Roger A. Maduro

See the following -

OSEHRA 2012 Open Source EHR Summit Opens to Capacity Audience - Live Blog

The 1st Annual Open Source EHR Summit & Workshop opened to a capacity audience of nearly 400 participants today at the Gaylord National Conference center at National Harbor in Maryland today This is the conference held by Open Source Electronic Health Records Agent (OSEHRA) organization, the custodial agent of the code for the U.S Department of Veteran's Affairs' (VA) open source VistA EHR. The conference has a packed agenda with more that 30 speakers. We will be blogging live from the conference with a few bits and pieces and will follow up with a more extensive set of articles later on.

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AMA Call To Action On Health Records Should Tell Doctors To Heal Themselves

The American Medical Association (AMA) is one of the most powerful and well-known institutions in this country. Opposition from the AMA helped to bury hopes for universal healthcare back in the Harry Truman presidency, and now the AMA maintains a stranglehold on Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes and therefore on any innovation in reporting medical services. So when the AMA puts out a press release titled AMA Calls for Design Overhaul of Electronic Health Records to Improve Usability, describing the serious usability problems of EHRs, and announcing the release of their “solution” white paper titled Improving Care: Priorities to Improve Electronic Health Record Usability, headlines get made and policy-makers start to stir. Can a snap of the fingers by the AMA bring the EHR industry in line? Read More »

Application Deadline to Host OpenMRS 2018 Annual Implementers Meet Coming Up

The deadline to apply to host the 2018 International OpenMRS Implementers conference is coming up on April 30 [updated]. Nations that want to host the meeting need to answer the detailed questionnaire by that time. For those Open Health News readers who have missed one of the greatest health IT stories of the decade, the Government of Uganda hosted the 2016 OpenMRS meeting in their capital city of Kampala. The conference was such an extraordinary success that a large number of other national governments volunteered to host the 2017 Implementer's conference. There are currently close to 40 countries around the world where OpenMRS is being implemented throughout the county in large-scale deployments.

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Blue Button Developers to Meet at the White House Today - Verma and Liddell to Open the Conference

More than 700 app developers and eHealth groups and organizations have registed to meet today at the White House for the first Blue Button 2.0 developer conference. The "The inaugural Blue Button 2.0 Developer Conference will bring together application developers in the technical community to help build and develop new tools to help patients understand their health data,” said Seema Verma, Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) in a statement. 

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CMS To Invest $5+ Billion a Year in Open Source and Cloud-based IT Infrastructure for Medicaid

After more than 40 years of relying on monolithic mainframe platforms to administer its services, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has embraced a new modular, open and agile approach to Medicaid health information technology for the Federal government and States. In many ways, this is the best of what open source advocates and technology innovators could have hoped for when it comes to open source policy from a government agency. According to Andrew Slavitt, Acting Administrator of CMS, the agency will spend more than $5 billion a year to fund this transformation.

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EHR Systems & Cost Transparency in the Healthcare Industry

Cost transparency is obviously a big issue in the healthcare industry. Whether it’s the amazing variation in costs hospitals charge patients for similar medical procedures, or the costs associated with acquiring and implementing an Electronic Health Record (EHR) system for a hospital - Why are all these costs often carefully hidden?  Is there something special about the healthcare industry that says – "Let's not talk about how much things really cost." Apparently, many industry leaders must feel that hospitals boards and patients have no need to know this information. Read More »

FDA Issues RFQ for Large Scale EHR Study - Wants to Leverage VA's Open Source VistA EHR and Database for Research

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) yesterday issued a Request for Quotation (RFQ) for a large-scale electronic health record (EHR) system. This RFQ is very important as the objective is to develop a platform to support a critical project by the FDA's Division of Bioinformatics and Biostatistics (DBB) "to conduct research to assess the safety and surveillance of FDA regulated products through the FDA adverse event reporting systems..." Adverse drug reactions are one of the leading causes of death in the US, thus finding which drugs cause negative interactions is of vital importance. The project requires "use of the large electronic medical record (EMR) system..." The project is going to leverage the largest, most comprehensive, and clinically relevant medical records database, that of the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).

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HHS IDEA Lab Hosting Innovation Day in DC on May 15

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is holding an Innovation Day on Monday, May 15th at the Hubert H. Humphrey Building in Washington, D.C. The day will feature presentations from teams across HHS who are using open source, collaborative, and entrepreneurial methods like design thinking and lean startup to improve how their office or agency delivers on the HHS mission. The day will also feature a panel on deploying creative thinking to improve work in government, and innovative speakers from government and the private sector.

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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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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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Is Cloud Faxing the Solution to the Health IT Usability and Interoperability Crisis?

The Healthcare industry is in profound crisis as the HITECH Act of 2009 led medical facilities across the United States to spend in excess of $3 trillion on the purchase and implementation of expensive electronic health records (EHRs) under the Meaningful Use program. Yet, the most fundamental goals of electronic records Nirvana that were promised have not been achieved. For multiple reasons, EHRs have turned out to lack usability and be non-interoperable. In fact, most monopoly EHR vendors are engaged in what is commonly called “data blocking.” In most cases physicians are unable to obtain medical records for the patients they are seeing and patients have a hard time getting a hold of their own medical records. That means that the medical records are not available at the most important moment, the caregiver/patient encounter, and are not available to the patients themselves and their family members.

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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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Is the Grace Hopper Open Source Day 2015 a Turning Point for Open Health and Humanitarian Open Source Projects?

One of the most significant efforts to help open health and humanitarian open source apps seen to date will be taking place tomorrow in Houston, Texas. The event is the Open Source Day 2015, part of the annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC) a conference designed to bring the research and career interests of women in computing to the forefront. The full-day Code-A-Thon is focused on “coding for humanitarian causes in a dynamic, collaborative environment.” This day will give “women from around the world the chance to learn how to contribute to the open source community, regardless of their skill or experience level.”

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