The Future Is Open

Canadian start-up company WELL Health Technologies (WELL) just crossed the threshold a month ago to become the world’s first billion-dollar open source electronic medical records (EMR) company. WELL, based in Vancouver, British Columbia, has accomplished this milestone less than three years after its founding. WELL’s market cap is currently hovering between $1.2 and $1.3 billion. The company has developed a disruptive digital health platform model with an open source EMR core, and a firm focus on improving clinical outcomes by using the technology to assist physicians and patients focus on health and wellness. Its goal is to shift the industry from a highly fragmented and expensive sick-care system to a health care system.

Read More »

The HIMSS20 conference has been cancelled as a result of concerns due to the global spread of the coronavirus. Although the conference is not taking place, we have decided to publish a variation on our annual HIMSS conference Open Health Guide. Open Health News has published Open Health Guides to HIMSS conferences almost since our founding. They were widely read with thousands of reads each. So they are now a tradition for our publication and there were many great open health companies that were going to have exhibits at the HIMSS20 conference as well as presentations. Dominant health IT vendors spend over a billion dollars a year in PR and marketing for their lock-in solutions. Unable to match that kind of PR power, the annual HIMSS conference has been one of the few opportunities where Open Health companies have had to present their solutions to the world.

Read More »

On November 1st Newsweek published an extraordinary Op-Ed by Samuel Shem titled Why Computerized Medical Records Are Bad for Both You and Your Doctor. In the article, Shem, pen name for the American psychiatrist and well-known author Stephen Joseph Bergman, presents evidence that poorly designed electronic medical records (EMRs) and over-regulation are to blame for the growing crisis of physician burnout and suicide. The rate of suicides among physicians has risen to a staggering number--three per day. Shem argues that there is a "better way," and that is shown by the electronic health record (EHR) system used by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). The VA's EHR is called VistA. Shem's view is supported by a large and increasing number of physicians and nurses. Read More »

The Open Source Electronic Health Record Alliance (OSEHRA) will be holding its 8th Annual Open Source Summit at the Bethesda North Marriott Hotel and Conference Center. The theme of this year's two-day Summit is "Open SaaS - Open Source in the Cloud," this year's two-day Summit will showcase leading-edge, open source initiatives and highlight the increasing level of public-private partnership in major programs and agencies. Open source software has become key to both implementation and interoperability as more and more programs opt for cloud-based solutions and software-as-a-service delivery models. This Summit will address ways to optimize open source utilization and community involvement in this new playing field.

Read More »

One of the most surprising developments at HIMSS19 is the large number of companies exhibiting their Fax Technologies. Long derided by reporters, health IT consultants, and EHR vendors, fax technologies have been growing in leaps and bounds while EHRs continue to fail to deliver interoperability. Just a couple of years ago faxes were used in around 75% of medical records exchanges. Latest numbers indicate that faxes are now used to exchange more than 85% of medical records. Most people would react in horror to such figures. How could physicians and medical personnel rely on antiquated paper technologies like faxes? The real story to be found on the exhibit floor at the HIMSS 2019 conference is that what we are seeing is a rapid transition to digital fax technologies and platforms. And this transition is taking place because physicians and medical staff have figured out they work!

Read More »

The annual gargantuan HIMSS conference is back in Orlando with over 45,000 participants from more than 90 countries. There will be more than 1,300 vendors at the exhibit floor and more than 300 educational sessions. As with the last several conferences, the focus on open source as the key underlying technologies of health information technologies continues to increase. In previous conferences, we have seen the rise of open source technologies, in particular, those related to interoperability such as FHIR and Blockchain. A large number of sessions at HIMSS19 will be focused on another set of technologies powered largely by open source software and design principles such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and natural language processing.

Read More »

Although not officially listed as a track at the HIMSS19 conference, there are a series of very important presentations on the use of open source software for disaster preparedness and response. This is a critical topic that we have covered extensively in Open Health News. As we detailed in this article, there was a major failure in being able to provide victims of Hurricane Harvey, as well as Hurricane Irma and Hurricane Maria with access to their medical records. Few emergency medical responders could access their records either. The two success stories that came out of the hurricanes were two open source electronic health record (EHR) systems, OpenEMR and the VA's open source VistA EHR.

Read More »

CES is the world's gathering place for all those who thrive on the business of consumer technologies. It has served as the proving ground for innovators and breakthrough technologies for 50 years - the global stage where next-generation innovations are introduced to the marketplace. This year's conference has a health and wellness track as well as many health IT vendors in the exhibit. One of the most significant announcements will be the release of iBlueButton 8 by Humetrix. Blue Button is one of the core elements of the White House open source health IT strategy that we wrote about here. Humetrix has developed a mobile health platform and the latest version will be unveiled at the conference.

Read More »

OpenMRS and the Kenya Health Informatics Association have issued an invitation to the OpenMRS Implementers Conference in Kenya. The conference will take place from December 4th to the 8th in in Nairobi, Kenya. The invitation was issued by Paul Biondich, the Executive Director of OpenMRS, and Steven Wanyee, Executive Secretary General, of the Kenya Health Informatics Association (KeHIA). The OpenMRS conference will be held back to back with the HELINA scientific conference which begins on December 3rd.This is the 12th OpenMRS Implementers’ conference, the 6th in Africa and the 2nd to be held in Kenya. OpenMRS Implementers’ Conferences are a way to bring health care professionals and OpenMRS implementers together to collaborate, share implementation experiences and discover new ways to improve OpenMRS.

Read More »

OSEHRA Chairman Seong K. Mun will be holding a kick-off meeting for the recently announced VistA Internationalization project called Plan VI...This is an important project as the open source VistA electronic health record is being adopted internationally at a rapid pace. There are large numbers of VistA deployments in Jordan and India, and great interest in South Korea, Japan, and China. The Internationalization project should accelerate the international adoption of the EHR, ranked as the best hospital-based EHR in the world.

Read More »