News

With the recent development in software technology, many application systems are now competing for medical attention. Healthcare (or what we can call it as medical software) is evolving rapidly through communications, record-keeping system to a source of decision support, consequently, playing an active role in clinical service. However, unlike many other services, medical software is not very well regulated and places like a safety burden and cost of ineffective use solely depend on the physicians...

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Back in 2010, a task force convened by the HIMSS Health Information Exchange (HIE) Open Source Task Force focused on assessing how open source software was being used by HIE organizations....The Task Force identified several open source development organizations that were solely dedicated to healthcare information technology. The majority of the Task Force’s work effort occurred between September, 2009, and April, 2010, and these organizations are still in the forefront of the movement... Read More »

Over the past two years the reputation of the IT department at the FDA has changed rapidly. Once best known for burning through CIOs and receiving slapdowns from the congressional watchdog, the FDA is now garnering plaudits for its embrace of agile and open development. This new way of thinking is central to--and to an extent responsible for--the recently unveiled precisionFDA initiative. Bio-IT World dug into the genesis of precisionFDA and its implications in a feature this week.

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How long does it take to buy a new handgun? More than a decade, if you’re the U.S. Army. What sounds like the set up to a bad joke is all too real in the world of Defense acquisition. It took the Army 10 years to develop and rewrite requirements for a new handgun when, in 2005, the service set out to replace the M9 Beretta pistol soldiers had carried for decades. The first draft of the Army’s 350-page request for proposals (not counting 23 attachments) issued in 2015 somehow neglected to identify key requirements, such as the caliber of the weapon. As chronicled in a new report on Defense acquisition, “the paperwork alone added an estimated $15 million or 20 percent to procurement cost”...

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Airtime is an awesome piece of software [which] lets radio stations take control of programming via the web. [...] To mark World Radio Day 2013, FrontlineSMS:Radio‘s Amy O’Donnell wrote a post for Sourcefabric’s blog on how this scheduling tool can be complemented by channels including SMS to help to make radio interactive. Read More »

Recently, I worked a booth for the Southwest ADA Center at the annual Rehabilitation Engineering & Assistive Technology conference held in New Orleans. The event was filled with interactive exhibits and workshops on robotics, artificial intelligence and technologies for people with disabilities. One researcher was gathering data for a robotics engineering center working on a therapy support robot. She brought up the telepresence robot, PadBot...

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