News

Summaries of open source, health care, or health IT news and information from various sources on the web selected by Open Health News (OHNews) staff. Links are provided to the original news or information source, e.g. news article, web site, journal,blog, video, etc.

See the following -

Five Ways Advanced Social Intelligence Guides Pharma Strategy

Mark Langsfield | PharmExec.com | June 4, 2013

Within the billions of daily comments from individuals across open social sources lies deep intelligence into markets, brands, patients, caregivers, healthcare providers and competitors. Several leading pharmaceutical companies are already using big data solutions to extract insights from the social realm... Read More »

Five Ways Consortia Can Catalyse Open Science

Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld, Karen S. Baker, Nicholas Berente, Courtney Flint, Gabriel Gershenfeld, Brandon Grant, Michael Haberman, John Leslie King, Christine Kirkpatrick, Barbara Lawrence, Spenser Lewis, W. Christopher Lenhardt, Matthew Mayernik, Charles McElroy, Barbara Mittleman, Namchul Shin, Shelley Stall, Susan Winter& Ilya Zaslavsky | Nature | March 29, 2017

“I am going to my grave with my disk drive in my cold dead hands.” So a senior scientist told a junior researcher, who related the tale at a 2013 US National Science Foundation (NSF) workshop on the reuse of physical samples in the geosciences. Sharing — of data sets, metadata, models, software and other resources — promises to speed discoveries, improve reproducibility and expand economic development. But it requires people to change. Overcoming personal reluctance is doubly difficult because many aspects of the scientific enterprise undermine sharing. Right now, most departments, funders and journals presume that data are proprietary from collection to publication..

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Five Ways To Bring A More Social, Open Development Environment To Your Company

Dave Gruber | OpenSource.com | January 20, 2014

Based on the success and effectiveness of the open source community, development organizations are taking a close look at the methods used within the open source world to understand how they can apply internal development to further increase creativity and accelerate development. Read More »

Fixing The VA-DOD Health System Fiasco

Peter Levin | Politico | May 14, 2013

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 »

Flawed Health IT: Whose Fault Is It?

Jeff Rowe | Government Health IT | September 18, 2012

We spent National Health IT Week peeking through the eyes of others at possible health IT futures.  So we'll start this week with the views of someone who points to a radically different future for health IT in large part by claiming that current health IT options are pretty miserable. Read More »

Flesh-eating Bacteria, Cancer-causing Chemicals, and Mold: Harvey and Irma's Lingering Health Threats

Julia Belluz | Vox | September 28, 2017

In the weeks following Hurricane Irma, parts of Florida have been awash in millions of gallons of sewage. Meanwhile, in Texas, oil refineries and chemical plants have dumped a year’s worth of cancer-causing pollutants into the air following Hurricane Harvey. In both states, doctors are on the lookout for an uptick in respiratory problems, skin infections, and mosquito-borne diseases brought on by the water and mold the storms left behind...

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Flexible 3-D Printed Scaffolds Could Mend Broken Bones

Leah Samuel | STAT | September 28, 2016

When doctors repair broken bones or problematic joints, they often rely on ceramic or resin bone implants. But those have some downfalls: Because they’re rigid, they’re difficult for surgeons to customize to a patient’s body, and they are tricky to use in minimally invasive surgeries. The ideal would be a cheap material that would be bendable but would allow new bone to grow into its structure...

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Flinders University App Allows Mobile Phones to Maintain Contact When There’s No Signal

Brad Crouch | The Advertiser | May 16, 2016

An app developed by Flinders University to maintain mobile phone contact in disaster zones with no cellular signals has won a $279,000 humanitarian award. The Serval Mesh software lets users talk and text each other even when the usual mobile phone coverage fails. It is one of five winners in the Pacific Humanitarian Challenge, sponsored by the Federal Government, who will share $2 million prizemoney to further develop their projects...

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Florida Doctors Weigh Higher Costs For Medical Record Copies

Kyle Murphy | EHR Intelligence | August 2, 2013

A hearing in Florida is considering a petition to increase the costs of reproducing patient medical records scheduled to begin Friday morning at the DoubleTree by Hilton in Deerfield Beach, according to the Tampa Bay Times. (Apparently, the Blue Button has yet to come to this part of the Sunshine State.) Read More »

Florida Patients, Lawyers Face Steep Fees For Record Copies

Jennifer Bresnick | EHR Intelligence | December 6, 2013

EHRs aren’t doing much to streamline the documentation reproduction process for providers, patients, and legal teams in Florida.  After proposing a hike in the per-page rate to produce copies of patient records this summer, the Florida Board of Medicine has followed through by determining that whether a record is paper or electronic, patients and lawyers asking for files on their clients’ behalf will fork over nearly four times the current rate. Read More »

Florida’s Poop Nightmare Has Come True

Emily Atkin | New Republic | September 14, 2017

In the days and hours before Hurricane Irma slammed into Florida, its residents were treated to copious media speculation about nightmare scenarios. This monster storm, journalists said, could bring a 15-foot storm surge, blow roofs off of buildings, and cause tens of billions of dollars in damage. But perhaps no scenario seemed more dire than the one Quartz warned about the day before Irma made landfall: “Hurricane Irma will likely cover South Florida with a film of poop”...

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Focused Only On The US? Here’s What You’re Missing

Russ Koesterich | BlackRock | August 12, 2013

Many investors remain fixated on what’s happening in the United States -- and particularly on what the Federal Reserve will do -- but Russ explains why they shouldn’t lose sight of what’s happening abroad. Read More »

Follow The Honey: 7 Ways Pesticide Companies Are Spinning The Bee Crisis

Michele Simon | Civil Eats | April 28, 2014

If you like to eat, then you should care about what’s happening to bees. Two-thirds of our food crops require pollination–the very foods that we rely on for healthy eating–such as apples, berries, and almonds, just to name a few. That’s why the serious decline in bee populations is getting more attention, with entire campaigns devoted to saving them. Read More »

Following the Epic Systems Money

Bob Brewin | NextGov | March 23, 2011

I reported yesterday that five members of the Wisconsin congressional delegation asked the Veterans Affairs and Defense departments to consider using a single commercial system for their new electronic health records, a move that could benefit one of the state's largest employers, software company Epic Systems Corp.

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Followup: Medicaid Probably Does Improve Health Outcomes After All

Kevin Drum | Mother Jones | May 1, 2013

I've now read the new study of the Oregon Medicaid experiment, as well as some additional commentary on it, and I think some of the results are important enough that they deserve a new post, not just updates to the previous post. Read More »