OSEHRA Product Management Roadmap and Discussion.
Sam Habiel, Doctor of Pharmacy and the new Director of Product Management for OSEHRA, will present an update on the current OSEHRA open source product portfolio. This portfolio will reflect code convergence efforts and software as well as documentation for the community.
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Has the Internet Become an Epidemic?
It seems obvious that internet companies would calibrate their apps to keep you using them as often and as long as possible. But did you realize that these companies have become so good that your relationship with the internet has crossed from an affection to an addiction? Scientists across the globe have demonstrated that shifting the internet from our computers to our phones has created an epidemic worse than the one created by smoking, albeit attacking our minds instead of our lungs...
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Scientists Are Accidentally Helping Poachers Drive Rare Species to Extinction
If you open Google and start typing “Chinese cave gecko”, the text will auto-populate to “Chinese cave gecko for sale” – just US$150, with delivery. This extremely rare species is just one of an increasingly large number of animals being pushed to extinction in the wild by animal trafficking. What’s shocking is that the illegal trade in Chinese cave geckoes began so soon after they were first scientifically described in the early 2000s. It’s not an isolated case; poachers are trawling scientific papers for information on the location and habits of new, rare species...
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5 Myths Busted: Using Open Source in Higher Education
Have you ever heard someone say, "It's impossible to do X with Linux"? Me too. This is the story of how I busted the myths about open source in my own head and used Linux to finish my PhD in fine arts. Many people think non-technical students can't use Linux, and they make a lot of assumptions about people who use it in their advanced degree programs. They scoff and reply with something along the lines of, "Well, of course; those people do 'computer stuff,' but in my [lofty, important, unique area] it's just not possible." Well, it is possible, and I'm proof...
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Cernering the Market
After years of speculation and rumors, in a move that surprised absolutely no one, Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin announced that the Department of Veterans Affairs is moving to Cerner Millenium to replace its home-grown VistA electronic health record. On the surface this makes sense, because of DoD’s move to Cerner in 2015 and an overarching VA desire to move from custom software to COTS software. However, SecVA’s decision is only the beginning of an extremely long path, as DHA is finding with its MHS GENESIS project. Moreover, VA has a broader scope than DHA. Unlike DHA, whose primary goal is to provide a medically ready fighting force, VA handles a slew of additional tasks, including...
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Social Medicine 2.0—Can You Use Crowdsourcing to Give Your Medical Device a Leg Up?
Online crowdsourcing communities are a game changer. These platforms allow anyone to appeal to the entire connected world for support or participation. They get many of us to participate—Kickstarter processed just shy of $500 million dollars in 2014. Most interesting, at least to me, are platforms for crowdsourcing information. These make up the next generation of online forums, ranging from chat forums to open source hardware development...
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Transparency Tool Seeks End to ‘Secret Pricing’
Noting that as much as $3.2 trillion a year in medical care is “secretly priced,” an entrepreneurial physician named Bill Hennessey is on a mission to unmask those costs for self-insured employers with the help of brokers and advisers. The secret weapon: an ability to identify by ZIP code known charges and claim allowables before services are actually rendered. The proprietary platform, Pratter, instantly identifies, itemizes and targets a host of outpatient procedures, seeks to break the confounding cycle of contractual arrangements with TPAs or insurance carriers that prevent employers from auditing their own claims...
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Electronic Health Record Usability Where Art Thou?
I like to begin my articles with a little humor…no matter how little the humor. I am sure many in the User Interface community might find this joke hilarious. Not so much if you are a physician using an electronic health record (EHR) that does not provide good usability. Lack of EHR usability is one of the biggest complaints clinicians have with some currently available EHRs...So what are some of the pain points associated with EHRs that make them not user friendly? IDC Health completed a survey in 2013 to identify frequent causes of clinician EHR dissatisfaction. Of the seven dissatisfiers identified, four were associated with usability. These were...
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How to Write Documentation That's Actually Useful
Programmers love to write code, but they hate to write documentation. Developers always want to read documentation when they inherit a project, but writing it themselves? Feh! How common is this? A recent GitHub survey found that "incomplete or outdated documentation is a pervasive problem," according to 93 percent of respondents. Yet 60 percent of contributors to the open source code repository say they rarely or never contribute to documentation. Their reasoning, for both the open source projects and their own applications? A common attitude that "documentation is for 'lusers' who don't write good code!"...
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How to Create an Internet-in-a-Box on a Raspberry Pi
If you're a homeschool parent or a teacher with a limited budget, Internet-in-a-Box might be just what you've been looking for. Its hardware requirements are very modest—a Raspberry Pi 3, a 64GB microSD card, and a power supply—but it provides access to a wealth of educational resources, even to students without internet access in the most remote areas of the world. I recently had a chance to visit with developers Adam Holt and Tim Moody about the project. Adam said this wonderful initiative began with One Laptop per Child at MIT. From there it was forked in 2012 into the School Server Community Edition project, and now it is called Internet-in-a-Box. I learned of the project while attending LinuxConNA last summer in Toronto, where I first met Adam...
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