Eric Reinhart, who describes himself as “a political anthropologist, psychoanalyst, and physician,” has had a busy month. He started with an essay in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) about “reconstructive justice,” then an op-ed in The New York Times on how our health care system is demoralizing the physicians who work in it, and then the two that caught my attention: companion pieces in The Nation and Stat News about reforming our public health “system” from a physician-driven one to a true community health one. He's preaching to my choir. I wrote almost five years ago: “We need to stop viewing public health as a boring, not glamorous, small part of our healthcare system, but, rather, as the bedrock of it, and of our health.” Dr. Reinhart pulls no punches about our public health system(s), or the people who lead them...
Just as with software development, research under Horizon Europe promotes the adoption of sharing research outputs as early and widely as possible to citizen science, developing new indicators for evaluation research, and rewarding researchers. Horizon Europe emphasizes open science and open source technology. The program evolved from Horizon 2020, which provided financial support for research projects that promoted industrial competitiveness, advanced scientific excellence, or solved social challenges through the process of "open science." Open science is an approach to the scientific process based on open cooperative work, tools, and diffusing knowledge found in the Horizon Europe Regulation and Model Grant Agreement. This open science approach aligns with open source principles that provide a structure for such cooperation.
In the summer of 2022, the UK government and NHS England published its Open Source Policy, stating that open source technology is: Particularly suitable for use within the healthcare industry where, through active collaboration between IT suppliers and user/clinicians communities, solutions can be honed to maximise benefits to delivery of health and social care. The public statement by NHS England is just the latest development in a broader trend: The wholehearted embrace of open source software by the healthcare sector. And no wonder; open source presents myriad opportunities for this most complex of industries, with potential solutions across various sub-sectors. Yes, open source is now powering everything from medical wearables to healthcare human resource management.
Product security incident response teams (PSIRTs) are teams of security professionals that work diligently behind the scenes to protect software products and services of companies. A PSIRT is a different breed than a computer security incident response team (CSIRT), those that tend to be called Information Security. The difference is simple but stark: a CSIRT focuses on responding to incidents that affect a company's infrastructure, data or users. A PSIRT focuses on responding to incidents that affect products a company builds, the most common being the discovery of a vulnerability or security defect, and subsequent actions to manage or remediate. 
In the golden age of data analysis, open source communities are not exempt from the frenzy around getting some big, fancy numbers onto presentation slides. Such information can bring even more value if you master the art of generating a well-analyzed question with proper execution. You might expect me, a data scientist, to tell you that data analysis and automation will inform your community decisions. It's actually the opposite. Use data analysis to build on your existing open source community knowledge, incorporate others, and uncover potential biases and perspectives not considered. You might be an expert at implementing community events, while your colleague is a wiz at all things code. As each of you develops visualizations within the context of your own knowledge, you both can benefit from that information.
Where do people come together to make cutting-edge invention and innovation happen?....What of open source software? Certainly, major projects are highly collaborative. Open source software also supports the kind of knowledge diffusion that, throughout history, has enabled the spread of at least incremental advances in everything from viticulture to blast furnace design in 19th-century England. That said, open source software, historically, had a reputation primarily for being good enough and cheaper than proprietary software. That's changed significantly, especially in areas like working with large volumes of data and the whole cloud-native ecosystem. This development probably represents how collaboration has trumped a tendency towards incrementalism in many cases. IP concerns are primarily handled in open source software—occasional patent and license incompatibility issues notwithstanding.
The HLN Consulting team attended the HL7 36th Annual Plenary & Working Group Meeting (WGM) held in Baltimore, MD, September 17 – 23, 2022. More than 500 attendees, representing all aspects of the industry, were a part of the WGM in-person meeting after 2 years of virtual meetings. The seven day event started on Saturday with a weekend connectathon. This meeting offered an opportunity for attendees to come together and collaborate. It was a valuable meeting especially for people involved in standards development around healthcare. 
Open source is a flourishing and beneficial ecosystem that publicly solves problems in communities and industries using software developed through a decentralized model and community contributions. Over the years, this ecosystem has grown in number and strength among hobbyists and professionals alike. It's mainstream now—even proprietary companies use open source to build software. With the ecosystem booming, many developers want to get in and build new open source projects. The question is: How do you achieve that successfully? This article will demystify the lifecycle and structure of open source projects. I want to give you an overview of what goes on inside an open source project and show you how to build a successful and sustainable project based on my personal experience.
Open source software (OSS), once a niche segment of the development landscape, is now ubiquitous. This growth is fantastic for the open source community. However, as the usage of OSS increases, so do concerns about security. Especially in mission-critical applications— think medical devices, automobiles, space flight, and nuclear facilities—securing open source technology is of the utmost priority. No individual entity, whether developers, organizations, or governments, can single-handedly solve this problem. The best outcome is possible when all of them come together to collaborate. The Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) formed to facilitate this collaboration.
In August 2022 the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) launched the 2022 Public Health Data Systems Task Force as a subcommittee of the Health Information Technology Advisory Committee (HITAC). The task force will meet through the beginning of November to present recommendations continuing and building upon the work of the 2021 task force. Members of the task force include individuals from various levels of government, relevant public health associations, and industry partners. Specifically, the task force is focused on the certification criteria for EHR products certified under the ONC Health IT Certification Program that cover transmission of data from EHRs to public health in these domains...
Today in healthcare, platforms are understood mostly as “technology”. That’s not wrong, but it’s limiting. We want to offer you a more expansive view of platforms, and in turn, understand platforms as being more than just technology. This post is the third in our series on The New Rules of Healthcare Platforms. In this essay, we will: Explain why platform business models are NOT new; Share a survey of health plan execs that documents a view of platforms as “technology”; Explain how network effects are the North Star of platform business models and strategy; Expand your view of platforms beyond just “technology.”