I’ve been in New Zealand this week, meeting with government, academic, and industry leaders to discuss the IT challenges ahead - social networking-based teamwork for health, mobile applications, precision medicine analytics for decision support, and cloud computing all within a framework of protecting privacy. I believe that New Zealand has a unique opportunity to leapfrog the rest of the world with healthcare IT breakthroughs that show the rest of us what is possible from a 4.5 million person learning lab. Why? The perfect storm for innovation requires alignment of technology, psychology, and implementation. New Zealand is divided into 20 District Health Boards which improve the health of their populations by delivering high quality and accessible health care...
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What the History of Open Source Teaches Us About Strategic Advantage
The free software movement started like many other movements: A group of bright, spirited people felt controlled by a greater power and rose up and took matters into their own hands. It's not that different from the American Revolution. The colonists were tired of being controlled by Great Britain, so they declared their independence and started building their own system of government and military, and creating their own cultures. The revolutionaries' methods were disorganized and improvised, but they ultimately proved to be effective. Same goes for the software revolutionaries...
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APIStrat Boston to Highlight Link Between APIs and Open Source Projects
This year's API Strategy and Practice (known as APIStrat)—to be held in Boston on November 2-4—has a strong open source component running throughout the event, and with little wonder. Successful API strategies more often than not either contribute new open source projects, or draw on the rich source of tools already built by the open source community. The API mindset has always lent itself to an open source ethos. APIs are all about opening up internal assets, data, and systems in order to connect and collaborate with a wider ecosystem of partners and end users...
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Will “Digital Fingerprint” Forensics Thwart the Data Thieves Lurking in Hospital EHR Corridors?
As Halloween approaches, the usual spate of horror movies will intrigue audiences across the US, replete with slashers named Jason or Freddie running amuck in the corridors of all too easily accessible hospitals. They grab a hospital gown and the zombies fit right in. While this is just a movie you can turn off, the real horror of patient data theft can follow you...Unfortunately, this horror movie scenario is similar to how data thefts often occur at medical facilities. In 2015, the healthcare industry was one of the top three hardest hit industries with serious data breaches and major attacks, along with government and manufacturers. Packed with a wealth of exploitable information such as credit card data, email addresses, Social Security numbers, employment information and medical history records, much of which will remain valid for years, if not decades and fetch a high price on the black market.
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New Zealand Can Lead Healthcare IT
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Your Toaster May Be Bad For Your Health IT
the cyberattack last week...shut down access to many major websites...What does this have to do with health care? Plenty, as it turns out. IoT devices are increasingly helping us manage our health and medical care. IoT in health care is expected to be a huge market -- perhaps 40% of the total IoT, and worth some $117b by 2020, according to McKinsey. Expected major uses include wearables, monitors, and implanted medical devices. The problem is that many manufacturers haven't necessarily prepared for cyberattacks. Kevin Fu, a professor at the University of Michigan's Archimedes Center for Medical Device Security, told CNBC: "the dirty little secret is that most manufacturers did not anticipate the cybersecurity risks when they were designing them [devices] a decade ago, so this is just scratching the surface."
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Real Business Innovation Begins with Open Practices
To business leaders, "open source" often sounds too altruistic—and altruism is in short supply on the average balance sheet. But using and contributing to open source makes hard-nosed business sense, particularly as a way of increasing innovation. Today's firms all face increased competition and dynamic markets. Yesterday's big bang can easily become today's cautionary tale. Strategically, the only viable response to this disruption is constantly striving to serve customers better through sustained and continuous innovation. But delivering innovation is hard; the key is to embrace open and collaborative innovation across organizational walls—open innovation...
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Distributing Encryption Software May Break the Law
Developers, distributors, and users of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) often face a host of legal issues which they need to keep in mind. Although areas of law such as copyright, trademark, and patents are frequently discussed, these are not the only legal concerns for FOSS. One area that often escapes notice is export controls. It may come as a surprise that sharing software that performs or uses cryptographic functions on a public website could be a violation of U.S. export control law...
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How OpenStack mentoring breaks down cultural barriers
Victoria Martinez de la Cruz is no stranger to OpenStack's mentorship opportunities. It's how she got her own start in OpenStack, and now a few years later is helping to coordinate many of these opportunities herself. She is speaking on a panel on mentoring and internships later this week at OpenStack Summit in Barcelona, Spain. In this interview, we catch up with Victoria to learn more about the details of what it's like to be a part of an open source internship, as well as some helpful advice for people on both sides of the mentoring process...
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Everyone's Your Partner in Open Source
When I first started working at ByWater Solutions the company was in its infancy, and as such couldn't afford a full time employee, but that didn't stop them from hiring me. ByWater Solutions provides support, hosting, training, and development for the Koha open source integrated library system. Brendan Gallagher, the CEO at ByWater, was (and is) an active member of the Koha community, as I am. So when Brendan wanted to hire me, he turned to the community to ask how they could help keep me employed in the Koha world, and Paul Poulain at BibLibre (a similar, more mature, company in France) stepped up and offered to co-sponsor my employment for that first year with the understanding that ByWater would allow me to spend work-time keeping the Koha manual up to date...
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Couchbase and the Future of NoSQL Databases
Couchbase is a NoSQL, document-oriented database for building interactive applications. Trends in the open source database industry show positive growth as NoSQL is used for web, mobile, and the Internet of Things (IoT). In this interview, Arun Gupta, VP of Developer Advocacy at Couchbase, shares his views on how open source has made an impact on the database industry, and the challenges that lie ahead for the NoSQL industry. Also, find out which open source tools and methodologies Couchbase has adopted...
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