Open-source software continues to make inroads into the federal government, and a new organization to promote open-source applications has been established.

Open Source for America is a coalition of more than 50 companies, academic institutions, communities of interest and related groups that will advocate for greater acceptance of the use of open-source software in government information technology systems. Read More »

Open-source research, which started as a counterculture movement in the software industry 15 years ago, has since grown into a business model whose best-known product, Linux, has become a credible alternative to Microsoft's Windows.

Now, with biology increasingly becoming an information-orientated science, some have suggested that what worked for software might be part of the answer to the spiralling cost of drug R&D. Read More »

Open source technology and collaborative models will matter in media, mapping, education, smarter cities, national security, disaster response and much more in 2011 and beyond. The success of open source in building systems that work at scale offers an important lesson to government leaders as well: to meet grand national challenges and create standards for the future, often it's best to work collectively on them. Read More »

Last weekend, I [Salil] visited my parents who live in Hyderabad, a city in South India. During the trip, I initiated a conversation with an old family friend named Ghuraan Bi by simply asking how she was doing.  A slight lady in her 60s, the innocuous question seemed to trigger a barrage of emotions.

 Ghuraan Bi settled down on the floor and unbundled a small bag in which she stored betel leaves (paan) and betel nuts (supari). This was an indication that she was preparing for a long conversation, and then, she said something that immediately caught my attention. Read More »

The pharmaceutical industry of the future will require, at least in part, a robust, globally accessible informatics infrastructure available to industry, academic, regulators, and NGOs.  In some cases, accessibility may even be extended to patients.  Read More »

City University's Centre for Health Informatics (CHI) has launched a research programme and policy challenge paper to explore how NHS IT services can be improved and made more cost-effective in the face of "past failure". The challenge paper calls for new NHS systems to be based on a combination of open standards, open source software, open system interfaces and agile development. Read More »

Instigated by the incredibly slow adoption of Electronic Medical Records (EMR) by doctors across the nation, Medicare is announcing it will begin offering doctors free electronic medical record software solutions.

Both upfront and ongoing costs have been critical factors in the lagging EMR adoption rate. Medicare hopes that by providing doctors with a free or very low-cost system, doctors will readily adopt EMR putting healthcare providers in America on a common system, thereby, providing Medicare and the general public  with obvious, health, reporting and billing benefits. Read More »

When you think of hospitals and doctors, you often think of paper charts and records. But that won't be the case anymore for Kern Medical Center.

Friday, KMC announced its implementation of a new electronic record keeping system. It may not seem like a big deal, but it's expected to make a world of a difference to the hospital staff and patients.

Currently, KMC processes about 400 charts per day. Each chart can contain up to hundreds of pages in medical records. But all that would be condensed into the electronic system and accessible at the click of a mouse.

The publisher of The Wall Street Journal filed suit Tuesday to overturn a decades-long court order barring public access to a confidential Medicare database it says is essential to rooting out fraud and abuse in the government health-care program.

The American Medical Association, the doctors' trade group, successfully sued the government in 1979 to keep secret how much money individual doctors receive from Medicare, and the ruling still stands. Read More »

[...] Late last month, Kaiser officials announced their gift made to the International Healthcare Terminology Standards Development Organisation, the Denmark-based organization that took over work on the Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine, or SNOMED, code family from the College of American Pathologists in 2007.

To new users, the CMT will be licensed under the Apache Version 2 open source license. Copies should be available by November from the National Library of Medicine. Read More »