The Future Is Open

INASP has launched its Open Access Week Competition for 2015. The competition is open to representatives of institutions and organizations from INASP partner or network countries. Open Access Week, a global event now entering its seventh year, is an opportunity for the academic and research community to learn more about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they’ve learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in Open Access developments. For more information, see OpenAccessWeek.org.

Read More »

We have been very busy lately and did not have time this year to write a recap of major events related to our news web site. Well, a bit late, we start here with a review of our traffic figures. Traffic to the website continues to grow and we are now approaching 20,000 unique visitors per month. As the table shows below, the total number of unique visitors since we launched the site nearly four years ago has surpassed 375,000 and the total number of Page Views has broken the 8 million mark.

Read More »

OSEHRA has been holding a "Code Alignment Workshop" in Oakland, CA that has brought together leading corporate members to work out how they can collaborate on a core verion of the open source VistA EHR...More details in the note below and in an online briefing on the meeting tomorrow at 08:30 AM Pacific Time. Read More »

Just got an email from Kris Prendergast, community organizer for the Open Source Electronic Health Record Alliance (OSEHRA) calling on the community to provide input to the open source strategy for the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). The VA, which developed the VistA EHR, widely recognized as the world's best hospital-based EHR, is seeking comments to their next generation IT contract. They are specifically requesting comments and suggestions to their open source strategy. This strategy will be discussed in great detail at the OSEHRA conference next week. Read More »

Just got an email from Jill Riley from HANDI Health calling for speakers and panelists for their upcoming conference on November 4th and 5th in Birmingham, UK. HANDI Health is a non-profit organization focused on the development of open source health IT solutions. They have had a series of very successful conferences and workshops and many senior members of UK's National Health System believe that HANDI has contributed more usable code than what they got from the $19.6 billion failure of their previous Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) effort. Read More »

For those of you who have not noticed yet, the folks at Opensource.com just completed the publication of an entire series of interviews with speakers at the upcoming O/Reilly OSCON conference. This conference is one of the most important and interesting open source conferences of the year and the wide variety of interviews conducted which show the depth and breadth of the conference topics. `

Read More »

I heard from Clinovo's Olivier Roth a few days ago. He said that Clinovo is looking for a writer who can help them write articles and white papers about their open source clinical research solutions and their implementations. Clinovo is a Clinical Research Organization (CRO) that partners with life science companies to streamline their clinical trials. Clinovo is committed to open source solutions and open innovation. This is discussed in detail in a terrific interview with their CTO Marc Desgrousilliers who is managing the development of ClinCapture, their open source Electronic Data Capture (EDC) system. In this interview, he tells us more about why healthcare needs open source and why it is the future of clinical trials. Read More »

I received an email newsletter this morning from the Pistoia Alliance and it was so full of information and updates that I decided to post the entire newsletter as an article. A note on the Pistoia Alliance is long overdue. I had meant to write an article on the Alliance back in April after the 2014 Bio-IT World conference organizers announced that Pistoia's HELM project had been chosen as one of the Grand prize winners. Read More »

Roger A. MaduroI heard today from Kris Prendergast, OSEHRA's open source community organizer. She gave me a heads up that OSEHRA has posted the full recording "Industry Day" that the US Deaprtment of Veterans Affairs (VA) conducted on June 18. As detailed in this press release, several of the key technical groups in the VA joined forces to host this day-long event. The event provided an intense and productive discussion of the VA's new scheduling application called Medical Appointment Scheduling System, or MASS for short (gosh, can't the folks at the VA come up with good names!).

Read More »

Mona Alsaffar, a health informatics graduate student at University of California-Davis is conducting a study about developers involved in healthcare open source projects. She contacted Open Health News for help in informing the open health community about the project.

Read More »