The chief technology officer for HHS said efforts to liberate health records and data within the federal space will spur innovation in the public and private sectors that improves Americans' health and health care. Read More »

Two megatrends are locking in: Massive incentive change and information liberation, says Todd Park, CTO of the US Department of Health and Human Services. The federal programs must lead the way in changing from fee-for-service to incentives for value in healthcare. Read More »

It could be that Sam Ramji is just an eternal optimist. While many free software advocates warn that the cloud could kill open source, because users won't have access to the source code, Ramji disagrees. He says that work is going on now to eliminate the legal liabilities of contributing to open source. Read More »

With the release of the movie Contagion, I thought it would be appropriate to post my cheat sheet on how to investigate a disease outbreak. Aspiring disease detectives take notes! Read More »

The Health and Human Services Department wants to use the "NOAA model" to bring down health care costs, its chief technology officer said Tuesday. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration "collects tons of weather data and publishes it online in machine-readable, downloadable form for anyone for free," HHS CTO Todd Park said. Read More »

Biopharma companies are pursuing open-innovation collaborations with an eye on speeding up research and discovery work. Academic and independent research institutions are also teaming up with industry to discover new treatments under this open-source model. Read More »

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT and the Health 2.0 entrepreneurial organization have opened a contest for developers to innovate with the popHealth tool beyond its reporting functions so healthcare providers can learn more about their patient populations and improve their care. Read More »

Some light was shed on the progress that the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has been making on its Virtual Lifetime Electronic Record (VLER) project at a National eHealth Collaborative (NeHC) webinar earlier this week. Read More »

The cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG) was launched in 2003 by the US National Cancer Institute with the aim of connecting research teams through the use of shared infrastructure and software to collect, analyse and share data. It was an ambitious project, and the issue it aimed to address was huge and far-reaching. Read More »

On Wednesday, Oct. 5, Todd Park, chief technology officer of the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) helped open the Merge Live 2011 Client Conference, a user-group conference sponsored by the Chicago-based Merge Healthcare, and taking place this week at the Sheraton Hotel and Towers in downtown Chicago. Read More »