News

Over the last 25 years, China, Ethiopia, the Maldive Islands, Peru, South Korea and Turkey had the greatest improvements in “deaths avoidable through health care at their economic level,” a complex but intriguing new measure of global mortality described last week in the Lancet. By that standard, the United States improved slightly over the same period, 1990 to 2015. But the American ranking is still so low that it’s “an embarrassment, especially considering the U.S. spends $9,000 per person on health care annually,” said the report’s chief author, Dr. Christopher J. L. Murray, director of the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, created by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Read More »

In recent years, Silicon Valley seems to have forgotten about silicon. It’s been about dot-coms, Web advertising, social networking and apps for smartphones. But there are signs here that hardware is becoming the new software. Read More »

A florist chain in Argentina, a food delivery service in Hong Kong, and a Singaporean travel agency—these are a few of the companies relying on a Kenyan startup to help them talk to their customers on WhatsApp, WeChat, and other messaging apps. Ongair, a Nairobi-based startup, says instant messaging could and should replace the traditional channels of customer service—frustrating phone calls, inefficient e-mail exchanges, online chats that don’t work well on a smartphone, or SMS messages that costs businesses per text...

Read More »

Now that NwHIN has been spun-out into the public-private entity Healtheway one has to wonder exactly what value they can deliver to market that will sustain them as they attempt to ween themselves from the federal spigot. Healtheway has no lack of challenges ahead but they intend to target one area that presents an interesting opportunity. Question is: Are they too early to market? Read More »

A small health IT company and technology consultancy have launched what they call an “online ecosystem” of resources to help share digital health record and HIE interfaces, especially those developed with public funding. San Antonio-based Pronia Health and consultant Aegis.net are partnering to offer the Open Library of Health Information Exchange, or OLHIE, with the broad aim of accelerating connections through the “reuse of interfaces and other assets.” Read More »

Open access is a topic as important for the French research community as for any other, and, yet, no major events to mark International Open Access Week had ever been held in Paris—until now. Read More »