Feature Articles

Crafting a Next Generation IT strategy

During my 16 years as CIO, I’ve witnessed the transition from client server to web, from desktops to mobile, and from locally hosted to cloud. As Beth Israel Deaconess merges and acquires more hospitals, more practices and more care management capabilities, what are its strategic IT choices?...

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Karen Sandler Addresses Open Source's "Identity Crisis"

For Karen Sandler, software freedom isn't simply a technical matter. Nor is it a purely ideological one. It's a matter of life and death. Sandler, Executive Director of the non-profit Software Freedom Conservancy, says software freedom became personal when she realized her pacemaker/defibrillator was running code she couldn't analyze. For nearly a decade—first at the Software Feedom Law Center, then at the GNOME Foundation before Conservancy—she's been an advocate for the right to examine the software on which our lives depend...

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World Health Organization Goes Open Access-Joins PubMed Central

Back in January, the global health authority, the World Health Organisation (WHO), announced the launch of a new open access policy to ensure the widespread dissemination of scientific research. The policy, which applies to all WHO-authored or WHO-funded research published in external journals and books, kicked into action on 1st July 2014.

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Is Robert A. McDonald Fit to be VA Secretary?

President Obama's nominee to head the [VA] is now Robert A McDonald, former CEO of Procter and Gamble...Yet aside from a single article on the Ring of Fire web site, all news coverage and discussion so far has ignored Mr McDonald's previous experience in health care leadership, but also that his relevant track record ought to raise questions about his fitness for the VA position.

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Clueless or Craven? The White House Gets the VA Story Exactly Backwards

Sad to say, the Obama administration seems clueless about what might be broken at the VA and how to fix it. Either that, or it is just cravenly saying and doing whatever it thinks is necessary to make the story go away. Evidence for the clueless hypothesis came on Friday, when White House Deputy Chief of Staff Rob Nabors weighed in with his diagnosis (pdf) of what ails the VA. The document is extraordinary in its contradictions, sloppy formulations, and non-evidence-based conclusions.

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21st Century Healthcare: the Open Platform that will Transform

As we begin, we restate the widely held view that 21st Century healthcare is under pressure, in a state of near-crisis in many places where the burden of disease and the limitations of current healthcare systems are becoming ever more apparent. We acknowledge that at the clinical frontline that staff are already working under immense pressure , in unsustainable ways and that we must find ways to “work smarter, not harder”. So too we must find ways to improve the quality, safety, timeliness and cost effectiveness of modern medicine. We must become more effective at efforts to improve through clinical audit and ensure our clinical research efforts are more enlightening than ever before..

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‘Open-Source’ Seeds Released to Nurture Patent-Free Food

An ‘open-source’ seed initiative has released 36 varieties of 14 food crops, which the project’s leaders say could help poor farmers get access to better quality seeds. The new seed varieties have been available for delivery globally from mid-May, says Irwin Goldman, a vegetable breeder and horticulturalist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was involved in the release. Read More »

5 Assistive Technology Open Source Programs

Assistive technology software is any program or operating system feature designed to let a user with cognitive, sensory, or physical impairments use a computer system. Innovations in assistive technology software can make a huge difference in the daily lives of these people... Read More »

Can Open Science Help Patients And Save Pharma?

Open science research and development hybrid development model can protect pharma company profits while reducing costs of medicines for consumers Read More »

Open Humans Project Allows Volunteers to Share Their Personal Health Data

While many researchers encounter no privacy-based barriers to releasing data, those working with human participants, such as doctors, psychologists, and geneticists, have a difficult problem to surmount...A new project, Open Humans, seeks to resolve the issue by finding patients who are willing—even eager—to share their personal data. Read More »

7 Rules of Thumb for Your Open Science Project

Tips for creating and maintaining open source software for science. Read More »

Healthy Skepticism – Jared Sinclair's Critique of HealthKit as Both an iOS Developer and Registered Nurse

Of the many new APIs announced at WWDC this summer, HealthKit has been particularly thought-provoking for me. At the risk of sounding like that guy, I think I have a somewhat priviledged perspective of HealthKit. There can’t be that many former registered nurses who’ve switched to iOS app development and tried to start a healthcare data company.

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Open Digital Science Journal Gains Users

The medical image community embraced open source as a standard practice back in 2000, with the adoption of the Insight Toolkit (ITK). ITK is sponsored by the US National Library of Medicine and was built as a C++ library. It is the equivalent to a usable encyclopedia of image processing algorithms... Read More »

Notes on the June Meeting of the HIT Standards Committee

The June HIT Standards Committee focused on an update and evaluation of the standards and interoperability framework initiatives, consistent with the overall theme of ONC’s recent reorganization and strategic plan to focus on fewer goals with a greater depth. Steve Posnack, who now leads the ONC Office of Standards and Technology, introduced the topic... Read More »

Just how long are those wait times at the VA really?

You probably saw headlines earlier this week like this one from CNN “Audit: More than 120,000 veterans waiting or never got care.” Sounds pretty bad, and so does the lede CNN used...Want to know what that audit actually shows? Click here (pdf), or trust me to give you the main findings and some context...

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