So many counter-intuitive findings recently. For example, a new study claims 7 of the 10 most profitable hospitals in the country are "non-profit." Let me say that again, most profitable hospitals in the country are usually nonprofit. Or, despite the drive to improve surgical quality by limiting surgeries at low volume hospitals, it appears that the relationship between volume and patient outcomes is not as clear as had been thought, once "more advanced statistical modeling" is used to analyze the data. Wait, what? Either one of these would be a good topic to write about, and many others have done so already (e.g., KHN and Modern Healthcare, respectively)...
Feature Articles
Open Textbooks 4 Africa
By Kelsey Wiens | May 11, 2016
The first Open Textbook Summit in Africa was hosted in Cape Town on March 11-12 by Open Textbooks for Africa (OT4A). This two-day event bought together 45 local University lecturers, open education practitioners, and open textbooks experts from around the world. OT4A is a pilot project designed to support the adoption and adaption of currently available open textbooks as well as build and design our own textbooks to showcase African knowledge to the world.
Open Source Mesh Networks Defying Corporate Control of Wireless
By Justin Goetz | May 10, 2016
PittMesh is a new community-owned wireless network that runs OpenWrt, a widely supported, well documented, open source firmware for embedded systems like WiFi routers. PittMesh routers are owned by individuals and configured in a way that make them work together to build a larger, decentralized network. The project was started by a wireless networking non-profit called Meta Mesh and has been developed by a world-wide coalition of programmers for well over a decade.
What Can You do with Open Data?
By Gordon Haff | May 10, 2016
Play a word association game and the word "open" will almost surely be followed by "source." And open source is certainly an important force for preserving user freedoms and access to computing. However, code isn't the only form of openness that's important. Open data has been discussed for at least a decade. At the OSCON conference in 2007, Tim O'Reilly kicked off a bit of a ruckus when he suggested that open data might actually be more important than open code. Open data in this context mostly referred to the ability to export the user-created "Web 2.0" data, which was becoming important at that time. Tim Bray, then at Sun Microsystems, highlighted the issue when he wrote...
Open Government Partnership Celebrates Open Innovation in Africa
By Tom Sasse and Anna Scott | July 29, 2016
As diverse delegates gather in Cape Town this week for the OGP regional meeting, we reflect on open innovation, ODI projects and promising initiatives in the continent. This week, South Africa hosts the third Open Government Partnership (OGP) Africa Regional Meeting 2016. The two-day event brings together a wide range of delegates from African governments and civil society, startups and international organisations. It offers a platform to share lessons from programmes across the continent, with a particular focus on promoting sustainable development...
Confessions of a Cross-Platform Developer
By Marcus D. Hanwell | June 16, 2016
Andreia Gaita is giving a talk at this year's OSCON, titled Confessions of a cross-platform developer. She's a long-time open source and Mono contributor, and develops primarily in C#/C++. Andreia works at GitHub, where she's focused on building the GitHub Extension manager for Visual Studio. I caught up with Andreia ahead of her talk to ask about cross-platform development and what she's learned in her 16 years as a cross-platform developer...
Open Source Projects Are Transforming Machine Learning and AI
By Sam Dean | May 6, 2016
Machine learning and artificial intelligence have quickly gained traction with the public through applications such as Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana. The true promise of these disciplines, though, extends far beyond simple speech recognition performed on our smartphones. New, open source tools are arriving that can run on affordable hardware and allow individuals and small organizations to perform prodigious data crunching and predictive tasks.
Halamaka Takes a Deep Dive on the MACRA NPRM
By John D. Halamka, MD | May 5, 2016
As promised last week, I’ve read and taken detailed notes on the entire 962 page MACRA notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) so that you will not have to. Although this post is long, it is better than the 20 hours of reading I had to do! Here is everything you need to know from an IT perspective about the MACRA NPRM...What is the MACRA NPRM trying to achieve with regard to healthcare IT? The MACRA NPRM proposes to consolidate components of three existing programs, the Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS), the Physician Value-based Payment Modifier (VM), and the Medicare Electronic Health Record (EHR) Incentive Program for eligible professionals (EPs), creating a single set of reporting requirements. The rule would sunset payment adjustments under the current PQRS, VM, and the Medicare EHR Incentive Program for eligible professionals...
The Postmodern EHR: The Data Layer
By Tomaž Gornik | May 5, 2016
This second approach entails defining a data layer, which is the most important aspect of the Postmodern EHR architecture from my previous post. Why is this the most important layer? Most healthcare organizations are beginning to realize that their data is more valuable than their applications. Data has become a key asset, since good data is key to improving outcomes, managing chronic disease and enabling population health management. And it needs to be managed for the lifetime of the patient. Which application is going to last that long? What happens to health data when we switch applications?
European Union Pushing Ahead in Support of Open Science
By Timothy Vollmer | May 4, 2016
April saw lots of activity on the open science front in the European Union. On April 19, the European Commission officially announced its plans to create an “Open Science Cloud”. Accompanying this initiative, the Commission stated it will require that scientific data produced by projects under Horizon 2020 (Europe’s €80 billion science funding program) be made openly available by default. Making open data the default will ensure that the scientific community, companies, and the general public can enjoy broad access (and reuse rights) to data generated by European funded scientific projects.
Health Care Is Better as a Game
By Kim Bellard | May 3, 2016
A Fresh Look at the U.S. Draft Policy on 'Federal Sourcing'
By Mark Bohannon | July 29, 2016
In a recent article in Government Computer News, I looked at the challenge of reshaping federal IT with open source without go-it-alone government-off-the-shelf approaches to open source software. In that article, I noted that the growing use of open source software by governments has shifted from "whether to use" to "how to deploy." The latest evidence for this is a draft Federal Sourcing Policy announced by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which drives U.S. government (USG) procurement and IT policy...
OSEHRA 2016 Summit to Address Global Open Health IT Issues as well as the Future of VistA, eHMP and the VA's Veteran's Centric Strategy
By Seong K. Mun, PhD | April 27, 2016
The 2016 OSEHRA Summit to be held June 27-29 is sixty days away, and we are very excited about the way it has come together...We will open the Summit on Monday afternoon with the Global Open Health Informatics Workshop. There we will hear about the progress of many programs, including those in India, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, Slovenia and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. This workshop will also address technical issues supporting the global deployment of open source EHRs.
Getting Health IT on the Blockchain Bandwagon
By Kim Bellard | April 29, 2016
Face it: health care IT infrastructure is a mess. After spending tens of billions of dollars to "incent" providers to move to EHRs, they're using them but are not very happy with them. In a world in which health IT systems should help improve patient care, they're seen more as a burden than as an asset. We now have millions of electronic records that are still way too siloed, and all too often incomplete. Worse yet, when those records aren't being hacked, they are being held captive by ransomware. Enter blockchain.
How Does an Entrepreneur Help His Fiancé Fight Cancer? With Open Source Tools, of Course.
By Jorge Cortell | April 26, 2016
My name is Jorge. I started Kanteron Systems, a medical imaging open-source software company, in Valencia (Spain) in 2005. In 2011 I moved to New York to open our US subsidiary. While living in New York, I started dating a woman that was battling breast cancer. Her name is Stephanie. Stephanie’s oncologist was at Beth Israel Cancer Center, her surgeon at Mount Sinai St. Luke’s Hospital, and her radiation therapist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC). As I held her hand through the process twice (she had surgery, and a recurrence a year later) and met with her doctors, I saw first-hand how broken many cancer-care processes involving data and medical imaging sharing were.
5 Eclipse Tools for Processing and Visualizing Data
By Tracy Miranda | April 25, 2016
Gone are the days of scientists processing data by hand. Scientific tools are rapidly scaling to meet the increasing demands of their users, both in terms of complexity and sheer volumes of data. In various domains, highly sophisticated scientific workbenches have been developed to enable scientists and researchers to quickly make sense of their data in a reproducible way. Several scientific workbenches have been built on top of the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) framework and offer up open source environments for processing and visualizing data. The companies and institutions behind these workbenches got together to collaborate on these tools, and so the Eclipse Science Working Group was born...
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