American Way Of Birth, Costliest In The World

Elisabeth Rosenthal | New York Times | June 30, 2013

Seven months pregnant, at a time when most expectant couples are stockpiling diapers and choosing car seats, Renée Martin was struggling with bigger purchases. [...] Read More »

Advocacy Groups Support EC Guide Against IT Vendor Lock-In

Gijs Hillenius | European Commission (EC) | June 26, 2013

European groups advocating public administration's use of free and open source software and open standards are welcoming the 'Guide for the procurement of standards-based ICT', published by the European Commission this week Tuesday. Read More »

OpenMRS Contributor of the Month Works on Rwanda eHealth Systems

Michael Downey | OpenMRS Blog | July 5, 2013

...These days, I’m working in the Rwanda Ministry of Health’s eHealth Department as an implementation lead and program manager for the Rwanda Health Information Exchange (RHIE) initiative, under a contract to Regenstrief Institute. Our project tries to improve healthcare delivery through implementation of a health information exchange that allows healthcare providers to easily save and access patient information for specific care services... Read More »

VHA Quietly Provides EHR Training to Physicians in the U.S.

Training physicians in the use of Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems is crucial nowadays. Fortunately, this type of training has been quietly provided by the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) to many hundreds of thousands of clinicians across the country over the past several decades. Here are some simple facts that might surprise some readers. Read More »

Minnesota & Great Lake States using VistA & Other Open Source EHR Systems

The installation and use of 'open source' electronic health record (EHR) systems have continued to spread across Minnesota and many other states across the U.S.  See the map of healthcare facilities running some variant of the open source VistA electronic health record (EHR) system in Minnesota and other state Read More »

Dramatic Growth of Open Access

Heather Morrison | UO Research | July 4, 2013

Kudos to the Directory of Open Access Journals for an oustanding second quarter! In the past few months, DOAJ has added 912 titles for a total of 9,759 journals. Read More »

Open Source Software Creeps into Healthcare through Clinical Research

Although open source has not conquered the lucrative market for electronic health records (EHRs) used by hospital systems and increasingly by doctors, it is making strides in many other important areas of health care. One example is clinical research, as evidenced by OpenClinica in field of Electronic Data Capture (EDC) and LabKey for data integration. Last week I attended a conference for people who use OpenClinica in their research or want to make their software work with it. At any one time, hundreds of thousands of clinical trials are going on around the world, many listed on an FDA site. Many are low-budget and would be reduced to using Excel spreadsheets to store data if they didn’t have the Community edition of OpenClinica. Read More »

Open Letter to Chuck Hagel: DoD still doesn’t know what the hell they are doing

...I fear that you are paving a road to a hellish destination.  Rather than lifting up the VA eligibility problem to a shiny new common information system, you are on the verge of dragging health IT into the same bureaucratic vortex that has already done so much damage in the past.  AHLTA was declared “intolerable” in a Congressional hearing 4 years ago.... Read More »

The Crypto-Currency Ecosystem

Andreas Antonopoulos | O'Reilly Radar | June 27, 2013

Just like the IP protocol, bitcoin is the culmination of several important advancements, all combining to form a paradigm-changing innovation. Read More »

Researchers Call For Open Access To Autism Diagnostic Tools

Sarah DeWeerdt | Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI) | June 24, 2013

Most of the world’s children live in low- and middle-income countries. Yet few epidemiological studies of autism prevalence have been conducted in these countries, and little is known about how the symptoms of autism vary from culture to culture. Read More »