This week Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker led a trip of clinicians, industry leaders, government officials, academics, and entrepreneurs to visit Israel (not at taxpayer expense) on a mission to establish Massachusetts as an incubator for the US growth of Israeli companies. I represented the healthcare IT innovation work we’re doing at Beth Israel Deaconess and Harvard Medical School. Israel is a remarkable place. With 8 million people in a nation the size of New Jersey situated in an unstable part of the world, Israel has no choice but to be a start up nation, creating companies that generate economic impact world wide...
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Halamka's Dispatch from Israel
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Growing the Duke University eNable Chapter
We started the Duke University eNable chapter with the simple mission of providing amputees in the Durham area of North Carolina with alternative prostheses, free of cost. Our chapter is a completely student-run organization that aims to connect amputees with 3D printed prosthetic devices. We are partnered with the Enable Community Foundation (ECF), a non-profit prosthetics organization that works with prosthetists to design and fit 3D printed prosthetic devices on amputees who are in underserved communities. As an official ECF University Chapter, we represent the organization in recipient outreach, and utilize their open sourced designs for prosthetic devices...
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Just Doing Our Jobs
Health care fraud is bad. Everyone agrees about that (except those who profit by it). We'd similarly agree it is all too pervasive. Just in the past few days racketeering charges have been brought against former executives of Insys Theraputics, numerous charges brought against leaders of Forest Park Medical Center (Dallas), 18 people in Pittsburgh were charged in a prescription fraud scheme, a New Jersey chiropractor was arrested for health fraud, and the feds settled a $4.5 million fraud case against a Florida orthopedic clinic. The list goes on and on, week after week, in every state, for every type of medical specialty, and against most health insurers. Some estimate that fraud could account for up to 10% of health care spending. But that's chump change: estimates are that other kinds of wasteful spending, such as unnecessary care and excessive administrative costs, are easily double that...
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How to Care for the Community Over the Code
At All Things Open 2016, Joe Brockmeier answers the question: How can companies can work effectively with open source communities? In his talk, Joe reminded us of the #1 open source myth: Open source is comprised of mostly volunteers. The truth is, these days, pretty much any major open source project has people who are paid to work on it. There are always people who do it because they love it, but these days most of us are paid (and still love it). Over the years we have learned that if you want patches in a timely manner, you need people who are paid to do it...
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11 Wonderful Wearable Open Source Projects
LEDs are on everything, and almost everyone you know has at least tried a FitBit or similar device, whereas Google Glass didn't really take off. Despite several years of growth, whether wearable electronics are a fad, or here to keep growing from fun to truly functional is too early to tell. Judge for yourself—read through a few of our favorite wearable projects from 2016. You might even get inspired to start creating...
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21st Century Cures and the Road Ahead
I’ve been writing fewer posts recently because the trajectory forward for healthcare and healthcare IT seems to be evolving very rapidly. In just the past week, we’ve had: the American Hospital Association letter suggesting that 21,000 pages of regulations be rolled back including Meaningful Use Stage Three concepts and quality measurement in many care settings, the passage of the 21st Century Cures bill and its many IT related mandates, and the nomination of Tom Price for HHS Secretary and Seema Verma for CMS administrator...
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No Forms For You!
What do you hate worst about health care? It could be the uncertainty about diagnoses, or the impreciseness of treatments. Or there is the opaqueness about the actual performance of our providers. Maybe it is the drabness and/or confusing layout of many health care settings, or the interminable waiting we do in them. But somewhere on the list has to be having to fill out all those forms, over and over, at practically every stop along the way. If only someone would do for health care what Amazon is trying to do with grocery stores with Amazon Go. If you've missed the many stories about Amazon Go, or don't want to bother with the above video, it goes something like this...
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Under Cures Law Interoperability Will No Longer Be Voluntary
Passed easily on Wednesday by the U.S. House, the bill is expected to sail through the Senate next week. It is supported by President Obama, who undoubtedly will sign it. Much of the bill focuses on significant FDA regulatory changes, support of mental and substance abuse-related healthcare, and funding for programs such as Vice President Biden’s Precision Medicine Initiative, the Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies Initiative, cancer research and regenerative stem cell-based medicine. It also includes mandates to improve healthcare IT — most notably, in relation to nation wide interoperability and information blocking. Suddenly, those “Interoperability Pledges” that EHR vendors signed earlier this year will not be toothless expressions of good will.
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Tools for Collecting and Analyzing Open Source Community Metrics
Thus far, we've discussed the importance of setting goals to guide the metrics process, avoiding vanity metrics, and outlined the general types of metrics that are useful for studying your community. With a solid set of goals in place, we are now ready to discuss some of the technical details of gathering and analyzing your community metrics that align with those goals. The tools you use and the way in which you collect metrics depend heavily on the processes you have in place for your community. Think about all of the ways in which your community members interact with each other and where collaboration happens...
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How to Care for the Community Over the Code
At All Things Open 2016, Joe Brockmeier answers the question: How can companies can work effectively with open source communities? In his talk, Joe reminded us of the #1 open source myth: Open source is comprised of mostly volunteers. The truth is, these days, pretty much any major open source project has people who are paid to work on it. There are always people who do it because they love it, but these days most of us are paid (and still love it). Over the years we have learned that if you want patches in a timely manner, you need people who are paid to do it...
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