In 2011, the Department of Veterans Affairs officially moved its most critical software, the VistA electronic health record system, into open source by establishing the Open Source Electronic Health Record Alliance (OSEHRA). Along the way, VA officials solicited and followed advice from numerous open source experts, including Red Hat, Carnegie Mellon University and the Industry Advisory Council...

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

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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A recent article of mine celebrated a clever educational service offered on the Web by theUS Department of Health and Human Services. I ended with a list of three lessons for the health care field regarding usability of health IT Tools, which deserve further explanation. Communications can be improved by using the advanced features provided by the Web and mobile devices. In the HHS case, developers went to great lengths to provide a comfortable, pleasant experience to anyone who viewed their content, even if the viewers were visiting a different web site and the HHS content was merely embedded there.

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Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) appeal mostly to statisticians and researchers whose careers depend on access to data. But these programming tools are also a useful part of a Web that is becoming increasingly supple and sophisticated. I have written a series of articles about the use of APIs to share and run analytics on patient data, but today I’ll cover a cool use of an API developed by the Department of Health and Human Services for disseminating educational material. The locus for this activity started with the wealth of information created by the Centers for Disease Control for doctors, public health workers, and the general public. Striving to help the public understand vaccinations, West Nile fever, Ebola (when that was a major publicissue), and even everyday conditions such as diabetes, the CDC realized they had to make their content simple to embed in web sites for allthose audiences.

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The promise of device data pervades the health care field. It’s
intrinsic to patient-centered medical homes, it beckons clinicians who are enamored with hopes for patient engagement, and it causes data analysts in health care to salivate. This promise also drives the data aggregation services offered by Validic and just recently, the Shimmer integration tool from Open mHealth. But according to David Haddad, Executive Director and Co-Founder of Open mHealth, devices resist attempts to yield up their data to programmers and automated tools.

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Recently, I resorted to a rare economic argument in a health IT article, pointing out that it’s unfair to put the burden of high health care costs on the patients. Now 101 economists have come out publicly recommending that very injustice. Their analysis shows the deep reluctance of those who are supposed to guide our health care policy to admit how distorted the current system is, and how entrenched are the powerful forces that keep it from reforming...But in this case, the average patient has knowledge that these economists lack. The problems are also well known to anyone in the health care industry who has the courage and clarity of vision to acknowledge what’s going on. If we want the system to change, let’s put public pressure on the people who are actually responsible for the problems–not the hapless patient.

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