United Kingdom (UK)

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Instead of Medicare for All, How about VA for All?

I wonder -- why would people be calling for a new system that would still have thousands of private hospitals/facilities and millions of healthcare professionals, practicing FFS medicine using countless systems and data structures? In short, why aren't people calling for VA for All? Like Medicare, the VA -- more especially, its healthcare component, the Veterans Health Administration -- is charged with providing healthcare to a designed population, in this case, veterans. Unlike Medicare, though, it does so as an integrated health system (by far the largest in the U.S.), with 170 VA Medical Centers, over a thousand outpatient facilities, and somewhere over 100,000 physicians...it offers some of the finest care in the world. It offers a range of services that Medicare can only dream of, and it does so at, it is believed, lower costs than private coverage or even Medicare. Plus, it also was an innovator in electronic health records and is today in telehealth. What's not to like?

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Internet of Things in Healthcare: What's Next for IoT Technology in the Health Sector

Graysen Christopher | Computer World UK | July 19, 2016

Internet of Things technology holds the potential to revolutionise the healthcare industry, but not before overcoming barriers of security and data ownership.
Internet of Things (IoT) refers to any physical object embedded with technology capable of exchanging data and is pegged to create a more efficient healthcare system in terms of time, energy and cost. One area where the technology could prove transformative is in healthcare – with analysts at MarketResearch.com claiming the sector will be worth $117 million by 2020...

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Investigation Finds Online Pharmacies 'Freely' Prescribing Antibiotics

Staff Writer | The Telegraph | October 2, 2016

An investigation has been launched after online pharmacies were accused of over prescribing antibiotics to undercover reporters. The General Medical Council (GMC) launched the probe based on evidence collected by BBC Radio 5 live, and said that "the overprescribing of antibiotics risks the health of us all". The investigation looked at 17 UK-based pharmacies selling antibiotics online and in one case a reporter posing as a patient was issued with three prescriptions in the space of just 24 hours...

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King's College Accelerates Synthetic Brain 3D Image Creation Using Open Source AI Models and Software Powered by Cambridge-1 Supercomputer

Press Release | King’s College London | July 26, 2021

King College London, along with partner hospitals and university collaborators, unveiled new details today about one of the first projects on Cambridge-1, the United Kingdom's most powerful supercomputer. The Synthetic Brain Project is focused on building deep learning models that can synthesize artificial 3D MRI images of human brains. These models can help scientists understand what a human brain looks like across a variety of ages, genders, and diseases. The AI models were developed by King's and NVIDIA data scientists and engineers as part of The London Medical Imaging & AI Centre for Value Based Healthcare research funded by UK Research and Innovation and a Wellcome Flagship Programme (in collaboration with University College London).

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Latest 'Open Source' & eHealth News from Europe

The news just keeps coming about the widespread acceptance and increasingly rapid deployment and use of 'open source' software solutions by local and national government agencies in Europe. Federal, state, and local government agencies across the U.S. should pay close attention. Read More »

Leeds City Council Chief Digital and Information Officer Dylan Roberts Interview - Developing 'City as a platform'

Thomas Macaulay | CIO | June 26, 2017

Leeds City Council Chief Digital and Information Officer Dylan Roberts is responding to cuts to council budgets by harnessing the power of technology to deliver public services in a new way. "We need to flip our thinking altogether and think about how we affect better outcomes for people," says Roberts, a high-flyer in the 2017 CIO 100...

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Microsoft Eyes Hybrid Open Source Approach to Public Sector Work

Neil Merrett | Government Computing | October 24, 2016

Microsoft is increasingly looking at a hybrid approach that takes advantage of both proprietary enterprise IT and open source technologies for public sector projects to better meet the needs of customers in a multi-platform technology environment. Michael Wignall, national technology officer at Microsoft UK, said that despite being a company long associated with proprietary software and technology changing user needs had facilitated a switch towards providing solutions that offer at least some open source components in the area of Android devices and other platforms...

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NASA Opens Research to Public: Why That’s a Big Deal

Weston Williams | The Christian Science Monitor | August 22, 2016

It has been a good week for science and space enthusiasts. NASA announced last Tuesday that they would be releasing hundreds of peer-reviewed, scholarly articles on NASA-funded research projects online. The articles are entirely free to access for any member of the public. The new service is a big deal for the space agency, which has been gathering scientific information on a huge variety of topics since it was established in 1958...

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Nature Journal on the Need for Clinical-Trial Data Sharing Regulations

Editorial | Nature | May 17, 2016

Governments need to tighten regulation if the sharing of clinical-trial data is to succeed. Clinical science has a compatibility problem. Although there are set protocols to test medicines and to treat patients, no such standards exist to compare clinical-trial data. The problem arises because each research group has a preferred method of collecting and categorizing results. Differences can be as great as omitting or including the gender and ethnicity of patients enrolled, or as mundane as the vocabulary used in medical records...

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New Film ‘SWINE' Exposes the Secret Life of Factory Farms and the Rise in Antibiotic Resistance in Farmed Animals

Staff Writer | Ecologist | July 8, 2016

Today (Friday, 8th July) the charity Viva! will debut its new short thriller/documentary, film SWINE which exposes the dirty secrets of factory farming in UK - including the growing health risks to humans from MRSA Superbugs. This short but alarming film exposes the impending crisis of antibiotic resistance developing in UK factory farms and more broadly highlights the failings of the industrialised meat industry...

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New US Digital Service Looks to Avoid IT Catastrophes

Alex Howard | TechPresident | August 13, 2014

The second initiative went live on Monday, when the White House formally launched a United States Digital Service (USDS) and published an open source Digital Services Playbook and a “TechFAR,” a part of the guide that “highlights the flexibilities in the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) that can help agencies implement ‘plays’ from the Digital Services Playbook.” Read More »

NHS & VHA: Transatlantic Exchange of Ideas and 'Lessons Learned' on Adoption of Health IT Solutions

Britain's 2020Health.Org has just released a major report outlining how the United Kingdom can transform its healthcare system by enhancing its existing collaboration effort with the U.S. Veteran's Health Administration (VHA) and by sharing technology, knowledge and lessons learned on the effective use of Telehealth, PHR, and EHR systems. Entitled "Making connections - A transatlantic exchange to support the adoption of digital health between the US VHA and England’s NHS", the report lays out step by step how Britain's National Health Service (NHS) can create a digital revolution that can significantly enhance its ability to provide health care. Read More »

NHS England to fund NHS VistA projects

John Hoeksma | eHealth Insider (EHI) | July 1, 2013

NHS England will spend some of the £260m Technology Fund on further exploring the creation of an NHS version of the US Veterans Health Association’s open source electronic medical record, VistA.  eHI revealed last week that senior figures from NHS England have visited the US to see VistA in action. Read More »

ONC's 3rd Interoperability Forum: Not Much to Report

On August 21 and 22, 2019 the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) held its third Interoperability Forum in Washington, DC. More than 600 individuals participated in person with many others viewing the general sessions via webinar. The conference began and ended with half-day plenary sessions while providing five tracks with smaller sessions in between. I attended the Health Information Exchange (HIE)/Community-based Information Exchange (CIE) breakout session on both days. The plenaries...focused on the current state and the future state of interoperability.

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Online-only Pharmacies That Don't Require Prescriptions Could Fuel Antibiotic Resistance

Press Release | Imperial College London | February 16, 2017

The researchers from Imperial College London analysed 20 pharmacies that were available for UK citizens to access online. This is one of the few studies to have examined the online availability of antibiotics and to have explored the potential effects on public health. The research is published in Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy. Antibiotics are classed as prescription only medicines in the UK, meaning they cannot legally be sold to consumers without a valid prescription...

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