In effect through superciliousness and complacency, they just might be, along with the people who approve EMR's, CPOE's and other clinical IT for sale, as well as those who actually purchase this IT for healthcare organizations. [6-part series]

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Last year there wasn’t a single fatal airline accident in the developed world. So why is the U.S. health care system still accidently killing hundreds of thousands? The answer is a lack of transparency. Twelve years ago, the Institute of Medicine issued a landmark report showing that medical errors in U.S. hospitals kill up to 98,000 Americans a year. In 2000, another estimate, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which included fatalities resulting from unnecessary surgery, hospital-acquired infections, and other instances of harmful medical practice, put the total annual death toll at 250,000. By that figure, contact with the U.S. health care system was the third leading cause of death in the United States, just behind all heart disease and all cancer.

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Health care IT systems should look to open source software (OSS) as an alternative that is more secure, as well as offering a cheaper option.  With local hospitals in UK soon to resemble Crimean-war era triage tents due to lack of funding it seems that the once impressive NHS could certainly now do with a few extra bob. Billions are spent on health care IT, though open source is looked at as a less viable option for a number of unfounded reasons.

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A new report into government IT failures has warned that previous inquiries may have embedded problems by focusing on inappropriate ‘best practice’ instead of looking for alternative approaches.  The report, from the Institute for Government, says “existing ‘best practice’ project models do not deal with the fundamental issues at the heart of government IT.”

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During the past decade, global attention to biodefense and pandemic preparedness has given rise to major government-development programs, such as Project Bioshield and the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) in the U.S.  At the same time, nonprofit organizations, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, have become important sponsors of drug-development programs, adding to an increased focus on affordable treatments for widespread diseases of the developing world, including neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), such as malaria and tuberculosis. Read More »

Do you like Open Source Software and Development? Well…you should check out POSSCON! What is POSSCON, well it is the Palmetto Open Source Software Conference held in Columbia, SC. There are going to be a host of presenters from four different program tracks that pertain to you: Leadership, Technical, Healthcare, and Education. Open source software continues to be one of the hottest and most relevant topics in information technology as organizations strive to meet the increasing demand for innovation while struggling with shrinking budgets.

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We planned and developed a community health information query system that linked community-based health data with data from the Health Indicators Warehouse (HIW). The HIW is a data hub with standardized health outcome and health determinant indicators along with associated evidence-based interventions. What makes the HIW so awesome is that it provides a user-friendly interface to national, state, and community health indicators data.

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DataStax, the first commercial company to offer technical support and consulting for Cassandra, has introduced a management interface for the NoSQL system....On Feb. 1 at O'Reilly's Strata big data conference in Santa Clara, Calif., the firm announced the beta version of its management interface, OpsCenter for Cassandra. The software is slated to become a generally available product by the end of March, said Pfeil.

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At the end of 2010, the "open-source" software movement, whose activists tend to be fringe academics and ponytailed computer geeks, found an unusual ally: the Russian government. Vladimir Putin signed a 20-page executive order requiring all public institutions in Russia to replace proprietary software, developed by companies like Microsoft and Adobe, with free open-source alternatives by 2015.

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The Veterans Affairs and Defense Departments will decide by late March the technical method they will pursue to create a common electronic health record.  The VA and DOD secretaries are committed to do this together and make the best decision for their two departments as jointly as possible on how they can move forward to a common electronic health system (EHR), said Roger Baker, VA CIO.

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