Longtime Microsoft executive Steven VanRoekel is set to become the United States' second federal CIO, replacing outgoing incumbent Vivek Kundra. The White House announced on Thursday that President Barack Obama intends to appoint VanRoekel, who left his post as senior director of Microsoft's Windows Server and Tools Division in 2009 after 15 years at the firm to become managing director of Read More »

Vivek Kundra, the Federal CIO, is leaving government for academia, and today a new Federal CIO was named. Below, you’ll find a letter from Open Source for America wishing Mr. Kundra well. Read More »

The United States needs a national system of public-health surveillance to improve prevention and treatment of widespread chronic diseases, according to the Institute of Medicine. And that system should take advantage of all the information available in electronic medical records, insurance claims, patient-compiled data, and even death records. Read More »

The interview below, with Scott Lundstrom, group vice president for IDC Health Insights, first appeared as a video presentation. To help guide healthcare organizations as they consider going forward with open source software, Red Hat, Inc. posed the following questions to Scott.

Q: What healthcare industry trends are removing costs from organizations’ IT infrastructures? Read More »

Imaging analysis exists for clinical applications in many other organs, but there has not been as much funding to develop post-processing for those applications, which consequently tend to lag behind neuroimaging applications. But that doesn’t mean that neuronal image data analysis technologies cannot be improved. Read More »

Steven VanRoekel, a onetime speech and strategy assistant to Microsoft founder Bill Gates, is the new federal chief information officer, replacing Vivek Kundra. President Obama announced Thursday the appointment of VanRoekel, who joined the administration in 2009 as managing director of the Federal Commun Read More »

A five-year health IT-supported Medicare demonstration project that helped shape the accountable care organization (ACO) model being promoted today has shown what government officials say is significant improvement in care, while also saving Medicare millions of dollars. Read More »

U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) medical centers are now included in the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) Hospital Compare Web site, which measures hospital quality based on outcomes of care. Read More »

The mobile phone is becoming the most pervasive technology in Africa and in the Third World in general. It is poised to prove the most robust means for the powerless to voice out. Read More »