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 Scrutiny Of Freely Available Data Might Save The NHS Money

Staff Writer | The Economist | December 8, 2012

This week Britons were reminded yet again of the strains on the government’s finances. But another resource—data—is in abundant supply. Like governments in many other countries, Britain’s is turning more and more of its trove of information into “open data”... Read More »

How Secure Are Home IOT Devices, Actually?

Bill McCabe | LinkedIn Pulse | September 11, 2015

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a phenomenon that is currently experiencing huge year on year growth. One of the fastest growing areas within the industry is in the market of home IoT devices. These are devices designed to make life easier, such as connected garage door openers, smart switches, smoke alarms, and even IP surveillance cameras. There are almost 5 billion connected devices being used today, and according to Gartner Research, that number is expected to grow by 500% in the next 5 years.All of this shows a promising industry, but unfortunately the risks are never covered as much as the growth figures. IoT devices are often designed without a necessary focus on security or user privacy, and this is something that the industry needs to address...

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How SMART on FHIR Grew Vendor Support for Interoperable HIT Apps

Sara Heath | EHR Intelligence | February 18, 2017

Kenneth Mandl, MD, and Isaac Kohane, MD, PhD, both big players in creating SMART on FHIR, a major interoperability project, have recently recounted key details to the project and its successes in a paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. This paper first explained the project, stating that the Substitutable Medical Applications and Reusable Technologies (SMART) project aimed to create a platform on which developers could make healthcare applications that could run interoperably across different health IT systems...

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How Snowden's Email Provider Plans To Build An NSA-Proof Communications Tool

Conor Friedersdorf | The Atlantic | November 5, 2013

Ladar Levison intends to offer a product with world-class cryptography and a user interface simple enough for a grandmother to master. Read More »

How SparkFun Electronics Built Their Open Hardware Business

Christopher Clark | opensource.com | September 18, 2012

At SparkFun Electronics we do not sell software, yet we have a robust software development team. These developers spend some of their time on SparkFun.com, an eCommerce platform with extra content and integrated community elements. The vast majority of their time, however, is spent on Sparkle. Read More »

How States Launched Successful Health Exchanges

Joseph Marks | Nextgov | November 1, 2013

In the second half of August, six weeks before rollout, the best tech minds building Washington D.C.’s Health Benefit Exchange gathered to test the system end to end... Read More »

How Stephen Wolfram Plans To Reinvent Data Science & Make Wearables Useful

Dylan Tweney | MedCity News | March 17, 2014

The Wolfram Language will become publicly available in the next few weeks, Wolfram Research founder Stephen Wolfram promised in a recent keynote at SXSW.

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How Style Guides Sustain Effective Consistency In EHR Design

John B. Sparling | EHR Intelligence | January 6, 2014

Style guides have been described as an EHR designer’s “source of truth.” Many large healthcare organizations design their own unique style guide to create a framework used and recognized at various department levels in implementing an EHR to place orders and record clinical documentation. Read More »

How Technology Can Help Mitigate Hurricane Harvey-Like Disasters

John Breeden II | Next Gov | September 5, 2017

Unfortunately, we don’t yet have technology that can prevent a storm of the magnitude of Hurricane Harvey from devastating our cities and towns. But it can help in the response, and even provide valuable information for citizens trying to survive a catastrophic event. One key is properly locating backup and recovery systems for government agencies. Typically, most cities and towns with a backup plan for their data rely on nearby data centers. That’s fine if there is a fire at the local office building or something that forces the temporary closure of government buildings...

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How Technology Democratised Development

Ken Banks | BBC | September 7, 2012

Over the coming weeks, A Matter of Life and Tech will feature a range of voices from people helping to build Africa’s tech future. This week, mobile innovator Ken Banks argues that technology has become a vital tool in the fight against poverty. Read More »

How Technology Is Destroying Jobs

David Rotman | MIT Technology Review | June 12, 2013

[...Erik] Brynjolfsson [...] and his collaborator and coauthor Andrew McAfee have been arguing for the last year and a half that impressive advances in computer technology—from improved industrial robotics to automated translation services—are largely behind the sluggish employment growth of the last 10 to 15 years. Read More »

How The 'Internet Of Things' Can Spark An Open Source Community

Steven Max Patterson | Network World | June 3, 2013

Ninja Blocks puts a power into the hands of developers and users that has never been realized before, and which could be the genesis of an open source community of makers. Read More »

How the (Finally Ended) Corn Ethanol Subsidy Made Us Fatter

Bruce Watson | Daily Finance | January 4, 2012

America's food chain has lately produced a bumper crop of headline-ready catastrophes...But the biggest threat -- the one that food experts agree is most responsible for America's health, economic, and dietary problems -- has just been neutralized: At the end of 2011, Congress allowed the much-vilified corn ethanol subsidy to expire. Read More »

How The Campaigns Cast A Shadow On HIX, Medicaid — And Why They're Now Poised For Forefront

Tom Sullivan | Government Health IT | November 14, 2012

Amid all of the politicking by both President Barack Obama and former GOP contender Mitt Romney around healthcare during the campaign season and general election, two of the more divisive pieces of the Affordable Care Act – Medicaid expansion and health insurance exchanges – were inhibited as many Governors waited to learn the election’s outcome. Read More »

How the Cloud Can Bring Expenditure Agility to Agency Budgets

Kate Spies | GovernmentHealthIT | July 3, 2012

A clear presidential push becomes apparent reading the FY2013 budget. The White House is calling for Federal agencies, health departments among those, to shift IT budgets from a capital expenditure basis to one built on operational spending. In their words, the generation of a “more agile, operational focus” – and the cloud computing model is one way of embracing that expenditure agility, IT-wise. Read More »