Health care fraud is bad. Everyone agrees about that (except those who profit by it). We'd similarly agree it is all too pervasive. Just in the past few days racketeering charges have been brought against former executives of Insys Theraputics, numerous charges brought against leaders of Forest Park Medical Center (Dallas), 18 people in Pittsburgh were charged in a prescription fraud scheme, a New Jersey chiropractor was arrested for health fraud, and the feds settled a $4.5 million fraud case against a Florida orthopedic clinic. The list goes on and on, week after week, in every state, for every type of medical specialty, and against most health insurers. Some estimate that fraud could account for up to 10% of health care spending. But that's chump change: estimates are that other kinds of wasteful spending, such as unnecessary care and excessive administrative costs, are easily double that...
Feature Articles
How an Open Leader Achieves Work/Life Balance
Becoming an open leader means becoming attuned to the intricate ways that complex and ever-moving systems structure our daily lives. As I've argued, open leaders are masters of balancing multiple parts of those systems strategically—not only as part of various projects at work, but also in other aspects of their lives. In fact, open leaders operate the way they do—and achieve what they do—because of their keen balancing skills. Here's an example of how this works. I remember a time, several years ago, when I was desperately seeking ways to incorporate more exercise into my life. Exercise classes near the office started at 6:30 p.m.—and I found I really enjoyed them...
Just Doing Our Jobs
A New Way Forward for Power Utilities: The Open Smart Grid Platform
After energy balancing software PowerMatcher was released as open source at Alliander in 2014, I was able to convince more of my colleagues to invest in making more technologies open source. I started the conversation with a question about the Open Smart Grid Platform: "How open is open? Where can I find the code?" The development of the Open Smart Grid Platform started after research was done on how to give municipalities control over their public lighting switching schedule. This schedule is based on ecomomic sense, and is a list of rules for when to switch on and off the street lights. For example, streets lights switch off ten minutes after sunrise...
A Tour of Google's 2016 Open Source Releases
Open source software enables Google to build things quickly and efficiently without reinventing the wheel, allowing us to focus on solving new problems. We stand on the shoulders of giants, and we know it. This is why we support open source and make it easy for Googlers to release the projects they're working on internally as open source. We've released more than 20-million lines of open source code to date, including projects such as Android, Angular, Chromium, Kubernetes, and TensorFlow. Our releases also include many projects you may not be familiar with, such as Cartographer, Omnitone, and Yeoman...
How Gratipay Helps Solve the 'Free Rider' Problem
Open source has come a long way, but the "free rider" problem still exists. In a lightning talk at All Things Open, Chad Whitacre shared how his company, Gratipay, is helping companies pay for open source software. While companies like Red Hat have figured out how to make open source development sustainable, Whitacre points out that there are still big parts of the open source ecosystem that aren't sustainable. These projects are plagued by what he calls the "free rider" problem...
4 Open Source Drone Projects
Over the past few years, interest in both civilian and commercial use of drones has continued to grow rapidly, and drone hardware sits at the top of many people's holiday wish lists. Even just within the civilian side of things, the list of unmanned aerial devices that fit the moniker of drone seems to be constantly expanding. These days, the term seems to encompass everything from what is essentially a cheap, multi-bladed toy helicopter, all the way up to custom-built soaring machines with incredibly adept artificial intelligence capabilities...
6 Growing Pains of Open Source Organizations That You Can Avoid
Everything has a season, and as organizations age—communities, charities, companies, churches and more—they face similar diseases of time. These are emergent patterns of failure that arise not from mistakes but from the consequences of earlier success. In open source, we are seeing the same patterns emerge; this should not be a surprise. Some of them are unavoidable. Understanding them helps leaders reduce the risk that will arise and helps identify them when they do. This is by no means a comprehensive list, but we have encountered all of these modes of systemic failure, some of them often...
Top Open Innovations in 3D Printing
Open source continues to drive rapid innovation in the 3D printing industry. This makes sense if you stop and think about it—a 3D printer exists to make other things. Combining that philosophy with free software and open source hardware helps other people participate in improving the objects that it makes, and in making the printers faster, smarter, and cleaner. Here are a few of my favorite open source 3D printing innovations from 2016...
Why the Operating System Matters Even More in 2017
Operating systems don't quite date back to the beginning of computing, but they go back far enough. Mainframe customers wrote the first ones in the late 1950s, with operating systems that we'd more clearly recognize as such today—including OS/360 from IBM and Unix from Bell Labs—following over the next couple of decades. An operating system performs a wide variety of useful functions in a system, but it's helpful to think of those as falling into three general categories. First, the operating system sits on top of a physical system and talks to the hardware. This insulates application software from many hardware implementation details...
21st Century Cures and the Road Ahead
I’ve been writing fewer posts recently because the trajectory forward for healthcare and healthcare IT seems to be evolving very rapidly. In just the past week, we’ve had: the American Hospital Association letter suggesting that 21,000 pages of regulations be rolled back including Meaningful Use Stage Three concepts and quality measurement in many care settings, the passage of the 21st Century Cures bill and its many IT related mandates, and the nomination of Tom Price for HHS Secretary and Seema Verma for CMS administrator...
7 Cool Little Open Source Projects That Stood Out in 2016
In the early days of the open source movement, a lot of the attention was on operating systems, and later on large content management systems. These days, containers are mentioned regularly even in mainstream news outlets. The big tech stories are great, but they miss the other great activity in the niches of the open source space. I've rounded up seven interesting lesser-known projects from the past year. You can see more articles about projects like this in my Nooks and Crannies column...
4 Open Source Peer-to-Peer Marketplaces
Peer-to-peer marketplaces have been booming, and PwC predicts the market will go from $15 billion in 2013 to $355 billion in 2025. This means that a lot of marketplaces will be developed in the next years. However, until recently, you didn't have many choices if you wanted to create a marketplace like Airbnb, Blablacar, or Drivy. You either developed an expensive proprietary solution like the incumbents do, or you used a hardly customizable SaaS solution, and that approach isn't scalable...
Why Your Teams May Be Failing at the Collaboration Game
When we think about skills needed to build open structures and establish open mindsets, collaboration jumps to mind immediately. In order to collaborate effectively, communication—or rather, clear communication—is imperative to making it all work. Communication can be defined as a transfer of information from one space or person to another—but it can look like dialogue, conflict resolution, listening skills, or even a knowledge commons. In open organizations, we look for timely transfers of information to all members so that they may do their jobs effectively and efficiently...
No Forms For You!
What do you hate worst about health care? It could be the uncertainty about diagnoses, or the impreciseness of treatments. Or there is the opaqueness about the actual performance of our providers. Maybe it is the drabness and/or confusing layout of many health care settings, or the interminable waiting we do in them. But somewhere on the list has to be having to fill out all those forms, over and over, at practically every stop along the way. If only someone would do for health care what Amazon is trying to do with grocery stores with Amazon Go. If you've missed the many stories about Amazon Go, or don't want to bother with the above video, it goes something like this...
Growing the Duke University eNable Chapter
We started the Duke University eNable chapter with the simple mission of providing amputees in the Durham area of North Carolina with alternative prostheses, free of cost. Our chapter is a completely student-run organization that aims to connect amputees with 3D printed prosthetic devices. We are partnered with the Enable Community Foundation (ECF), a non-profit prosthetics organization that works with prosthetists to design and fit 3D printed prosthetic devices on amputees who are in underserved communities. As an official ECF University Chapter, we represent the organization in recipient outreach, and utilize their open sourced designs for prosthetic devices...