HHS Makes Changes to 'Wall of Shame' Breach Reporting Site
The Department of Health and Human Services has made changes to its website, widely referred to as the "wall of shame," that lists reports of major health data breaches affecting 500 or more individuals. The changes come after complaints from some members of Congress and others that the website unfairly exposes breached organizations to endless public scrutiny because incidents are indefinitely listed on the site...
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Hard to Communicate with Other Teams? Check Out These Tips
When teams in the same organization—or even across organizational boundaries—start to collaborate, they will most likely realize that not all of their goals align. The IT team, for instance, might not have the same criteria for success as the sales team. Different teams have different benchmarks, even if the teams are part of a larger organization (as in the case of relationships between a developer team and an operations team). But the teams all strive towards the same goal, which is to make the organization successful. And they rely on each other to accomplish that goal. For this reason, learning more about why a team is working on a specific project, not just focusing on how they're involved and what the project is about, can help you foster better relationships across your organization...
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Health Tech Podcast: How One Woman Built Her Own Artificial Pancreas and Started a DIY Movement
Dana Lewis has Type 1 diabetes, which means her pancreas doesn’t work the way it should: It doesn’t make the insulin she needs to survive. So, she built a new one. It’s not a biological organ. Lewis’ artificial pancreas system (APS) is an open-source computer system that monitors her blood sugar level and gives her body insulin as needed, building on the insulin pump and glucose monitor that she’s been using for years...
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What’s Next for Health Care? Confused Congress Should Look to Indian Country
Senate Republicans campaigned against Obamacare for seven years. Yet there was never an alternative that had support from a majority of their own party. The problem is simple: Many (not all) Republicans see health care programs that help people—the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid, etc.—as welfare. Others look at the evidence and see these programs that are effective: insuring people, creating jobs, supporting a rural economy, and actually resulting in better health outcomes. Evidence-based success stories...
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Trump Says VA’s EHR Woes Are Finally Fixed. Not Quite
To hear the President of the United States tell it, the Department of Veterans Affairs' frequently maligned EHR system has been fixed in just a few short weeks. During a speech on Tuesday in Ohio, President Donald Trump praised the work of Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin in reforming the agency responsible for providing medical care to the nation’s veterans. He specifically underscored the efforts his administration has taken to improve the VA’s EHR system...
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This EHR Mess We’re In
Dr. Matthew Hahn blogs about the current state of today’s EHR’s and rightly points out many of the same reasons that I have identified in my previous posts...There are several other important concerns that have been left unanswered by our current Health IT offerings...The solution Dr. Hahn proposed is one that hinges on the hope that government will abandon MU (unlikely given this political climate), and create a whole new EHR development program based on a national competition and then for the government to subsidize the cost of that winner EHR for physicians to use...
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How to Fix the EHR Mess
Computers, more specifically, electronic health records (EHRs), will someday revolutionize the practice of medicine. In fact, successful computerization of medical care is the most critical step necessary to transform the American health-care system from its current sorry state to the 21st century system of our dreams. It is ironic, then, that today EHRs represent one of the worst problems plaguing medical professionals. At this point, many physicians would say that EHRs have created more problems than they have fixed. The most important question is how do we get from where we are to where we need to be?...
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Half of the World’s Languages Are Dying. Should We Save Them?
There are currently around 7,000 languages being used today, with one language dying every two weeks. UNESCO says that half of the world's languages may vanish in a century's time. And, in my home country of India, 220 languages have died in the last 50 years and 197 languages are endangered. Open science is advancing scientific research by enabling individuals and organizations to collaborate and exchange knowledge that improves each other’s work. One area that could use this kind of help is native languages around the world...
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Is Single-Payer the Right Payer?
As is customary for every administration in recent history, the Trump administration chose to impale itself on the national spear known as health care in America. The consequences so far are precisely as I expected, but one intriguing phenomenon is surprisingly beginning to emerge. People are starting to talk about single-payer. People who are not avowed socialists, people who benefit handsomely from the health care status quo seem to feel a need to address this four hundred pound gorilla, sitting patiently in a corner of our health care situation room. Why?
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How to Use Libraries.io Data from Millions of Open Source Projects
What if we applied the techniques Google applied to index the internet back in 1998 to the world of open source software? That's exactly the thought Andrew Nesbitt had in 2014 which lead to the creation of Libraries.io, an open source project for indexing other open source projects. This month Libraries.io released metadata on over 25 million open source projects. You can download it right now from Zenodo, but what can you do with it? To understand what is contained within this dataset, I'll take a quick look at how it's collected. Everything in Libraries.io begins with package managers. We index project metadata from 33 package managers, filling in gaps from their source repositories where we can. We parse project manifests—a gemfile, package.json, or similar—that includes code from other projects and stores the links between them...
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