardware can run in seconds. Read More »

Where did the issue of health data exchange disappear to?

There has been extensive talk about the scandals at the VA and remedies for them, including the political and financial ramifications of partial privatization. Republicans have suggested it for some time, but for the solution to be picked up by socialist Independent Senator Bernie Sanders clinches the matter. What no one has pointed out yet, however–and what makes this development relevant to the Datapalooza–is that such a reform will make the free flow of patient information between providers more crucial than ever. Read More »