To Your Health Deadly Fungal Infection That Doctors Have Been Fearing Now Reported in U.S.

Lena H. Sun | Washington Post | March 10, 2017

Nearly three dozen people in the United States have been diagnosed with a deadly and highly drug-resistant fungal infection since federal health officials first warned U.S. clinicians last June to be on the lookout for the emerging pathogen that has been spreading around the world. The fungus, a strain of a kind of yeast known as Candida auris, has been reported in a dozen countries on five continents starting in 2009, when it was found in an ear infection in a patient in Japan. Since then, the fungus has been reported in Colombia, India, Israel, Kenya, Kuwait, Pakistan, South Korea, Venezuela and the United Kingdom...

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AHIP Speakers: Soaring Drug Prices Reach Crisis Stage

Ryan Basen | MedPage Today | March 9, 2017

On the same day that President Trump met with Democratic leaders to discuss controlling prescription drug costs, physician advocates and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) debated and vented about drug costs at the America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) National Health Policy Conference. "The system is broken right now," Marilyn Tavenner, AHIP's CEO and former administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, said Wednesday...

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Google to Create Blockchain Style System for Healthcare to Track Patient Data

Gautham | News BTC | March 11, 2017

Ever since Bitcoin’s underlying blockchain technology became popular, many businesses are trying to find uses for it in their operations. Alphabet, Google’s spin-off holding company is also one such company working on creating a “blockchain-style” system for the healthcare industry. Alphabet’s DeepMind Health has announced its plans to use a distributed ledger-like system to keep tabs on how every bit of patient data is being used. The blockchain like tool goes by the name – Verifiable Data Audit which will be released sometime later this year...

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Best Health and Fitness Tools for Linux

Avimanyu Bandyopadhyay | It's F.O.S.S. | November 20, 2016

In our busy work schedule as Linux professionals or home-users, it becomes essential to keep track of our health as studies have shown that continued usage of sitting in front of a PC is absolutely not recommended for long hours. It hampers the productivity. While we already covered productivity tips and tools for Linux earlier, today we are going to look for some Linux tools that will help you to stay healthy while working on Linux. There are plenty of mobile apps to help keep us stay fit and healthy by getting us used to ergonomic habits. You can always use them, but you can always benefit from some native Linux apps. In this article, we have compiled a list of the best health Linux apps we could find...

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The Real Story About COTS for the VA

Deanne Clark | FCW | March 14, 2017

There has been a tremendous amount of news coverage of recent congressional hearings about the need for the Department of Veterans Affairs to replace its existing electronic health record technology. What's even more remarkable is how one-sided the discussions and the reporting have been. For anyone without a background in healthcare IT, it would seem like a slam dunk that moving to a commercial off the shelf electronic health record solution is the best way forward for the VA...

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Health Care in a Post-Privacy World

Someone knows you are reading this. They know what device you are using.  They know if you make it all the way to the end (which I hope you do!).  They may be watching you read it, and listening to you.  They know exactly where you are right now, and where you've been. As FBI Director James Comey recently proclaimed, "there is no thing as absolute privacy in America." Director Comey was speaking about legal snooping, authorized by the courts and carried out by law enforcement agencies, but, in many ways, that may be the least of our privacy concerns...

Open Source in Death and Beyond

Benjamin Franklin was known to say, "In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes." There are open source solutions for completing your taxes, such as Open Tax Solver, but what about the other side of that quote? What does open source have to do with death? It's quite a lively subject, it seems. I know you are just dying to know, so let's dig in. We all experience death and it becomes a long drawn out process of paperwork and burial rituals that we hope doesn't weigh too much on the loved ones we've left behind. The open source community has given this process some thought, not surprisingly. They've lent their mindshare towards rethinking how to deal with that final episode of life. It turns out, not only is open source great in life, but it comes in handy in death, too...

34th VistA Community Meeting

Event Details
Type: 
Conference
Date: 
March 20, 2017 (All day) - March 22, 2017 (All day)
Location: 
Regenstrief Institute Indianapolis, IN
United States

The VistA community will be gathering at Regenstrief Institute in Indianapolis, Indiana, for the 34th VistA Community Meeting (VCM). The goal of VistA Community Meetings is for those involved in the VistA Community to network & collaborate, i.e., to share ideas and work, with the objective of moving VistA & the VistA community forward.

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The Difference Between Open Source Development and Deployment

For many years, I was a Smalltalk programmer, and that experience gives me a different viewpoint from which to observe ideas in the programming world. For example, the idea that source code should be stored in text files took some getting used to. We as programmers often make a distinction between "development" and "deployment," specifically the idea that we develop software in one place using tools that are different from the place and tools that we use after we deploy the software. In the Smalltalk world, there is no such difference...

Could Billion Dollar EHRs Bankrupt the Country?

Earlier this year, Monmouth University conducted a survey to determine which issues were most important as the country transitions to a new presidential administration. Among all the potential concerns Americans now face, the issue that rises to the top is healthcare costs. How acute a concern is this? It’s significant enough that, when asked the open-ended question, “turning to issues closer to home, what is the biggest concern facing your family right now?”, 25 percent of respondents made it their number one issue...