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 -

A Bit More About FrontlineCloud: Announcing A New Blog Post Series

Laura Walker Hudson | FrontlineCloud | October 16, 2013

FrontlineCloud has been out in beta for just over a month, and we’re proud to have over 450 users signed up already, sending and receiving thousands of messages. The newest addition to the Frontline product set has had an incredibly warm and supportive reception on social media and in the many lovely emails we’ve received from friends, users and donors. [...] Read More »

A Bleak First Week: 99.6% Of Healthcare.gov Visitors Did NOT Enroll In Obamacare

Matt Pace | Compete | October 15, 2013

Since October 1st, Americans living in the 50 states and Washington, D.C. can purchase healthcare through exchanges as part of the Affordable Care Act [...]. Little information has been made available by the administration on the level of interest these exchanges have received or more importantly the number of consumers who actually enrolled, although the rollout has been plagued with widespread reports of system outages and bugs. Read More »

A Blueprint to End Mass Incarceration

Matt Ford | The Atlantic | December 16, 2016

Much of the debate surrounding mass incarceration is centered on its statistics: The United States has 5 percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of its prisoners; American prisons hold more inmates than Soviet gulags at their peak; a greater proportion of black Americans are imprisoned than black South Africans under apartheid. Now there’s a new figure worth remembering: 39 percent...

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A Bold Move To Open Source Your Core Business

Kosta Peric | Forbes | May 21, 2012

The part of my job I enjoy the most is meeting interesting people and companies from all over the world. One such company is Allevo in Romania. They have decided to open source their core business... Read More »

A Buffet Of Health Data

Aman Bhandari | HealthData.gov | September 18, 2012

Hundreds of codeathons are held throughout this country every year resulting in the development of innovative applications, like the “Like” button on Facebook, or solutions to critical social and health problems, like childhood obesity. Read More »

A Burnout Fix: Occupational Health

Maureen Miller | The Atlantic | July 2, 2013

In the midst of the doctor shortage and burnout epidemic, occupational medicine is the best-kept secret in U.S. health care. Read More »

A Call to Action For IT Leaders

Kris van Riper and Lon Zanetta | Nextgov | March 4, 2014

Following the failed launch of HealthCare.gov, President Obama stated, "The way the federal government does procurement and does IT is just generally not very efficient. In fact, there's probably no bigger gap between the private sector and the public sector than IT." Read More »

A Capitalist’s Dilemma, Whoever Wins On Tuesday

Clayton M. Christensen | New York Times | November 3, 2012

WHATEVER happens on Election Day, Americans will keep asking the same question: When will this economy get better? Read More »

A Case Of The Mumps

Rob Tweed | The EWD Files | October 21, 2012

I’ve been a developer since the late 1970′s and still going strong. [...] In all that time, just two languages have come my way where I’ve thought: “yes, this is cool; this is fun; this makes me really productive”.  One you’ll know: Javascript.  The other you’ll have either not heard of [....]: it’s known as the Mumps language. Read More »

A Case Study In Closed Access

Adi Kamdar | Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) | October 25, 2013

One of the core messages of Open Access Week is that the inability to readily access the important research we help fund is an issue that affects us all—and is one with outrageous practical consequences. Limits on researchers' ability to read and share their works slow scientific progress and innovation. [...] Read More »

A CEO Who Resisted NSA Spying Is Out Of Prison. And He Feels ‘Vindicated’ By Snowden Leaks.

Andrea Peterson | The Washington Post | September 30, 2013

Just one major telecommunications company refused to participate in a legally dubious NSA surveillance program in 2001. A few years later, its CEO was indicted by federal prosecutors. He was convicted, served four and a half years of his sentence and was released this month. Read More »

A Chat with CommonWell’s Executive Director: Interoperability’s Next Steps, Data Blocking, and Epic

Rajiv Leventhal | Healthcare Informatics | July 12, 2016

It’s been a little over three years since the CommonWell Health Alliance, an industry trade group made up of many of the largest electronic health record (EHR) systems vendors and other health IT companies, formed at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) annual conference with the goal to greatly enhance health data exchange. And, it’s been a little over a year since the Alliance tapped Jitin Asnaani as its founding executive director...

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A Compelling, Short Video Explains The Present And Future Of Wearable Technology

Christopher Mims | Quartz | April 26, 2013

“Having technology on you, around you, inside you 24/7 is going to be totally commonplace,” says Rebecca (Becky) Stern, a director of wearable electronics at Adafruit Industries, in this excellent, highly watchable introduction to wearable technology. Read More »

A Connected Garden Can Reap More Of What You Sow

Lauren Orsini | ReadWrite | November 4, 2013

You don't have a green thumb, but your devices might. [...] If you find yourself accidentally killing your plants, maybe it’s time to hand over the controls to somebody else. Make that something else—connected devices that use quantified data to nurture your plants into their most verdant and fruitful selves. Read More »

A Consulting Firm Transition to Open Source Health Software (Part 2 of 2)

Andy Oram | EMR and HIPPA | September 7, 2016

The best hope for sustaining HLN as an open source vendor is the customization model: when an agency needs a new feature or a customized clinical decision support rule, it contracts with HLN to develop it. Naturally, the agency could contract with anyone it wants to upgrade open source software, but HLN would be the first place to look because they are familiar with software they built originally. Other popular models include offering support as a paid service, and building proprietary tools on top of the basic open source version (“open core”). The temptation to skim off the cream of the product and profit by it is so compelling that one of the most vocal stalwarts of the open source process, MariaDB (based on the popular MySQL database) recently broke radically from its tradition and announced a proprietary license for its primary distinguishing extension.

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