Feature Articles
Trends in Corporate Open Source Engagement
In 1998, I was part of SGI when we started moving to open source and open standards, after having been a long-time proprietary company. Since then, other companies also have moved rapidly to working with open source, and the use and adoption of open source technologies has skyrocketed over the past few years. Today company involvement in open source technologies is fairly mature and can be seen in the following trends...
Storming the Government Castle
Open source software seems like a perfect fit for government IT projects. Developers can take advantage of existing code bases and, it's hoped, mold that code to their needs quickly and at less cost than developing code from scratch. Over the last few years, governments in the U.S. and abroad have been more closely embracing open source. However, agencies at all levels of U.S. government are still wary of open source and can be reluctant to adopt it. It's still not easy for government projects to use open source or for developers employed in the public sector to contribute their work to open source project...
If You Build It, They Won't Come: Why Your Open Source Project Needs Better Marketing
FOSS (free and open source software) conferences are full of talks about how to improve your code, or how you manage your code, or what the latest and greatest languages and tools are. But a successful open source project is about more than good code. First, let's talk about what success is, because success isn't a guarantee. University of Massachusetts faculty members Charles Schweik and Robert English have studied open source projects and their success extensively. In a study of 174,333 projects through 2009, they were able to declare success or abandonment for only 145,475...
Halamka Pays a Visit to Oscar Health
Today I’m in New York City visiting Oscar Health, on my continuing quest to determine how best to integrate digital platforms, patient-family engagement, and care coordination in preparation for MACRA/MIPS and the transformation from fee for service to alternative payment models. At the moment, there is no single magic bullet, but there are early innovations that hold promise. At BIDMC we’ve thought the best approach to care management is to identify a cohort with a disease, then enroll that cohort in a program which involves tracking progress against guidelines/protocols, deploying telemedicine/visiting nurses, and measuring data from home-based devices...
We Need to Learn How to Search the Web of Data
Many data portals exist, especially open data portals. Our team at ODIHQ and members of our global network have helped people to build data portals and get them used, so they can create impact. Despite the growing number of data portals, we are often asked “Do you know where I can get X data?” Sometimes there is an expectation that the Open Data Institute has ‘all the data’, and some people even ask us “Where should we publish our data so people can find it?” We’ve also been getting requests from people trying to create a data marketplace, where data can be bought and sold...
Is Paying for Un-Healthiness the Core Problem with the US Healthcare System?
Health care needs a better business model. HHS reports that U.S. health care spending will surpass $10,000 per person this year, will grow almost 6% annually for the foreseeable future, and will consume over 20% of GDP by 2025. About half of our spending goes for labor costs, with health care employment remaining one of the "bright spots" in our economy. Indeed, health care jobs continued to soar even when the economy tanked in our most recent recession. Despite that steady growth, we continue to talk about a physician shortage, especially for primary care. Medical school enrollment is at new highs, yet it is not projected to dent the demand...
Creating Affordable Solutions with Open Source Tools
Open source is often the heart of many civic technology solutions because using open source leverages the minds of many. Small web solution providers, in particular, often turn to open source as a way to deliver services without having to reinvent the wheel. I recently found out about Digital Deployment, a civic web solution provider in Sacramento, that leverages open source, and so I asked them to share their story with me. I chatted on the phone with Chief Operating Officer Sloane Dell'Orto and Lead Software Engineer Dennis Stevense...
The Largest Wikipedia Gathering in South Asia Kicks Off
Wiki Conference India 2016 (WCI), the largest gathering of contributors to Wikipedia and its sister projects in South Asia, will be held during August 5-7 this year in Chandigarh, India. The first iteration of this event was five years ago in 2011. The event is focused around South Asian language Wikipedias and Wikimedia projects. Hundreds of participants, including over 100 scholarship holders from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, will participate in this three-day event...
Halamka Discusses His Guiding Principles
As I’ve aged and matured my approach to life, career, and family, I’ve evolved my rubric for organizing each day. Here’s what I’ve used for 2016: Avoid commuting delays as much as possible - leave no later than 6:00am in the morning and return either before 3pm or after 7pm. I generally go in early, return early, care for animals, then work in the evening. I work in Boston Tuesday/Thursday, in our suburban Metrowest office Monday/Wednesday and wherever the most urgent projects are happening on Friday...
The Reduction of State-coordinated HIE: How Should Public Health React?
Noam ArztA recent article in HealthAffairs describes a significant decline in the number of both operational HIEs and HIEs in the planning stage from several years earlier. The authors note continuing barriers to broad-based HIE and a shift to vendor-driven exchange which diminishes the effectiveness of community-based networks. In effect, this translates to a shift away from geographic-based/dominated HIEs to product-dominated HIEs. We have already noted (see The Interoperability of Things) the lack of a national strategy on HIE, and ONC’s Nationwide Interoperability Roadmap barely mentions the concept.
Uber For Health Won't Play Nice...It Will Sideswipe the Industry
People talk "Uber for health care." After all, Uber has been wildly successful, valued over $60b, which makes it bigger than Ford and GM. AirBnB, the Uber of hotels, is worth some $20b. Heck, even the disposable razor industry has its own Uber, with Dollar Shave Club just getting acquired for $1b. Any industry that isn't looking in its rear view mirror for potential Uber-type competitors may find itself disrupted into irrelevancy. And, goodness knows, health care could use some disruption. There are no shortage of candidates for health care Ubers...
The Rise of Telemedicine
As reimbursement evolves from fee for service to alternative payment models, incentives will shift from treating sickness to keeping the population healthy. New investments will be made in technologies that reach into the home and enhance care team communication. 2016 saw an acceleration of telemedicine/telehealth. 2017 will see exponential growth. Telemedicine is hard to define. It could be real time video teleconferencing between clinicians (a consult), between a patient and clincian (a visit), or group to group (tumor board discussion). It could be the transmission of a static photograph, such as the poisonous mushroom/plant teleconsultation I do 900 times per year. It could be secure texting to coordinate patient care...
Open Is the Solution to Improving 21st Century Education
Much of the Internet runs Linux and open source software, yet in most of our schools—whether PK-12 or higher education—Linux and open source software are given short shrift. Linux has made serious inroads on hand-held devices, the desktop, and the Internet of things (IoT) that use platforms such as Raspberry Pi, Galileo, and Arduino. Despite this astounding growth, a relatively small number of secondary and post-secondary schools offer technology training that prepares students for increasingly in-demand technical skills. The growth of the maker movement and the concurrent interest in STEM skills, which include coding and ethical hacking, may provide a much-needed impetus to change this trend. The problem for most schools is finding the mentors and exemplars of this paradigm...
Fluxday: A no-fuss open source productivity tracker
There are only so many hours in the day, so making the most of your time is critical. There are two ways to increase your output: Put in more hours or work smarter. I don't know about you, but I prefer the latter. If you go online and search for ways to improve your productivity, you'll find many articles with tips and tricks for working smarter and changing your habits. This works really well at a personal level, but when you're looking to get your entire team to be more productive and align everyone in the company toward a collective time-dependent goal, nine times out of ten you will reach the same point: looking for a platform to track employee contributions and time spent on tasks towards achieving smaller goals, and then integrating those to your company's goals...
Hexoskin: Clothing That Records Medical Data?
What if a person could wear a shirt that recorded many of the things going on underneath their skin? Gone are the days of bulky heart rate monitors that provided inaccurate information. The newest item to hit the active wear market is the Hexoskin Smart shirt. It is a “smart shirt” that is designed to give the causal person exercising to high performance athletes lab quality results about their bio metric data...