News Clips

A year after roll-out, the Island Health electronic health record (EHR) project being piloted at Nanaimo Regional General Hospital (NRGH) is abandoning electronic processes and returning to pen and paper. An alert reader forwarded me this note from the Island Health CEO, sent out Friday afternoon: "The Nanaimo Medical Staff Association Executive has requested that the CPOE tools be suspended while improvements are made. An Island Health Board meeting was held yesterday to discuss the path forward. The Board and Executive take the concerns raised by the Medical Staff Association seriously, and recognize the need to have the commitment and confidence of the physician community in using advanced EHR tools such as CPE"...

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Health Level Seven International (HL7), the global authority for interoperability in healthcare information technology with members in 55 countries, today announced that the HL7 FHIR Foundation is now working with Google to support HL7's Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard and the FHIR community using Google Cloud Platform. Google Cloud Platform plans to work with the HL7 FHIR Foundation to advance the health data interoperability efforts of both organizations by providing the underlying cloud technology for the HL7 FHIR developer community. This collaboration will provide the FHIR community with resources to learn, create and accelerate real life FHIR implementations...

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...Healthcare NExT, a new initiative to dramatically transform health care, will deeply integrate greenfield research and health technology product development, as well as establish a new model at Microsoft for strategic health industry partnerships. Through these collaborations between health care partners and Microsoft’s AI and Research organization, our goal is to enable a new wave of innovation and impact using Microsoft’s deep AI expertise and global-scale cloud.This initiative includes investments in resources for our partners to capture new opportunities to apply AI to healthcare, such as the Microsoft AI in Health Partner Alliance, an expanding group of partners focused on advancing health technology. Alliance members will receive unique training and access to Microsoft technologies, engineering expertise and data sets. Read More »

The researchers from Imperial College London analysed 20 pharmacies that were available for UK citizens to access online. This is one of the few studies to have examined the online availability of antibiotics and to have explored the potential effects on public health. The research is published in Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy. Antibiotics are classed as prescription only medicines in the UK, meaning they cannot legally be sold to consumers without a valid prescription...

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​Want to know how your business can get the most from open source? This free ebook can help. Developers know that open source is great. Even Microsoft is now on the open-source bandwagon. But, outside of the IT department, many companies don't understand why and how open source can help their businesses. The Linux Foundation has the answers you need in its new free Open Source Software Basics ebook. "Organizations have begun to realize that as they adopt more open-source software, they need to establish processes for everything from selecting software -- to deploying it, to ensuring license compliance," said Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin at the Open Source Leadership Summit in Lake Tahoe, Calif.

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An international collaboration led by scientists from The University of Western Australia has uncovered the three-dimensional molecular structure of a protein, called EptA, which is responsible for multi-drug resistance in many disease-causing bacteria. Multi-drug resistance in bacteria has been identified as a major worldwide public health concern by the World Health Organization. Multi-drug resistant bacteria are responsible for approximately 700,000 deaths per year, a figure which the WHO says could reach 10 million by the year 2050...

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