News

Nursing Informatics & 'Open' Health IT Solutions

Expect nurses to play a much bigger role in defining requirements for health IT systems of the future, especially given the growth of  more inclusive 'Open Communities' that are playing a bigger role in the defining 'Open Health IT' systems for tomorrow.

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Blue Button Initiative Takes Off, Contest Winner Announced

Blue Button, an easy to use open source tool to access the “MyHealtheVet” Personal Health Record (PHR) that was publicly released in August of last year by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), has surpassed all expectations and is now being used by more than 425,000 veterans across the country. Read More »

EHI Live 2011: A Skunkworks Approach to Healthcare

The EHI Live 2011 will supply conference delegates with the latest updates on healthcare policy and innovation in the NHS while providing plenty of networking opportunities to all involved. Most significant, the exhibition will showcase an open source skunkworks concentrated on using open source software to solve healthcare problems. Read More »

popHealth App Challenge Launched by ONC and Health 2.0

We should be seeing major improvements to the open source popHealth reporting tool as a result of a Challenge Award just announced by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) and Health 2.0. It is hoped that the awards will  motivate developers to create innovative applications that will enhance the open source tool beyond its current capabilities. The hope is that the challenge will generate new methods of leveraging the program’s current reporting functions and open source framework to help providers better understanding and care for patient populations...

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VistA & the Underground Railroad

See this series of You Tube video presentations about the public domain VA VistA comprehensive health information system. The speakers were attending the latest gathering of the original developers who were members of a clandestine group of forward thinkers within the Veterans Administration (VA) known as the Underground Railroad. VistA is now one of the most well known of the open source Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems. See the video presentations on You Tube.   Read More »

OSEHRA Launches Code Repository & Certification Process

The Open Source Electronic Health Record Agent (OSEHRA), a non-profit foundation recently created to continue the development of the VA's VistA software using an open source collaborative development model, announced today the launching of its Code Repository and Software Quality Certification Process.  The establishment of this repository and certification process is a major step towards providing the tools that will enable users, developers, and researchers to engage with and advance electronic health record technology.

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'Open' Health Education & Training Solutions

The use of 'open source' software to deliver global health education and training solutions to health care provider organizations and medical schools is an important trend to watch. The number of open source and/or public domain health education and training software solutions currently available or under development has grown to be quite substantial.

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Number of Open Source Users Continue to Climb

According to a recent article in eWEEK Europe, their readers have given a resounding thumbs-up to open source software. In a poll they conducted, nearly two-thirds (65 percent) of the respondents use open source to some extent, with fifty percent of them using it in major production systems or wherever possible. Read More »

Capsite Survey Reports PACS/RIS Purchases to Climb

CapSite has announced the release of their 2011 study of Radiology Information Systems (RIS) in the U.S.  One of the highlights reported in the study is that 22% of U.S. hospitals plan to purchase a new Radiology Information System (RIS).  At Open Health News, we always encourage healthcare provider organizations to make sure they check out and consider open source alternatives in addition to more costly commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) products. Read More »

Open Health Software Continues Exponential Growth, Breaks 1,500 Mark

Open source software in the healthcare field continues its exponential growth according to a report just released by Black Duck Software. According to Black Duck, a total of 294 new healthcare-related open source projects emerged in 2010, a 31% increase over the previous year. Projects for 3-D medical imaging, data management and clinical trials dominated new projects in the Black Duck® KnowledgeBase™, which counts more than 1,500 OSS projects with a health care focus.

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