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 -

How Making Microchips 3D Could Unleash An Age Of “Cognitive Computing”

Christopher Mims | Quartz | March 21, 2013

When it comes to the never-ending struggle to innovate in microchips, Hector Ruiz is a veteran. He was for 10 years the CEO of AMD—the David to Intel’s Goliath in the battle for marketshare of the chips that powered a generation of PCs. He’s just written a not-at-all-subtle book about those experiences [...] and now he’s thinking about his next chapter... Read More »

How Mandated Reporting Set Infection Rates On The Decline

Anthony Brino | Government Health IT | December 17, 2013

Six years after the New York Department of Health started publishing hospital-acquired infection data as part of a public transparency agenda, the rates of most infections are trending downward. Read More »

How Many Billions For The New Defense EHR?

Bob Brewin | Nextgov | July 10, 2013

The Defense and Veterans Affairs departments in February ditched plans to develop an integrated electronic health record due to costs, which had soared to $28 billion, according to new testimony from Frank Kendall, undersecretary of Defense for acquisition, technology and logistics. Read More »

How Many Die From Medical Mistakes in U.S. Hospitals?

Marshall Allen | ProPublica | September 19, 2013

Now comes a study in the current issue of the Journal of Patient Safety that says the numbers may be much higher — between 210,000 and 440,000 patients each year who go to the hospital for care suffer some type of preventable harm that contributes to their death, the study says.

Read More »

How Microsoft Handed The NSA Access To Encrypted Messages

Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill, Laura Poitras, et. al. | The Guardian | July 11, 2013

Microsoft has collaborated closely with US intelligence services to allow users' communications to be intercepted, including helping the National Security Agency to circumvent the company's own encryption, according to top-secret documents [...]. Read More »

How Mobile Apps Could Transform Rural Health Care

Clara Ritger | Nextgov | November 11, 2013

Rural residents seek services from primary care doctors and emergency rooms, which works if the patient doesn't have a chronic or life-threatening condition. But when they do, rural patients don't always have access to the most comprehensive care. [...] Read More »

How Much Are Misaligned Incentives In Health Care Costing Tax Payers?

Liz Dzeng | The Health Care Blog | February 23, 2013

On Christmas Eve, I took care of a patient who had just undergone surgery for an infected artificial shoulder. He was to be discharged on intravenous antibiotics three times a day for six weeks. [...] The total cost of this is approximately $7000 for nursing visits, antibiotics and supplies... Read More »

How Much Does An Emergency Room Visit Cost?

Jeanne Pinder | Clear Health Costs | October 9, 2012

A man crashes his bike and gets taken to the emergency room. The bill is more than $20,000 for the visit, which lasts a bit over 2 hours. He was taken to the highest level adult trauma center near the site of the crash in the Austin, Texas, area — University Medical Center Brackenridge, which is operated by the Seton Healthcare Family. So how much does an emergency-room visit cost? Read More »

How Much Does It Cost To Win Election To Congress?

Mike Masnick | Techdirt | March 14, 2013

A year ago, we wrote about a fantastic episode of the radio program This American Life, which was all about lobbying. One part of it revealed just how much time our elected officials in Congress spend fundraising, and the numbers were somewhat astounding... Read More »

How Much Will I Be Charged?

Press Release | UCSF | February 26, 2013

It’s a basic, reasonable question: How much will this cost me? For patients in the emergency room, the answer all too often is a mystery. Read More »

How NASA Is Harnessing Big Data From Mars Missions To Satellites

Jason Hiner | ZDNet | November 10, 2012

NASA's Nicholas Skytland explains how NASA had to build its own big data capabilities and how it's dealing with the enormous data sets from space missions.
Read More »

How NASA Is Using WordPress To Promote Open Source Technologies

Sarah Gooding | WPMU | June 10, 2013

The National Aeronautic and Space Administration has been a leading global pioneer in science and technology since its inception in 1958, boldly going where no man has gone before. [...] But did you know that NASA is also an active participant in the open source community? Read More »

How New OSS Communities And Code Bases Are Developed From Old Ones

Jesse Hood | OpenLogic | July 24, 2013

Open source software developers modify significant amounts of source code for a variety of different reasons.  Depending on the amount of modification, the number of developers doing the fragmentation (sometimes called a “fork” in the code), the status of these developers in the community, and the intention of the development community, the results could be just a few lines of updated code, or it could be a complete fork of the code base that takes the open source project in an entirely new direction. Read More »

How New Zealand Banned Software Patents Without Violating International Law

Christopher Mims | Quartz | August 28, 2013

What do you do when you’re a small country with a technology industry convinced that innovation requires the banning of software patents, but you’ve signed an international treaty that in theory obliges you to make software patentable? If you’re New Zealand, you simply declare, in a historic and long-debated bit of just-passed legislation, that software isn’t an invention in the first place. Read More »

How Open Access Scholarship Saves Lives

Nella Letizia | American Libraries | October 22, 2013

Gabriella Reznowski’s son, Xavier, was diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder in 2012, 14 long years after she first noticed the developmental delays and helped him ride out the seizures caused by the disorder. The most current information that describes it is only found in research journals, which often require subscriptions to access... Read More »