Open Payments

See the following -

Doctors And Hospitals Got At Least $3.5 Billion From Industry In Just Five Months

Julia Belluz | Vox | September 30, 2014

...Lawsuits in recent years revealed that doctors' relationships with industry can alter their prescribing practices and decision-making for the worse, and pharmaceutical companies have paid out billions of dollars in fines for fraudulent marketing practices...

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Editorial: Open Records Will Make U.S. Medicine Healthier

Staff Writer | Albuquerque Journal | October 6, 2014

If you were scheduled to have a medical device such as a knee or hip implanted, would you want to know if your surgeon and/or hospital had a financial relationship with one of the manufacturers?...Now, thanks to one of the successful components of the Affordable Care Act, you can find out what trips, research grants and honorarium are changing hands...

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Open Payments Website Opens Tuesday; Database Spotlights Physician Payments

Jaimy Lee | Crain's Detroit Business | September 29, 2014

Dr. Uzma Samadani, a New York City neurosurgeon, publicly discloses that she receives 6 percent of her revenue from research funding and has equity in a startup medical technology firm she founded.  Samadani and about 300 other doctors and clinicians are members of “Who's My Doctor?,” a new national group that encourages physicians to not only disclose to patients their financial relationships with medical manufacturers, but also report other details about their professional finances, such as whether they receive fee-for-service payments that could motivate them to perform more services...

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The Appeal of Graph Databases for Health Care

A lot of valuable data can be represented as graphs. Genealogical charts are a familiar example: they represent people as boxes, connected by lines that represent parent/child or marriage relationships. In mathematics and computer science, graphs have become a discipline all their own. Now their value for health care is emerging. Graph computing made a significant advance this past February in the form of a Graph Data Science (GDS) library for the free and open source Neo4j graph database. Graph databases are proving their value in clinical research and public health; I wonder whether they can also boost analytics for providers. This article explains what's special about graph databases, and some applications in health care highlighted by recent webinars offered by the Neo4j company.

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