One of the things we were trying to do was to create an open community where the governance and the prioritization of features were a joint activity of the whole community. Up until then, the federal agency set the priorities. Read More »

Several developing nations are joining the revolution in electronic health records to improve efficiency in their health systems, but at a fraction of the usual cost. Luisa Sanchez-Garcia's praise for the VistA electronic medical record (EMR) system in the neonatal ward at the Centro Médico Nacional la Raza, a massive hospital complex in Mexico City, Mexico, is glowing.  Read More »

Open government in the Internet Age shouldn't be about simply throwing information online but about making it easily accessible and searchable too, government information technology officials said at a conference Wednesday. Read More »

Last week at Stanford, innovation guru BJ Fogg hosted a conference called Mobile Health 2011: What Really Works.  As a new member of the Pioneer team, the conference was a great opportunity to learn more about mHealth and meet some of the key players in the field.

As the title suggests, this year’s conference focused on what we know about how mHealth is changing behavior and improving health ou Read More »

On balance, people report being helped by the health information they find online, not harmed. While social networking sites are not a significant source of health information for online users, they do provide a source of encouragement and offer community for caregivers and patients. One quarter of online users have looked at drug reviews online, with some 38% of caregivers doing so. Read More »

The newly released beta version of EDC/data-management platform OpenClinica 3.1 boasts a "completely rewritten" version of Extract Data. It's now based around a plug-in architecture.

It turns out the various ways in which users organize, format and present data are "tremendously diverse and often conflicting," says OpenClinica provider Akaza Research, in an announcement. Read More »

Medicines are sometimes withdrawn from the market or heavily restricted in their use, when the risks are judged to outweigh the potential benefits. Is this just a case of bad luck or an unavoidable risk when it happens, or is it something more?

According to a fascinating article in the American Journal of Public Health (Am J Public Health. Read More »

In a perfect world, the sales process for an open source business would be as simple as answering the phone and taking orders. Read More »

"Now everyone is talking about measuring quality," he said, "But that wasn't how it was 11 or 12 years ago when I started NQF. No one really wanted to engage in measurement. Now, it's in a different place, but it clearly is not being used as much as it should be. 

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Gallup posted this table alongside the headline, “In U.S., 1 in 4 Adults Have Government Health Insurance.” But they’re understating their case.

Most of the people who have health-care insurance and don’t get it from Medicare, Medicaid or the military/veteran’s systems are getting it from their employer. Read More »