According to this article from the Global Health Council Magazine, cell phone use in developing countries is driving a new industry in health-related electronic applications for programmes that range from diagnosis and health worker education to social marketing and the flow of emergency food rations, many focused on geographically remote areas. Read More »

If you think you have an innovative or entrepreneurial spirit and are interested in data, health, and technology, then join us for an opensource.com Open Your World Forum webcast with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Entrepreneur-in-Residence, Todd Park. Park will speak about the power of open data for improving health. Read More »

Since its April 7 launch, the VA-DoD operated "PTSD Coach" application has been downloaded to iPhones and Android devices 12,300 times. PTSD patients resoundingly asked for something to help them "get through difficult moments," and now DoD and VA are moving to gather more data, in order to deliver better care, said Batten at a June 28 FedScoop event in Washington, D.C. Read More »

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has named 14 prime contractors for a sweeping $12 billion technology contract aimed at modernizing IT systems across the department. Read More »

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) will allow hospital clinicians and employees to use smartphones like iPhones and Android-based devices beginning Oct. 1 to access information from its electronic health records (EHR) system and other internal applications, according to CIO Roger Baker. Read More »

There are two perceptions about open source in the United Kingdom's government. First, there is the public-facing perception: that national and local government organizations have launched multiple open source deployment and integration projects over the years that sometimes seem to have trouble actually getting off the ground...Then there are the glimmers of what appears to be a darker truth about how open source is really handled in the UK. Read More »

There's no such thing as "the" open-source license. There are lots of them. Sixty-nine to be precise if one accepts the Open Source Initiative (OSI) as the definitive arbiter of what is open source and what is not. Read More »

While I wasn’t there from the very start of Linux. I was an early adopter. Even before Linux, though, I was a Unix desktop user ranging from the early character interfaces such as the Bourne shell to graphic Unix desktops such as SCO’s Open Desktop—better known back in the day as Open Deathtrap—and Solaris’s Looking Glass. In the last twenty years I’ve used almost every significant Linux desktop out there, and was the editor-in-chief for many years of Desktop Linux. Read More »

he Evangelical Lutheran Church of Tanzania (ELCT) has introduced telemedicine- a distant diagnosis platform in which health workers use cell phone technology to carry out distance diagnosis through a web-based programme. Read More »

Oregon and Illinois are two states that will launch their initial health information exchange core services in early 2012. Both states will shortly publish contractor proposals to help them develop the systems and databases they will need to support their health information exchanges (HIE). Read More »