News Clips

Visual Search Goes Open Source

Press Release | Zappen | August 17, 2017

Visual Search is now open source. Zappen® and Yes Exactly, Inc.® today announced a FOSS production-ready framework for mobile application development utilizing computer vision, image recognition, and augmented reality (AR) technologies. Previously, working implementations of visual search have only been available through proprietary APIs such as that offered by Google Lens (still in beta)...

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Personal Connected Health Alliance Enhances Continua Test Tool, Enabling Authentic, Clinical-Grade Interoperability

Press Release | Personal Connected Health Alliance | August 17, 2017

The Personal Connected Health Alliance (PCHAlliance) today announced it has approved a new Continua Test Tool (CTT), adding in several new enhancements based on its Continua Design Guidelines. The Continua Design Guidelines and the new CTT continues to scale enabling authentic clinical-grade interoperability and now includes chronic disease remote monitoring for diabetes care, hypertension, heart failure and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD). The Continua Test Tool helps PCHAlliance members achieve Continua Certification for their products ensuring that their data is clearly understood within an electronic health record (EHR)...

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Questions About The FDA’s New Framework For Digital Health

Nathan G. Cortez, Nicolas Terry, and I. Glenn Cohen | Health Affairs Blog | August 16, 2017

In June 2017, the new Food and Drug Administration (FDA) commissioner Scott Gottlieb pre-announced his agency’s Digital Health Innovation Action Plan that indicates notable shifts in the agency’s approach to digital health technologies. This plan is an important step in FDA regulation of this area, a process that began in 2011 with a draft guidance, followed by significant congressional actions. The new changes should not be surprising, given critiques published by Gottlieb prior to re-joining the FDA...

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Where's The Next Big Thing In Tech? Try A Government Funded Lab

Dr. Nadia Carlsten | Forbes | August 16, 2017

Research from government and university labs has brought us technologies as ubiquitous as the internet, microwaves, and GPS. But the path from laboratory bench to market success goes uphill, and it’s a steep hill at that. Most projects never make it out of the lab, and instead of helping us stream Youtube videos or warm up leftovers, are left to languish, unused, forever. It’s a cruel irony, given that today’s tech economy is driven by the relentless search for innovation. But this uphill path is not insurmountable, especially not with the right partner to guide the way...

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Print No Evil: Three-Layer Technique Helps Secure Additive Manufacturing

Press Release | Georgia Institute of Technology | August 16, 2017

Additive manufacturing, also known as 3-D printing, is replacing conventional fabrication processes in critical areas ranging from aerospace components to medical implants. But because the process relies on software to control the 3-D printer, additive manufacturing could become a target for malicious attacks – as well as for unscrupulous operators who may cut corners. Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology and Rutgers University have developed a three-layer system to verify that components produced using additive manufacturing have not been compromised...

What's Your Gut Instinct?

Press Release | University of California San Diego | August 16, 2017

It’s no secret that diet, exercise, medicine usage, and other habits affect your health and lifestyle, but how they do so is different for everyone. The Internet is filled with opinions on the matter. A quick Google search on “how do diet, exercise, medicine usage, and other habits affect your health and lifestyle” yields more than 3,000,000 results! A new project at UC San diego has set out to help alleviate some of the confusion by creating an educational platform for people to ask and answer gut health-related questions...

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New Genomic Data Platform to Focus on Children’s Health Issues

Press Release | UChicago Medicine | August 15, 2017

Investigators from the University of Chicago Medicine will play a central role in a five-year, $14.8 million effort by the National Institutes of Health, contingent upon available funding, to improve the understanding of inherited diseases. The project, known as the Gabriella Miller Kids First pediatric data resource center, will be a multi-centered effort led by investigators at the Center for Data Driven Discovery in Biomedicine at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP)...

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A New Pothole on the Health Interoperability Superhighway

Adrian Gropper | The Health Care Blog | August 15, 2017

On July 24, the new administration kicked off their version of interoperability work with a public meeting of the incumbent trust brokers. They invited the usual suspects Carequality, CARIN Alliance, CommonWell, Digital Bridge, DirectTrust, eHealth Exchange, NATE, and SHIEC with the goal of driving for an understanding of how these groups will work with each other to solve information blocking and longitudinal health records as mandated by the 21st Century Cures Act...

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Meet the Family Doctor with a Rare Practice — He Only Makes House Calls

Eun Kyung Kim | Today | August 15, 2017

When it comes to Ernest Brown's medical practice, the doctor is definitely not in. Ever. That’s a good thing for his patients, however, because it usually means he’s out visiting them. Brown, 49, is a family practitioner who only makes house calls. That means he travels to patients — at their homes, work sites, or hotel rooms if they’re visiting from out of town...

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OpenEMR Launches Easy Install Option for Amazon's Cloud Services

Press Release | OEMR | August 15, 2017

OpenEMR, the most popular open source electronic health records (EHR) and medical practice management solution, upgraded their cloud-services capability with the latest 5.0.0.4 release. OpenEMR can now be operated as an out of the box cloud-services solution using Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform. With several simple steps, end users can get their OpenEMR on the cloud and take advantage of all the benefits that the cloud provides.

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Academic Biomedical Research Community Should Take Action to Build Resilience to Disasters

Press Release | The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine | August 10, 2017

The academic biomedical research community should improve its ability to mitigate and recover from the impacts of disasters, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The consequences of recent disasters, from hurricanes to cyberattacks, have shown that the investments of the U.S. federal government and other research sponsors -- which total about $27 billion annually -- are not uniformly secure. The report recommends 10 steps that academic research institutions, researchers, and research sponsors should take to bolster the resilience of academic biomedical research.

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Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?

Jean M. Twenge | The Atlantic | August 10, 2017

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”...

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Ignite Accelerator Announces 14 Teams Selected for the Seventh Round of the Internal Innovation Training Program

Press Release | U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) | August 9, 2017

The Office of the Chief Technology Officer’s HHS IDEA Lab has announced the seventh cohort of teams selected for the HHS Ignite Accelerator. The HHS Ignite Accelerator is a program that spurs innovative problem-solving across the Department by encouraging and enabling HHS staff (at all levels) to experiment with novel means for addressing key Departmental challenges...

2017 Massry Prize Honors Microbiome Research Pioneers

Press Release | UC San Diego | August 9, 2017

Microbiome researchers Rob Knight, PhD, University of California San Diego, Jeffrey Gordon, MD, Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, and Norman Pace, PhD, University of Colorado Boulder, will share this year’s Massry Prize, splitting the $200,000 honorarium. These researchers lead a field that works to produce a detailed understanding of microbiomes — distinct constellations of bacteria, viruses and other microorganisms that live within and around us — and methods for manipulating microbiomes for the benefit of human and environmental health.

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Regenstrief Developing and Testing Novel, Real-World Automated Patient Identification

Press Release | Indiana University | August 8, 2017

Matching patients to their medical records from multiple health care providers is critical to medical care, but can be challenging to accomplish because their records can be incomplete or inaccurate, and patients often share similar names. How, for example, to match medical records to the correct “John Jones” or “Maria Garcia” from their primary care doctor's office, the lab which processed tests the doctor ordered, the imaging center where they had a cancer screening, the out of town hospital where they were treated while on vacation? What if a name is recorded as James at one site and as Jim at another? And what if a common or uncommon name is mistyped at one or more places?...