San Francisco-based uBiome, which makes a direct-to-consumer microbial genomic testing kit, has closed on a $22 million Series B funding round, led by 8VC with additional funding from Slow Ventures, Stanford’s StartX Fund and various angel investors. The funding will be used to deploy uBiome’s new testing kit, SmartGut, a sequencing-based clinical microbiome screening test. With an at-home collection kit, SmartGut aims to give individuals and their doctors access to a comprehensive screening test to weed out important microorganisms (which can only be detected through DNA sequencing) that could be causing health distress...

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The White House today is announcing the launch of Code.gov, a website that shows off U.S. government open-source projects and offers relevant resources for government agencies. By launching this site the White House is hoping to improve public access to the government’s software and encourage the reuse of software across government agencies...

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The results for nearly half of all clinical trials conducted by big drug makers during the last decade have not been published, and one company — Ranbaxy Laboratories — has not published findings for any of the nearly three dozen trials conducted in the past 10 years, according to a new online tool. The tool was launched Thursday by AllTrials, a consortium of researchers and medical journals that has been pushing the pharmaceutical industry to do a better job of disclosing clinical trial data...

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The launch of the Precision Medicine Initiative in 2015, along with this year's Cancer Moonshot, have touted the promise of genomic data for population health and more personalized diagnosis. As a result, more consumers are seeking genetic testing and more researchers are contributing to these initiatives. But the healthcare industry isn't necessarily prepared for this shift. The popularity of genetic testing doesn't come without risks, according to Mayo Clinic's recent report, The Promise and Peril of Precision Medicine...

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Electronic health records certainly enjoy their share of controversy and criticism. The software is hard for clinicians to use, the data therein more often than not is difficult to exchange with other systems and it appears there is little relief in sight. So it's not entirely surprising that even while EHRs are storming toward near-ubiquity among healthcare providers many forward-looking health IT professionals are already predicting the post-EHR era...

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Burke Mamlin, MD, and Paul Biondich, MD, of the Regenstrief Institute and Indiana University School of Medicine, will receive the 2016 Donald A.B. Lindberg Award for Innovation in Informatics from the American Medical Informatics Association for their work on open source software. AMIA's Lindberg award recognizes individuals for technological, research, or educational contribution that advances biomedical informatics...

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