Cities are experimenting with releasing more public data, engaging with citizens on social networks, adopting open source software, and finding ways to use new technologies to work with their citizens. They've been doing it through the depth of the Great Recession, amidst aging infrastructure, spiraling costs and flat or falling budgets. Read More »

The VA just might be the hippest government agency around. First, it said it will allow employees to use the iPad and iPhone come October 1. And now, the agency has instituted a policy that favors workers using an array of social media tools – not just internally, either. Read More »

Continuing its string of acquisitions, General Dynamics IT on Tuesday announced that it will acquire Vangent. For the nearly $1 billion ticket, GDIT obtains Vangent, it’s [sic] 7,500 employees, and a lineup of products including electronic health records, data analytics, health informatics, and business-process-outsourcing solutions. The portfolio will build out GDIT’s HIT systems and Read More »

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is developing a set of guides to help system vendors deploy a standard for electronically reporting incidents of healthcare-associated infections to the agency’s National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN). Read More »

The view of HIT Standards maturity and adoption is one of the things that HIT Standards Committee has discussed this week. This is fantastic update since the original that I blogged about in July. Read More »

MEDSEEK, a portal developer, has announced the connection of WNC Health Network's health information exchange, WNC Data Link, to the Veterans Administration's Health Information Systems Technology Architecture (VistA). Read More »

In an effort to capitalize on the potential of open source, the Alembic Foundation has launched the Aurion project, an open source HIE platform that implements the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) standard services and content specifications...

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Open Source software reaches new heights with each passing year, but hardware has yet to be given the same treatment. Fact is, open hardware is as important as open source software. A number of the issues facing open source software and operating systems is due to lack to drivers or proprietary drivers for proprietary hardware. Read More »

The Veterans Affairs Department has selected Western New York to become a pilot community this fall for sharing veterans’ health records with private sector providers as part of the virtual lifetime electronic record (VLER).  Read More »