Over the past few months, I’ve been in England, China, Denmark, New Zealand, and Canada. Each of them is rethinking their healthcare IT strategy and is not entirely satisfied with past progress. I’m often asked by senior government officials to help harmonize IT strategy at the country level. That I can do. I’m also asked to discuss the US Presidential campaign, but that defies rational explanation. I frequently say that healthcare IT issues are the same all over the world. Here’s a few common observations..
Capital One Introduces Blockchain and Analytics for Healthcare
Jack McCarthy | Healthcare IT News | October 25, 2016
Credit card and retail banking company Capital One revealed a handful of partnerships with several digital technology providers for its Treasury Management services — including a blockchain-based claims management solution for healthcare clients and another that uses new analytics processes to estimate healthcare patient costs. “We're seeing unprecedented transformation in the payments space as rapid advances in digital technology are reimagining the client experience,” Capital One executive vice president Patrick Moore said in a statement...
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UK's Development Agency Funds Frontier Technologies to Development Challenges
By Anita Makri | November 3, 2016
The three-year Frontier Technology Livestreaming initiative was launched this week (1 November) at the agency's headquarters in London, United Kingdom, along with a report that singles out 10 technologies that fit its definition of 'frontier'. These are technologies with the potential to "displace existing processes" and "reshape industry and communications, and provide urgently-needed solutions to global challenges like climate change", according to the report...
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Writing an Academic Paper? Try Fidus Writer
By D Ruth Bavousett | November 2, 2016
The Fidus Writer online editor is especially for academics who need to write papers in collaboration with other authors, and it includes special tools for managing citations, formulas, and bibliographies. If you're writing an academic paper by yourself, you have a lot of choices for tools to edit your document. Some of them even take care of making your footnotes and bibliographies come out in the right format. But writing collaboratively is harder, for lots of reasons. You could use Google Docs, ownCloud, or even Dropbox to share the document, but then you lose useful citation-management tools...
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On the Road
By John D. Halamka, MD | November 2, 2016
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Microsoft Eyes Hybrid Open Source Approach to Public Sector Work
Neil Merrett | Government Computing | October 24, 2016
Microsoft is increasingly looking at a hybrid approach that takes advantage of both proprietary enterprise IT and open source technologies for public sector projects to better meet the needs of customers in a multi-platform technology environment. Michael Wignall, national technology officer at Microsoft UK, said that despite being a company long associated with proprietary software and technology changing user needs had facilitated a switch towards providing solutions that offer at least some open source components in the area of Android devices and other platforms...
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Will Your DNA Become Your Own Medical Record
By Kim Bellard | November 1, 2016
It seems very likely that, within the foreseeable future, you will be able to have your DNA sequenced in near real-time, analyzed for defects/mutations, and have therapies specifically tailored to your results -- possibly even actually editing your genes/DNA. This is, after all, the goal of Precision Medicine. What would make this even cooler is that, as long as we're reading your DNA, your entire medical history is also being read -- maybe from the cloud, but maybe from synthetic DNA that you've had implanted, or even from your own DNA, if we start writing directly to it. And, of course, these DNA records would be updated in near real-time as well. Talk about owning your own data!
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Open Source Drives Companies to Change Hiring and Development
By Bruce Momjian | November 1, 2016
"Do I want to play with this open source thing?" This was the question most people asked 20 years ago when I started reviewing PostgreSQL bug fixes and assembling like-minded database colleagues to help start the PostgreSQL Global Development Group. It's mind-blowing to see how much things have changed. Today, not becoming a follower of some open source community almost means you're cobaling yourself—excluding yourself from the reality of how organizations use open software today. As engineers, we always want to keep up with the latest technologies not only to satisfy our desire to create and innovate, but also to remain marketable in a business world where products and technology constantly evolve. What's happened with the open source movement is different...
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'Get the Insurance Companies the Hell Out' of Healthcare System
Jon Queally | Common Dreams | October 25, 2016
Right-wingers like Charles Krauthammer don't "think anybody should buy it"—and too many Democrats actually don't want to talk about it—but that doesn't mean advocates for a single-payer or 'Medicare for All' healthcare system aren't responding to news about rising insurance premiums for the Affordable Care Act (ACA) with renewed demands. Just weeks away from national elections, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) made financial and political news late Monday by announcing the average premiums for plans under the ACA (aka Obamacare) will rise significantly for many consumers in 2017...
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The Third-Leading Cause Of Death Is Preventable, But Candidates Don't Mention It
Leah Binder | Forbes | October 26, 2016
It is more likely to kill you than terrorism. It has profoundly impacted virtually every American family. So this election year, why aren’t politicians at all levels of government talking about the third-leading cause of death in America—preventable errors in healthcare? The statistics are staggering: more than 500 patients per day are killed by errors, accidents and infections in hospitals alone. Medical errors kill more people annually than breast cancer, AIDS or drug overdoses...
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Epipen: A Sign of a Broken Healthcare System
Tanya Feke | Diagnosis Life, LLC | October 13, 2016
It has been going on for years. The difference is that now the media is hopping on the story. Now America is paying attention. In 2015, the price of doxycycline, a generic antibiotic, was up to $5 per pill, an increase from $0.03 in 2014. The antibiotic is the gold standard treatment for Lyme disease. In 2015, the price of Daraprim (pyrimethamine), was up to $750 per pill, an increase from $13.50. The antiparasitic medication is used to toxoplasmosis, an infection acquired in people who have HIV/AIDS...
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