The Veterans Affairs Department is expected to launch a test program next week that would permit as many as 1,000 VA employees to use mobile smartphone and tablet devices to access the VA's information network, according to comments made by VA's Roger Baker, reported by Federal News Radio. Read More »

Veterans Affairs Department Chief Information Officer Roger Baker envisions development of an in-house application store for mobile computing, he said Wednesday at a press briefing, where he also announced that VA is on course to open up its network to smartphones and tablet computers by Monday. Read More »

Just as young businesses of most any sort must circumvent myriad challenges to succeed, health providers are encountering multiple roadblocks in the implementation of HIEs. At the core of those: financial sustainability. The root of many, perhaps, money is neither the only problem, nor the most trying. Read More »

While the Obama Administration's electronic health records program offers incentives for doctors and hospitals using e-records, change is slow. Only 17 percent of the nation uses electronic records, Weiner said, comparing this statistic with the Defense's 100 percent use of electronic records. The health IT space, however, is at an exciting tipping point, he said. Read More »

Aliss (access to local information to support self management) is an attempt to make Scots better managers of their own health by ensuring local information can be found easily online. Read More »

Chas Bountra, chief scientist at the international Structural Genomics Consortium, and Sage Bionetworks' Stephen Friend tell Reuters' Ben Hirschler that they're in the process of rounding up backers for a project dubbed Arch2POCM, a patent-free approach to early-stage research. Read More »

Open-source computing looks at software as a public good. Programs are measured in pride over profit.  Programs are provided with their source code free-of-charge, allowing users to freely modify the work, provided the terms of the license (usually attribution and licensing the derived code under the same open-source license) are met. Read More »

The marriage between open source technology and electronic health records is at first blush, greeted by many with skepticism regarding robustness and efficacy. In truth, persistent myths obscure an intriguing reality: Open source EHR systems are not only possible but already in place. Read More »

[A]fter more than 13 years in business, it recently dawned on us [Kitware] that maybe we are doing something right, and others might be interested in how we've done it. To that end, we've been working on a succinct, single page position statement describing Kitware's Open Source Mission Statement. Read More »

Most people do not think of software developers as being high on the “social” scale. In fact, the (misinformed) stereotype for a typical developer is that of the introverted geek. But in many ways, particularly with open source developers, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Read More »