On March 9, 2020 the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) released its final rule on the 21st Century Cures Act: Interoperability, Information Blocking, and the ONC Health IT Certification Program. Referred to by some people as the "Information Blocking Rule," since this is the primary topic, the document actually covers a host of other issues related to interoperability driven primarily by requirements of the 21st Century Cures Act. In addition to the final rule itself you can read the ONC press release, a comparison between the proposed and final rules, and lots of other resources.

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The coronavirus pandemic is affecting all walks of life. Hospitals and medical professionals are on high alert. Schools are closing. Professional sports teams are playing in empty stadiums and, in some cases, not at all. Companies and governments are reviewing how to reduce health risks while maintaining productivity. An obvious response is to expand their telework programs for employees. Telework or remote worker programs have their challenges, and the concern is genuine for the federal government. There is the need to re-work policies, stretch budgets, deal with security concerns, and a big part of the challenge is the changing workforce as smartphones – rather than PCs and landlines of yesteryear – are the tools of choice.

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As a society we also need to get moving on the population level as well - and the sooner the better! In his fascinating genomic epidemiology detective work Trevor Bedford conducted based on the COVID-19 research he and his team had done in the Bedford lab in Seattle WA, he concluded that the narrow testing that was done in the Seattle area in the early days of the Coronavirus spread allowed the virus to spread faster. In contrast, the Coronavirus testing-blitz in South Korea appears to keep the death rate lower than it could be. It's time to test! The FDA gave high-tech labs the green light to operate tests before receiving any agency review or authorization and both Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp already announced that they have test in the market. But according to CDC, as of March 8 there were only 1,707 tests performed in the US vs. 189,236 in South Korea.

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What do the coronavirus and Navy ships have in common? For that matter, what do our military spending and our healthcare spending have in common? More than you might think, and it boils down to this: we spend too much for too little, in large part because we tend to always be fighting the wrong wars.I started thinking about this a couple weeks ago due to a WSJ article about the U.S. Navy's "aging and fragmented technology." An internal Navy strategy memo warned that the Navy is "under cyber siege" by foreign adversaries, leaking information "like a sieve." It grimly pointed out...

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Product marketing for COSS is materially different from product marketing for proprietary software and from general marketing practices like ads, lead generation, sponsorships, booths at conferences and trade shows, etc. Because the source code is open for all to see and the project's evolutionary history is completely transparent, you need to articulate—from a technical level to a technical audience—how and why your project works. Using the word "marketing" in this context is, in fact, misleading. It's really about product education. Your role is more like a coach, mentor, or teaching assistant in a computer science class or a code bootcamp than a "marketing person."

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