Mirth Corporation, provider in commercial open source healthcare information technology, has announced that its healthcare interoperability suite has been selected for supporting the planned statewide Health Information Exchange (HIE) initiative in Florida, whereby the statewide individual healthcare providers and practices would be provided with the Mirth technology delivered on the Mirth appl Read More »

The Direct Project announced today the completion of its open-source connectivity-enabling software and the start of a series of pilots that will be demonstrating directed secure messaging for healthcare stakeholders over the Internet.

The Direct Project specifies a simple, secure, scalable, standards-based way for participants to send encrypted health information directly to trusted recipients over the Internet.

Also announced: Read More »

Radically new approaches to drug discovery and commercialization are needed to overcome drug resistant diseases and provide cures for a global population according to a new healthcare innovation reportpublished by the University of Pennsylvania.

In contrast to the slow, secretive and hugely expensive drug discovery models of traditional pharmaceutical companies, the key characteristics of this new healthcare innovation model are cross-institutional research collaboration, rapid dissemination of results, and open access to new data. Read More »

Health IT presents many opportunities to dramatically improve healthcare delivery in America, from changing the way healthcare is financed to enhancing efficiency. Jerry Buchanan, account director, healthcare technology and services at eMids Technologies, shares five ways that health IT can cut healthcare costs in the long term.

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 »

Computer Sciences Corp won a $56 million contract yesterday to develop an electronic health record system for the Australian Department of Defence.

Cities, states and agencies are publishing more government data online, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. Much government data is still in paper form, locked away in file cabinets, or in closed formats on obscure servers. For instance, the data-driven story of BrightScope, which uses government data to clarify 401(k) plans, started with boxes upon boxes of printouts. Read More »

Around the United States, city governments have created a multitude of software. Unfortunately, most of the time the code from those projects is not shared between municipalities, which results in duplication of effort and redundant, static software.

Civic Commons, launched today at the Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington, is aimed squarely at helping city governments share the software they've developed. Civic Commons is the product of the District of Columbia's Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO), Code for America andOpenPlans.

A California-based company is attempting to introduce expert crowdsourcing to oncology to try and ensure that each cancer patient gets the most appropriate treatment.

Cancer Commons brings together leading physicians and scientists in each type of cancer to create an open-source wiki-style database that will catalogue the different genomic subtypes of each disease and show how patients are responding to different treatments. Read More »

IT SEEMS likely the next government will be made up of Fine Gael and Labour. Both propose extensive changes to the health service and both propose to introduce universal health insurance.

Last weekend, Fine Gael published a detailed policy proposing to introduce a social health insurance scheme, modelled roughly on the system in the Netherlands. Labour has yet to publish its detailed policies. Read More »