"Open source certainly is not going away. It is becoming a part of the infrastructure. Whether the open source code comes from a purely independent community or a federal integrator, open source should not get a free pass on verifying that it meets fundamental tests of mission or business worthiness," said Marc Jones, national federal practice director for CAST Software. "And conversely, the open source community should not feel threatened by that." Read More »

Research and discovery in the life sciences is a pretty complicated business. The complexity of the modern scientific process seems to be a reflection of the intricacies of life and the processes associated with disease and its treatment. Furthermore, as technologies become more advanced, so too does the problem of managing the ever expanding quantity of data being generated. Read More »

Veterans Affairs deputy secretary W. Scott Gould has resigned. The news was first reported by Federal News Radio. VA Secretary Eric Shinseki put out a statement via the department’s web site... Read More »

A recent RAND(1) study has concluded that the implementation of health information technology (HIT) has neither effected a reduction in the cost of healthcare nor an improvement in the quality of healthcare. Read More »

Members of Congress are lauding a bipartisan bill that limits funding for an integrated electronic health record system between VA and DoD and requires aggressive progress updates from both agencies, which have, in recent months, come under fire for the dilatory pace at which they're moving forward with the iEHR. Read More »

As health care plans nationwide enter the home stretch of implementing electronic records under the framework of the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act, and military service disability claims backlogs grow in size and attention, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Pentagon need a much more coherent approach to modernize and deploy their electronic health record systems. Read More »

This Wednesday and Thursday the Defense Strategies Institute plans to hold a conference on the Defense and Veterans Affairs departments’ planned integrated electronic health record (iEHR) that, as I reported, is open to vendors who want to peddle their wares to the government but not to the media. Read More »

Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture The House Appropriations Committee on Tuesday solidly backed development of a single, joint electronic health record for the Defense and Veterans Affairs departments in its preliminary version of VA’s fiscal 2014 spending bill. Read More »

The House Appropriations Committee fully supports the development of a joint electronic health record system for the U.S. Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs, so long as that system is open architecture, Nextgov reports. Read More »

Members of Congress are lauding a bipartisan bill that limits funding for an integrated electronic health record system between VA and DoD and requires aggressive progress updates from both agencies, which have, in recent months, come under fire for the dilatory pace at which they're moving forward with the iEHR. Read More »