Buoyed by the rapid progress in trying to develop an affordable drug for tuberculosis (TB) through the open source platform, the country's premier science research organisation now plans to replicate the model for malaria. Central Drug Research Institute, Lucknow, will power the initiative.

Fifty laboratories across the country are working on the TB project. In an open source project, different laborataries work on different parts of it and then upload their findings on the worldwide web. The data can be accessed as long as the users give due credit to the researchers. Read More »

For the next few weeks, I’ll be writing about an idea that can make people healthier while bringing down health care costs, both in poor countries and in the United States.

The strategy is to move beyond doctors — to take the work of health care and shift down from doctors and nurses to lay people, peers and family.  In the United States and other wealthy countries, lay people can fill in the gaps in left by doctors’ care.  In poor countries, people with no or little formal medical training are successfully substituting for doctors and nurses.

Kenneth W. Kizer, one of the nation's preeminent authorities on public health and health care quality improvement, has been named the director of the new Institute for Population Health Improvement (IPHI) at UC Davis Health System, and a Target of Excellence professor at the School of Medicine and the Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing. Read More »

The U.S. spends more per capita on healthcare than any other country. Yet, a 1999 report from the Institute of Medicine called To Err is Human found medical errors to be responsible for approximately 98,000 deaths in the U.S. every year. To put this in perspective, the number of deaths attributed to medical errors is about the equivalent to crashing a fully loaded 747 every day for a year. Read More »

As the push grows for hospitals, doctors and other health care providers to go paperless, the barriers that prevent wider use of electronic health records are slowly coming down. Sutter Health and UC Davis Health Systems, two of the capital region's largest medical providers, have joined forces to allow their doctors to instantly share confidential electronic medical charts across both systems.

The cooperation is an important development in advancing the use of electronic health records, which have the potential to revolutionize patient care, experts say.

...Ross is project manager for Redwood MedNet, a small company in rural Mendocino County about to launch California's first contribution to the national Direct Project for electronic health information exchange. Involved since the project began March 1, 2010, Ross said the Direct Project -- an updated, distilled version of the Nationwide Health Information Network -- offered his company a rare chance to participate with the big guys. Read More »

Physician executives who ignore smartphones and their healthcare applications will miss the most important disruptive technology trend in the next five years. Physician executives who understand how smartphones will transform the industry for providers, payers, patients, and employers will thrive in their careers. Read More »

Every day, tens of thousands of developers from businesses, colleges, and homes contribute patches or new code to open-source programs. It’s not every day though that the White House does it. That’s exactly what happened last week when the White House’s New Media Director Macon Phillips announced the White House’s second code release to the open-source Drupal content management system (CMS). Read More »

As Network World reported this week, iPhone apps that could save your life have come to an App Store near you.

"A growing number of developers are tapping into a treasure trove of U.S. government healthcare data and coming up with innovative iPhone apps that help consumers make better medical decisions," wrote Carolyn Duffy Marsan. She was reporting on a trend that started at the National Institute of Medicine in May when the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services launched its Community Health Data Initiative.

Network World covered Medwatcher, Asthmapolis, and iTriage -- the latter two also showed up here on Radar back in May.

Read More »