News Clips

Last weekend, I [Salil] visited my parents who live in Hyderabad, a city in South India. During the trip, I initiated a conversation with an old family friend named Ghuraan Bi by simply asking how she was doing.  A slight lady in her 60s, the innocuous question seemed to trigger a barrage of emotions.

 Ghuraan Bi settled down on the floor and unbundled a small bag in which she stored betel leaves (paan) and betel nuts (supari). This was an indication that she was preparing for a long conversation, and then, she said something that immediately caught my attention. Read More »

Silver Hill Hospital of New Canaan, Connecticut, recently joined a select group of psychiatric hospitals in the United States that have implemented an electronic health record (EHR) system. Founded in 1931, Silver Hill Hospital is a 129-bed not-for-profit psychiatric hospital that provides inpatient and residential transitional living programs for adolescents and adults. Silver Hill brings particular expertise to the treatment of patients with dual psychiatric and substance use disorder diagnoses. Read More »

Buoyed by the rapid progress in trying to develop an affordable drug for tuberculosis (TB) through the open source platform, the country's premier science research organisation now plans to replicate the model for malaria. Central Drug Research Institute, Lucknow, will power the initiative.

Fifty laboratories across the country are working on the TB project. In an open source project, different laborataries work on different parts of it and then upload their findings on the worldwide web. The data can be accessed as long as the users give due credit to the researchers. Read More »

The open-source approach fosters collaboration among competitors and drives innovation. "This is an important milestone in our journey to achieve secure health information exchange, and it means that health care providers large and small will have an early option for electronic exchange of information supporting their most basic and frequently needed uses," Dr. David Blumenthal, national coordinator for health information technology, said at the press conference announcing the launch of Direct Project..

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As the PCAST Workgroup ponders the meaning of a Universal Exchange Language and Data Element Access Services (DEAS), it is exploring what it means to exchange data at the "atomic", "molecular", and document level.   See Wes Rishel's excellent blog defining these terms. Read More »

For the next few weeks, I’ll be writing about an idea that can make people healthier while bringing down health care costs, both in poor countries and in the United States.

The strategy is to move beyond doctors — to take the work of health care and shift down from doctors and nurses to lay people, peers and family.  In the United States and other wealthy countries, lay people can fill in the gaps in left by doctors’ care.  In poor countries, people with no or little formal medical training are successfully substituting for doctors and nurses.