health care

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How Data And Communities Are Changing Health Care

Mike O'Neill | Open Source Delivers | August 21, 2012

The open source model is tremendously powerful, and it’s something VA understood when it created VistA. The next chapter will see the user-driven super community, OSEHRA, powered by data and the OSS ethos, helping to transform how VA delivers care.

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A Consulting Firm Transition to Open Source Health Software (Part 2 of 2)

Andy Oram | EMR and HIPPA | September 7, 2016

The best hope for sustaining HLN as an open source vendor is the customization model: when an agency needs a new feature or a customized clinical decision support rule, it contracts with HLN to develop it. Naturally, the agency could contract with anyone it wants to upgrade open source software, but HLN would be the first place to look because they are familiar with software they built originally. Other popular models include offering support as a paid service, and building proprietary tools on top of the basic open source version (“open core”). The temptation to skim off the cream of the product and profit by it is so compelling that one of the most vocal stalwarts of the open source process, MariaDB (based on the popular MySQL database) recently broke radically from its tradition and announced a proprietary license for its primary distinguishing extension.

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A Hologram Might Be Worth A Million Numbers

Kim Bellard | Blogspot: Kim Bellard Blog | November 24, 2014

I saw a fascinating article about how Fidelity, through their research arm Fidelity Labs, has released a virtual reality tool to portray financial information in a more visual manner -- not even using numbers.  I immediately thought about how this approach could apply to health care...

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A Primer on the Open Source Movement from a Health Care Perspective

Open source, in myriad forms, has emerged as a significant development model that drives both innovation and technological dispersion. Ignore it at your peril, as did the major computer companies destroyed or totally remade by Linux and free software, or encyclopedia publishers by Wikipedia, or journalists and marketers by social media. The term "open source" was associated first with free software, but it goes far beyond software now. People around the world use open hardware, demand open government, share open data, and--yes--pursue open health. The field of health, in particular, will be transformed by open source principles in software, in research, in consultations and telemedicine, and in the various forms of data sharing all these processes call for.

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As Health Records Go Digital, Where They End Up Might Surprise You

Jordan Robertson | Bloomberg | June 5, 2012

Two years ago, Latanya Sweeney created a graphic on the widespread sharing of medical files that shocked lawmakers, technologists and doctors.  Sweeney, who founded the Data Privacy Lab at Harvard University, produced a “health data map” that looks like a windshield cracked by a few big rocks...

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Big Tech Should Stay Out of Healthcare

Matthew Buck | Washington Monthly | December 2, 2019

...The use of digital technology in health care has enormous promise, to be sure. But, as the Wall Street Journal's coverage of Google's Project Nightingale revealed, there is also a potential dark side to these projects. Ascension, it noted, "also hopes to mine data to identify additional tests that could be necessary or other ways in which the system could generate more revenue from patients, documents show." That detail raises a key question that's largely overlooked in our health care debates: should the drive to maximize corporate revenues determine how health information technology develops and becomes integrated into medical practice, or should that be determined by medical science and the public?...An alternative path exists. In the 1970s, the Veterans Affairs Administration (VA) developed VistA, an open-source code system that was the country's first EHR system... Read More »

California's Blackouts Reveal Health Care's Fragile Power System

Nicole Wetsman | The Verge | October 28, 2019

The United States health care system depends on electricity to function normally: it needs power to run everything from ventilators to electronic health records, to ferry patients via elevator through hospitals, refrigerate medications, and countless other tasks. But that PG&E planned outage wasn't the last. There were more outages last week, and they are likely to become more frequent as the changing climate keeps California dry and makes fires more likely. The number of weather-related power outages is also increasing as extreme weather events become more common. As a result, it's more critical than ever that health care facilities are prepared for a present and future where power isn't a guarantee. Read More »

Can Data Provide the Trust we Need in Health Care?

One of the problems dragging down the US health care system is that nobody trusts one another. Most of us, as individuals, place faith in our personal health care providers, which may or may not be warranted. But on a larger scale we’re all suspicious of each other... Read More »

Clinician, researcher, and patients working together: progress aired at Indivo conference

Andy Oram | O'Reilly Radar | June 21, 2012

I spent Monday in a small library at the Harvard Medical School listening to a discussion of the Indivo patient health record and related open source projects with about 80 intensely committed followers. Lead Indivo architect Daniel Haas, whom I interviewed a year ago, succeeded in getting the historical 2.0 release of Indivo out on the day of the conference. Read More »

Could Pokémon Go Help Fix Healthcare and Lead to Usable EHRs?

However promising gamification in health care may be, it is the AR that may well hold the most promise for health care.  Google was not wrong to pursue Google Glass, just premature. Pokémon Go may be signaling that we're now finally ready for AR, and that it will be consumers as well as professionals who can benefit from it. The potential uses in health care are virtually endless, but here are a few examples...Ever feel like your doctor spends too much time staring at your chart or a screen? Instead of looking there for information about you, how much better would it be if he/she was looking at you, with AR notations for key information about you?...

Data Exchange Vendor Metriport Adopts Open Source

Metriport is addressing a problem similar to other IT companies in health care—a service to ingest and clean patient data for tasks such as providing care summaries during a patient transition—but is doing so in a very unusual way: through an entirely open source service. Because the choice to go open source is so central to their business model, I will discuss the importance of free and open source software in health care, then explain Metriport's service.

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Does Healthcare Need More Programmers? Or, More MacGyvers?

Health care is full of black boxes.  As much as we think we've learned about the human body over the last hundred years, we're still constantly reminded about how little we actually understand its working (e.g., the microbiome). As much time and money we spend training physicians, much of how they diagnose and design treatments for patients remain a mystery.  And does anyone know why we always have to fill out so many damn forms? The many organizations working on applying AI to health care are trying to figure out some of these black boxes, although their solutions may come at the price of new black boxes.  I hope, though, that we don't just turn things over to AI.  We still need people to figure out the problems.

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Dutch Healthcare Trade Group To Validate Open Source Solutions

The Dutch Association of Research Quality Assurance (DARQA), a trade group representing about 600 health care institutions and suppliers, will assist in validating open source software solutions for use in health care. Approved solutions will be given so-called vendor compliance statements, asserting compliance with European and global health care ICT standards. DARQA hopes to endorse hospital information systems, document management tools, archiving solutions and software for data analysis.

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Google Ventures Shifts Focus To Health Care

Alistair Barr | WSJ.com | December 15, 2014

Google’s venture-capital arm is moving strongly into health care and life-sciences startups, mirroring shifts at the Internet giant...

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Health Datapalooza 2017 – The Data Revolution Rolls On

The 8th annual Health Datapalooza returns on April 26 – 28 and offers a re-imagined vision of health and health care through the lens of data. In years past, Health Datapalooza has set its sights on health-care startups, apps, big data, electronic health records – you name it – but the main thrust was always more about the business of health care and how tech and data are used to innovate. The annual conference for data geeks, developers, health tech venture capitalists, and start-up wannabes, among others, will this year triangulate around the idea that the patient should be at the center of health care.