The Homeland Security Department provided details about its plans to purchase a commercial electronic health record system to support medical care and public health services for aliens it has detained. The current method of recording patient health information is manual or stand-alone systems. Read More »

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is now offering an online tool for comparing hospitals that could be a major help for all consumers if it were to be extended throughout the American health care industry. The VA last November began posting hospital-specific information on patient outcomes at the nation's 152 VA medical facilities. Read More »

In the last two weeks I have had several enlightening conversations with organizations working with clients in various agriculture value chains. These informative meetings highlighted the challenge of a scattered value chain. Cotton ginneries, for example, hire field agents to buy cotton from smallholders. Read More »

The implications of the digital revolution for health and media will feature in the public health session of the Public Interest Journalism Foundation’s two-day Read More »

In its legal struggle with Google (GOOG), Oracle (ORCL) is arguing for a new understanding of copyright that would make all software, even open source, de-facto proprietary. Read More »

When President Barack Obama addressed the United Nations General Assembly last year, he called on world governments — including his own — to return this September with promises to be more transparent, fight corruption and get more people involved in civic life. Read More »

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) intends to make commercial cloud-based software-as-a-service collaborative tools available for its physicians, seeking to improve communications while also reducing data breaches. Read More »

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) plans to test commercial cloud-based collaboration tools to improve communications and reduce data breaches that have occurred from previous use of tools not approved by the department. Read More »

Privacy and communications issues surround planned pilot testing of cloud-based tools by the Department of Veterans Affairs that could impact as many as 134,000 VA medical workers. Specifically, the VA wants to move its Microsoft Exchange-based collaboration system to a cloud-based system, according to InformationWeek. Read More »

Playing the role of sometime-cartographers, healthcare policymakers and stakeholders have been working for several years to draft a new kind of national roadmap. Read More »