News Clips

9 Healthcare Tech Trends in "The New Year of Uncertainty", Black Book Survey Results

Press Release | Black Book Market Research | December 20, 2016

Black Book’s year end C-suite polls reveal the brakes being pumped on advanced software acquisitions due to political and funding uncertainty that is menacing long term strategies and the willingness to purchase some IT products and services in the first half of the New Year. Policy changes in the wake of a full or partial repeal of Obamacare may create new demands on healthcare enterprises that will likely divert capital and resources toward getting ready for value based care. This uncertainty, as recognized by 9 of 10 hospital leaders surveyed, will at a best decelerate decision-making on planned or ongoing initiatives, and at worst drain IT investment dollars for a protracted period of time, according to Doug Brown, Managing Partner of Black Book...

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TB Drug Project Gets a Lease of Life

Jacob Koshy | The Hindu | December 20, 2016

There is also interest from BRICS countries to commit funds for research, says ICMR chief Read More »

"Industry Will Not Support Open-Ended Science, So Govt Must"

Aradhna Wal | CNN-News18 | December 20, 2016

On December 11, News18 exposed how India’s clinical trials and drug discovery process is skewed towards diseases like cancer while ignoring the top killers of the country like TB, diarrhea and Kala Azar. Responding to that, Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, Director-General of the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR) told News18 there was a need to support indigenous research in India. In this interview to News18’s Aradhna Wal, Dr Swaminathan says India needs a 10-year vision on drug research...

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Thinfilm to Demonstrate ‘Smart Beer’ and ‘Smart Medical Devices’ at CES 2017

Press Release | Thin Film Electronics ASA | December 20, 2016

Thin Film Electronics ASA (“Thinfilm”), a global leader in NFC (near field communication) smart-packaging solutions using printed electronics, will demonstrate its innovative technology at CES in Las Vegas, January 5-8, 2017. In addition, Erwan Le Roy, Thinfilm’s EVP Business Development & GM NFC Solutions and Smart Sensor Products, will deliver a presentation on Thinfilm’s NFC mobile marketing solutions and the critical role they can play in expanding the Internet of Things (IoT)...

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Open Source Libraries for Health Analytics

Andy Oram | EMR & HIPAA | December 19, 2016

According to Health Catalyst’s Director of Data Science Levi Thatcher, the main author of the project, these tools are tried and tested. Many of them are based on popular free software libraries in the general machine learning space: he mentions in particular the Python Scikit-learn library and the R language’s caret and and data.table libraries. The contribution of Health Catalyst is to build on these general tools to produce libraries tailored for the needs of health care facilities, with their unique populations, workflows, and billing needs. The company has used the libraries to deploy models related to operational, financial, and clinical questions. Eventually, Thatcher says, most of Health Catalyst’s applications will use predictive analytics based on healthcare.ai, and now other programmers can too...

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athenahealth CMO: Our Big Moonshot for 2017 is EHR ROI

Tom Sullivan | Healthcare IT News | December 19, 2016

Almost every healthcare CFO signed off on a big check to implement electronic health records software in the past six years. Not because they knew it would bring the same financial return as a shiny new MRI machine or building to house a slick surgery center, but instead because the federal government said they must. athenahealth chief medical officer Todd Rothenhaus, MD, made that assertion in a pre-HIMSS17 interview...

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Dell EMC to Join Open Source OpenSDS Project to Advance Storage Interoperability, Contribute Code

Press Release | The Linux Foundation | December 19, 2016

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit advancing professional open source management for mass collaboration, today welcomed Dell EMC to the OpenSDS Project. The OpenSDS community is forming to address software-defined storage integration challenges with the goal of driving enterprise adoption of open standards. As part of its support for the open source project, Dell EMC is also contributing its first project to OpenSDS, the CoprHD SouthBound SDK (SB SDK), to help promote storage interoperability and compatibility...

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VA Lays Out Plans for Cloud-Based Digital Health Platform

Greg Slabodkin | Health Data Management | December 16, 2016

The Department of Veterans Affairs has developed a blueprint for a cloud-based technology platform that will integrate veteran data from VA, military and commercial electronic health records, as well as apps, devices and wearables, so that the information is available to providers in real time. While the VA is still finalizing plans for how it implements the Digital Health Platform (DHP), the agency has a strategy in place that is seen as the future path for providing next-generation healthcare to millions of the nation's veterans...

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In-Depth: All the News from the Connected Health Conference 2016

Staff Writer | Mobi Health News | December 16, 2016

This week, the Connected Health Conference in National Harbor, Maryland brought together stakeholders and thought leaders in digital and connected health. MobiHealthNews covered the two-day event this week -- links to our coverage from Monday and Tuesday are at the bottom of this roundup... In a panel moderated by Dr. Joe Kvedar, the VP of Connected Health at Partner’s Healthcare, Alden Doerner Rinaldi, medical director at Mount Auburn Hospital and Ronan Wisdom, global lead for connected health at Accenture, talked about how the role of digital tools is changing in healthcare...

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Google Joins the Open Source Cloud Foundry Foundation

Frederic Lardinois | TechCrunch | December 16, 2016

Google is joining the Cloud Foundry Foundation as a Gold member. To be fair, this doesn’t necessarily come as a major surprise, especially given that Google recently hired the foundation’s former CEO Sam Ramji. Other Cloud Foundry Gold-level members include Accenture, Allstate, CenturyLink, Huawai, Phillips and Verizon. It’s worth noting that Google — unlike Cisco, IBM, SAP and others — didn’t opt for the highest level of sponsorship (platinum), though...

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A Blueprint to End Mass Incarceration

Matt Ford | The Atlantic | December 16, 2016

Much of the debate surrounding mass incarceration is centered on its statistics: The United States has 5 percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of its prisoners; American prisons hold more inmates than Soviet gulags at their peak; a greater proportion of black Americans are imprisoned than black South Africans under apartheid. Now there’s a new figure worth remembering: 39 percent...

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Study: Elite Scientists Can hold Back Science

Brian Resnick | VOX | December 15, 2016

Recently, researchers at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) released a working paper — titled, "Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time?" — that puts Planck's principle to the test. Sifting through citations in the PubMed database, they found evidence that when a prominent researcher suddenly dies in an academic subfield, a period of new ideas and innovation follow. The NBER team identified 12,935 "elite" scientists — based on the amount of funding they receive, how many times they've published, how many patents they invented, or whether they were members of the National Academies of Sciences or the Institute of Medicine...

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Distributed Ledgers, the Next step in Patient Generated Health Data (PGHD) Including Environmental Data

Jeff Brandt | LinkedIn Pulse | December 15, 2016

Soon we will be able to access thousands of datapoint into our lives, many will reflect our environment and health. The HHS Idea Labs held a Entrepreneur-in-Residence webinar on December 13, 2016, for recruiting an software architect to assist the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) in collecting employment data as it pertains to a persons health. They wish to share/store the collected data in the EHR. Onerous at best, because most EHR today do not have API for uploading data and HL7 standards do not currently provide for discreet PGHD data...

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Germany-Wide Consortium of Research Libraries Announce Boycott of Elsevier Journals Over Open Access

Cory Doctorow | Boing Boing | December 15, 2016

Germany's DEAL project, which includes over 60 major research institutions, has announced that all of its members are canceling their subscriptions to all of Elsevier's academic and scientific journals, effective January 1, 2017. The boycott is in response to Elsevier's refusal to adopt "transparent business models" to "make publications more openly accessible". Elsevier is notorious even among academic publishers for its hostility to open access, but it also publishes some of the most prestigious journals in many fields. This creates a vicious cycle, where the best publicly funded research is published in Elsevier journals, which then claims ownership over the research...

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Surescripts Patient Survey Reveals Patient Demand Access to their Medical Records

Press Release | Surescripts | December 14, 2016

Health data-sharing technology exists today, yet patients are increasingly frustrated with their healthcare experience, according to a recent survey by Surescripts, the nation’s leading health information network. The 2016 Connected Care and the Patient Experience survey found that patients are particularly dissatisfied with the lack of a central location for their health records as well as the difficulty in accessing and sharing those records. Plus, they’re expecting to see digitized care settings in the very near future through the use of telehealth and other technologies...

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