At HIMSS, I listened carefully to payers, providers, patients, developers, and researchers. Below is a distillation of what I heard from thousands of stakeholders. It is not partisan and does not criticize the work of any person in industry, government or academia. It reflects the lessons learned from the past 20 years of healthcare IT implementation and policymaking. Knowing where we are now and where we want to be, here are 10 guiding principles.
Feature Articles
3 Projects Successfully Using Mesh Network Technology
By William Turner | March 2, 2017
If you think about it, isn't the Internet just a giant mesh network? If we deviate slightly from the standard definition that requires that all nodes to assist in data distribution, the answer is a resounding yes. However, traditional network technologies and the vendor-provided hardware required to run them is often far too expensive to deploy without deep pockets. Open source software aims to solve these problems and enable network connectivity to marginalized groups all around the world...
Halamka's Next Steps for the National Healthcare IT agenda
By John D. Halamka, MD | March 1, 2017
Health Care Should Get "Smart" about Protecting Patient Data
By Kim Bellard | February 28, 2017
Admit it: you're worried about your online privacy. Admit it: your personal health information is one of the things you worry most about getting hacked. Admit it: you don't understand why your health care providers seem to have a hard time sharing key information about you. And admit it, you're not quite sure what health insurers really do, except for always saying no and for getting between you and your health care providers. This is why blockchain is the new hope -- or hype -- for health care. What intrigues me most about it, though, are its "smart contracts." The GAO recently cited health as a key area of cybersecurity weakness, and TrendMicro profiled why cybercrime is a particular threat for health care...
What to Do When People Start Hacking Your Open Source Culture
By Simon Phipps | May 17, 2017
I've previously written about the fact the Apache Software Foundation offers an exemplar of large-scale open source governance. Even with those supreme qualities, things can still go wrong. Apache offers some of the best protections for open source contributors but its mature rules can be manipulated by skilled politicians and/or determined agendas. What can we learn from their experience?...
Halamka's Dispatch from HIMSS 2017
By John D. Halamka, MD | February 22, 2017
As I wrote last week, I expected 2017 HIMSS to be filled with Wearables, Big Data, Social Networking concepts from other industries, Telemedicine, and Artificial Intelligence. I was not disappointed. 42,000 of my closest friends each walked an average of 5 miles per day through the Orlando Convention Center. One journalist told me “It’s overwhelming. You do your best to look professional and wear comfy shoes!” After 50 meetings, and 12 meals in 3 days, here’s my impression of the experience...
A New Perspective on Meritocracy
By Brook Manville | July 24, 2017
Meritocracy is a common element of open organizations: They prosper by fostering a less-hierarchical culture where "the best ideas win." But what does meritocracy really mean for open organizations, and why does it matter? And how do open organizations make meritocracy work in practice? Some research and thinking I've done over the last six months have convinced me such questions are less simple—and perhaps more important—than may first meet the eye...
What We (Think We) Know about Meritocracies
By Bryan Behrenshausen | July 13, 2017
"Meritocracy," writes Christopher Hayes in his 2012 book Twilight of the Elites, "represents a rare point of consensus in our increasingly polarized politics. It undergirds our debates, but is never itself the subject of them, because belief in it is so widely shared." Meritocratic thinking, in other words, is prevalent today; thinking rigorously about meritocracy, however, is much more rare. That kind of unspoken consensus—however tenuous and fraught in practice—makes tracing and tracking something called "meritocracy" all the more important. And indeed, interest in meritocracy as an explicit object of analysis and debate is intensifying, particularly in discussions examining open-style organizational designs and leadership practices...
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in Health Care
By Kim Bellard | February 21, 2017
I hate being a patient. I have to admit that, although I write about health care, I am typically what can be described as a care-avoider. My exposure to the health care system has mostly been through my professional life or through the experiences of friends and family. The last few days, though, I unexpectedly had an up-close-and-personal experience as a hospital inpatient. I want to share some thoughts from that experience. Now, granted, any perceptions I gained are those of one person, in one hospital, in one medium-sized mid-western city. Nonetheless, I offer what I consider the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of the experience...
3D Design Contest for Medical Tools in Africa
By Joshua Pearce | February 27, 2017
The moment the open source RepRap 3D printer was created, its potential for helping the developing the world was evident. The distributed digital production of open source appropriate technology can make a real difference. Research in this area has been heating up with numerous applications from the Enabling the Future's prosthetic hands, to the Waterscope microscope, to more mundane things like organic farm tools. The ReFab Dar project hopes to accelerate this trend. It is a pilot program that explores how plastic waste can power entrepreneurship using 3D printers in Tanzania. They have built on the early work done by the Michigan Tech Open Sustainability Technology Laboratory's efforts with open source recyclebots to turn plastic waste into 3D printing filament and then into high-value products...
Top 10 FOSS Legal Stories in 2016
By Mark Radcliffe | February 28, 2017
The year 2016 resulted in several important developments that affect the FOSS ecosystem. While they are not strictly "legal developments" they are important for the community. For one, Eben Moglen, the general counsel of the Free Software Foundation, stepped down. Eben has been a leader on FOSS legal issues since the late 1990s and has been critical to the success of the FOSS movement. The FOSS community owes him a huge debt of gratitude, and I expect that he will continue to be active in the FOSS community. The success of FOSS adoption was dramatically illustrated when Microsoft joined the Linux Foundation and summarized in the article, Open Source Won. So, Now What? in Wired magazine...
Halamka Gears Up for HIMSS 2017
By John D. Halamka, MD | February 15, 2017
Next week, 50,000 of our closest friends will gather together in Orlando to learn about the latest trends in the healthcare IT industry. I’ll be giving a few keynote addresses, trying to predict what the Trump administration will bring, identify those technologies that will move from hype to reality, and highlighting which products are only “compiled” in Powerpoint - a powerful development language that is really easy to modify! The Trump administration is likely to reduce regulatory burden but is unlikely to radically change the course of value-based purchasing. This means that interoperability, analytics, and workflow products that help improve outcomes while reducing costs will still be important...
Unleashed: Open Source Tech Goes to the Dogs...and Cats...and...
By Jeff Macharyas | March 21, 2017
I was discussing open source technology with my cat this morning and he brought up a good point: "Why don't you do an article on open source tech for animals?" You know, Donald's right. Animal open source tech deserves a spotlight. Afterall, animals appear in many open source brands, and pets, like mine at least, lend lots of support while I'm trying out new software, building gadgets, or just writing about this stuff. I did a little research, and perhaps you won't be surprised to learn there is a gaggle (the name for a group of geese) of open source projects that help us keep, love, and improve the lives of animals. Let's take a gander (also another word for a goose), shall we?
Recovering from Disasters: Social Networks Matter More than Bottled Water and Batteries
By Daniel P. Aldrich | November 7, 2017
Standard advice about preparing for disasters focuses on building shelters and stockpiling things like food, water and batteries. But resilience - the ability to recover from shocks, including natural disasters - comes from our connections to others, and not from physical infrastructure or disaster kits. Almost six years ago, Japan faced a paralyzing triple disaster: a massive earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdowns that forced 470,000 people to evacuate from more than 80 towns, villages and cities. My colleagues and I investigated how communities in the hardest-hit areas reacted to these shocks, and found that social networks - the horizontal and vertical ties that connect us to others - are our most important defense against disasters...
Is Use of the Open Source GPL License Declining?
By Jono Bacon | March 20, 2017
A little while ago I saw an interesting tweet from Stephen O'Grady at RedMonk on the state of open source licensing, including this graph. This graph shows how license usage has changed from 2010 to 2017. In reading it, it is clear that usage of the GPL 2.0 license, one of the purest copyleft licenses around, has more than halved in usage. According to the chart it would appear that the popularity of open source licensing has subsequently shifted to the MIT and Apache licenses. There has also been a small increase in GPL 3.0 usage. So, what does all this mean?
9 Relevant Topics for Community Leaders Today
By VM (Vicky) Brasseur | February 14, 2017
In 2009, Jono Bacon brought the first Community Leadership Summit to the free and open source world. Five years later, Donna Benjamin hosted an off-shoot event, CLSx at linux.conf.au in Perth. 2017 marks the third year for CLSxAU at LCA. This year the event hosted nearly 30 attendees, each participating in one or more of nine discussion sessions. All CLS events are presented in an unconference format, allowing attendees to shape the program as they see fit...
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