Open Solutions

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HIMSS14: Annual Conference and Exhibit Opening with Open Source Session

The 2014 Annual HIMSS Conference & Exhibition opens today in Orlando, FL. (February 23-27).  The more than 37,000 attendees can notice an important and growing breakthrough for the health IT industry.  For the first time, HIMSS invited OSEHRA to hold a four hour session today beginning at 12:45 pm, Convention Center 203C.  The day’s formal OSEHRA session, among the traditional industry businesses, marks a breakthrough recognition for the emerging benefits and impacts that open source solutions and their many new models of business are generating around the globe. 

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HIMSS17 - Open Health Guide to the HIMSS Conference in Orlando

The HIMSS17 Conference taking place in Orlando, FL, is clearly the turning point for open source in the healthcare information technology industry. Although the label "open source" is barely mentioned in the program, the fact is the majority of the presentations at the conference are either based directly on open source technologies or open health concepts. These include the large number of presentations on interoperability, FHIR, and the open/modular Medicaid IT revolution.

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HIMSS18: Key Exhibitor Booths for Open Solutions, Collaboration, and Interoperability

The annual gargantuan HIMSS conference is back at Las Vegas with over 40,000 participants, over a thousand exhibitors, and more than 600 presentations. As we saw last year in Orlando, more than half of the conference presentations are focused on applications based on open source such as FHIR and Blockchain, and a great emphasis on open solutions for interoperability. With so many presentations and exhibits, it is impossible to provide a full overview. Below are a few of some of the most interesting exhibits of open solutions this year.

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Is The 1.5+ Trillion Dollar HITECH Act a Failure?

Hopefully, the public statements made by President Obama and Vice President Biden will lead to a public debate over the monumental problems that the HITECH Act and proprietary EHR vendors have caused the American people. While the press continues to report the figure of $35 billion as the cost of implementing EHRs, that figure does not tell the entire story. Perhaps the next step is to provide accountability and transparency. That would start with firm numbers regarding the real costs of EHR implementations forced on an unprepared healthcare system by the HITECH Act.

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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 »

Obama and Biden Blast EHR Vendors for Data Blocking

As they are winding their terms in office, President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden dropped a stink bomb on the health IT industry. Speaking at different events on Friday, January 9th, the President and Vice President both criticized proprietary electronic health record (EHR) vendors as the primary obstacle to the success of their administration’s health care strategy. This is the highest level acknowledgment so far of the serious impact that “lock-in” EHR software vendors are having on America’s medical infrastructure and the ability of physicians to provide medical care.

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OSEHRA 2015: CORAnet Solutions CEO to Address Open Source Summit on the Need for Personal Health Information Exchanges

Press Release | CORAnet | July 27, 2015

Cora Alisuag, the CEO of CORAnet Solutions, Inc. will speak on the importance of Mobile Personal Health Information Exchange (PHIE) technologies in providing patients and their caregivers with the critical information needed for their personal care and wellness during the 2015 OSEHRA Open Source Summit taking place in Bethesda, MD July 29 to 31st. Alisuag has been one of the key visionaries who proposed the idea of patients and their family members being able to obtain their personal health records. This concept was embraced by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) under the name of the Blue Button initiative.

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OSEHRA 2015: Zoeticx CEO to Speak during Open Health Panel at the Open Source Summit

Press Release | Zoeticx | July 26, 2015

Thanh Tran, CEO of Zoeticx will speak as a member of the Open Health panel discussion on Wednesday, July 29, at the upcoming OSEHRA Open Source Summit. His participation on the panel will be followed by a more extensive presentation on the topic of “Healthcare Open Access Architecture” to take place during one of the breakout sessions. The OSEHRA Summit, now in its 4th year, has become the leading conference addressing issues of open solutions, open source, collaboration, transparency, and innovation in healthcare information technology. The conference will take place at the Bethesda Marriott North Hotel and Conference Center in Maryland from July 29 to the 31st. Keynote speaker at the conference will be Robert A. McDonald, Secretary of the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).

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OSEHRA 2017: Microsoft, OpenStack, IBM Support VistA in the Cloud

This year’s OSEHRA 2017 Open Source Summit proved to be another major milestone in the transition from locked-in vendor-controlled health information technology to an open solutions approach. One of the major news stories at the summit was the decision by Microsoft to join OSEHRA and collaborate with the Open Health community. Another major presentation was that of Martin Rice, Director of the Division of State System for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and Clyneice Chaney, Principal Systems Engineer. In their presentation (video* and PowerPoint*), Rice and Chaney described how CMS is transitioning to an open/modular approach to State Medicaid IT systems.

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Public Forum discusses Open Development Initiatives in Nepal

Staff | Nepal News | June 12, 2012

The Open Forum discussed three aspects of Open Development; Open Data and Knowledge, Open Operations and Tools and open solutions. Information was also shared on various tools and platforms like the Bank’s Open Data, Open Finances, Mapping for Results and Open Knowledge Repository as well as the Access to Information Policy which includes strengthening public ownership and oversight of Bank-financed operations. Read More »