News Clips
Military health costs up 300%
The cost of military health care, up 300% in the past decade, is eating a giant hole in the Pentagon's budget, according to a report released Monday by a group of defense experts. The Defense Department expects to spend $52.5 billion on health care in 2012, a 300% increase since 2001, the report says.
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How Can eHealth Help the Poorest? (Part 1, mHealth and Entrepreneurship)
Hassan Masum, GHI’s Aman Bhandari, Jody Ranck and Alex Jadad set out to ask the world’s health, technology and development experts: “How can eHealth help the poorest?” Today is the first of a 3 part guest series on mHealth and Entrepreneurship.
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Developers and Designers Dive Into the Open Data Ocean
We planned and developed a community health information query system that linked community-based health data with data from the Health Indicators Warehouse (HIW). The HIW is a data hub with standardized health outcome and health determinant indicators along with associated evidence-based interventions. What makes the HIW so awesome is that it provides a user-friendly interface to national, state, and community health indicators data.
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Mobile Technology: Small Wonder
Mobile phones have served as a catalyst in the process of global integration of communities. Handsets—even simple ones with SMS and voice capability—are used to collect information from, and disseminate it to areas which are hard to reach by traditional methods.
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Portland Software Developers Ratchet Up Their Open Source Ambitions
[Luke Kanies] was 29 when he created an open source software tool called Puppet for managing data centers and other big computer networks. His project took off, winning adoption from a community of like-minded enthusiasts who deployed it at Twitter, Google, the New York Stock Exchange and many other organizations.
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Free and Simple GIS as Appropriate for Health Mapping in a Low Resource Setting: a Case Study in Eastern Indonesia
Despite the demonstrated utility of GIS for health applications, there are perceived problems in low resource settings: GIS software can be expensive and complex; input data are often of low quality. This study aimed to test the appropriateness of new, inexpensive and simple GIS tools in poorly resourced areas of a developing country.
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Carrots, Sticks and Digital Health Records
The United States is embarking this year on a grand experiment in the government-driven adoption of technology — ambitious, costly and potentially far-reaching in impact. The goal is to improve health care and to reduce its long-term expense by moving the doctors and hospitals from ink and paper into the computer age — through a shift to digital patient records.
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OpenClinica Update is User-Driven
The newly released beta version of EDC/data-management platform OpenClinica 3.1 boasts a "completely rewritten" version of Extract Data. It's now based around a plug-in architecture.
It turns out the various ways in which users organize, format and present data are "tremendously diverse and often conflicting," says OpenClinica provider Akaza Research, in an announcement. Read More »
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Tech Views
It has been three and a half years since Software Tech News addressed the topic of Open Source Software (OSS). In that time, as Kane McLean writes in his article, “Military Open Source Community Growing”, its use in the Department of Defense (DoD) has grown significantly, widely adopted and implemented in a variety of systems.
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They've Got an App for That
There's a law requiring providers of federal funded drug and alcohol treatment services to obtain a patient's consent before disclosing their medical records to another provider or to a health information exchange. Does your electronic health record enable you to segregate those records, store those patient consent directives and remind you that you need to obtain patient consent to move patient-constrained medical information?
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Texting As Killer, As Savior
Any driver knows the dangers of texting. Yet this practice has become commonplace. Dr. Robin Landa recently challenged students to design an ad campaign about the dangers of texting and driving.... But texting can also save lives, even for the illiterate. Let me explain.
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Prime Minister Puts Weight Behind Open Source Software Push [UK]
The Prime Minister's office has put its weight behind a drive to make the government's open source policy overcome the obstacles that have seen it flounder for the last two years. Word of Prime Minister Cameron's intervention came as the Cabinet Office unveiled a raft of measures to designed to fulfil the coalition government's policy commitment to "create a level playing field for open source".
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National eHealth Collaborative Reveals Results Of Stakeholder Survey
National eHealth Collaborative (NeHC) recently announced the results of its first ever Stakeholder Survey, identifying privacy and security, sustainability and funding as the top three pain points in health information exchange (HIE).
VA, DOD Will Decide on Common EHR Method in March
The Veterans Affairs and Defense Departments will decide by late March the technical method they will pursue to create a common electronic health record. The VA and DOD secretaries are committed to do this together and make the best decision for their two departments as jointly as possible on how they can move forward to a common electronic health system (EHR), said Roger Baker, VA CIO.
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Government IT Suppliers Claim Procurement System Excludes Open Source [UK]
Systems integrators took on a disapproving audience of open source advocates this week after the government told its biggest suppliers to explain why its open source policy has been thwarted for so long.
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