News Clips

Resource and Patient Management System (RPMS)

Peter J. Groen, Terry Cullen | Virtual Medical Worlds | June 28, 2007

If one were looking to acquire and implement a comprehensive "open source" electronic health record (EHR) system, serious consideration should be paid to the Resource and Patient Management System (RPMS) used by the Indian Health Service (IHS).

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The Health of Nations

Ezra Klein | The American Prospect | May 7, 2007

Medicine may be hard, but health insurance is simple. The rest of the world's industrialized nations have already figured it out, and done so without leaving 45 million of their countrymen uninsured and 16 million or so underinsured, and without letting costs spiral into the stratosphere and severely threaten their national economies. Read More »

New head of DOD health affairs takes reins

Nancy Ferris | Government Health IT | April 18, 2007

The Department of Defense has a new assistant secretary for health affairs who supports developing systems for e-health records, now that the Senate has confirmed President Bush's nominee, Dr. S. Ward Casscells.

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Can Open-Source R&D Reinvigorate Drug Research?

Bernard Munos | Nature Reviews | September 15, 2006

Open-source research, which started as a counterculture movement in the software industry 15 years ago, has since grown into a business model whose best-known product, Linux, has become a credible alternative to Microsoft's Windows.

Now, with biology increasingly becoming an information-orientated science, some have suggested that what worked for software might be part of the answer to the spiralling cost of drug R&D. Read More »

Why the KDE Project Switched to CMake – and How (continued)

Alexander Neundorf | LWN.net | June 21, 2006

KDE developer Alexander Neundorf explains the background for the move away from the traditional "autotools"

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Open-access Research Makes a Bigger Splash

Sophie Hebden | SciDev.Net | May 17, 2006

Scientific papers published in online journals that are open-access have a bigger impact and are cited more frequently than papers readers must pay for, according to a new study. The findings will strengthen calls for more online scientific journals to switch to the open-access model and make research freely available.

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Open Access Increases Citation Rate

Catriona J. MacCallum, Hemai Parthasarathy | PLoS | May 16, 2006

The results of this natural experiment are clear: in the 4 to 16 months following publication, O[pen] A[ccess] articles gained a significant citation advantage over non-OA articles during the same period.

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State Veterans Homes Using the VistA System

Peter Groen & Christine Sheehy | Healthcare Informatics | March 1, 2006

In October 2003, the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the Under Secretary for Health issued guidance to its healthcare facilities across the country on a nationwide initiative to make the VA Veterans Health Information Systems & Technology Architecture (VistA) and Computerized Patient Record System (CPRS) available for use by all interested state veterans homes. Read More »

Not a Proud Day in the Annals of the Royal Society

Stevan Harnad | American Scientist Open Access Forum | November 24, 2005

The Royal Society's statement (below, with comments) is not only ill-informed, failing even to grasp what either Open Access or the proposed RCUK policy is about and for, but it is a statement for which the Royal Society (RS), a venerable and distinguished institution, will have profound reason to be ashamed in coming years.

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American Samoa & VistA

Peter Groen | Virtual Medical Worlds | November 15, 2005

The Lyndon Baines Johnston (LBJ) Tropical Medical Center in American Samoa recently completed a highly successful collaborative project involving the acquisition and implementation of VistA, an electronic health record (EHR) system developed by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). LBJ Tropical Medical Center is located in Pago Pago and is the only medical facility in American Samoa. Read More »

Open Access Deemed 'Dangerous' by Royal Society

David Dickson | SciDev.Net | October 24, 2005

One of the world's oldest scientific societies has warned that the spread of open access journals — as well as open archiving — could have a "disastrous" impact on scientific publishing, possibly forcing some peer-reviewed journals to close.

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Improving Quality of Care: How the VA Outpaces Other Systems in Delivering Patient Care

Steven M. Asch, Elizabeth A. McGlynn, Mary M. Hogan, et al | RAND Corporation | December 21, 2004

In its 2001 report Crossing the Quality Chasm, the Institute of Medicine called for systematic reform to address shortfalls in U.S. health care quality. Recommended reforms included developing medical informatics infrastructure, a performance tracking system, and methods to ensure provider and manager accountability...How does the VA measure up against other U.S. health care providers? Read More »

Beaumont Hospital in Ireland starts pursuing open source solutions

Brian Fitzgerald & Tony Kenny | EC Joinup | September 30, 2004

This article describes the implementation of an information systems infrastructure using open source software (OSS) in a large Irish public sector organization, Beaumont Hospital. The study identifies the primary organizational drivers in Beaumont’s move to OSS, namely principle and pragmatism. Read More »

UN Meeting Urged to Back Open Access Science

David Dickson | SciDev.Net | December 7, 2003

Member governments of the United Nations are being asked this week to give their support to initiatives that offer free access to research results published in the electronic versions of scientific journals.

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