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 -

OpenStreetMap’s Growing Use In Government

Alex Barth | OpenStreetMap US | April 24, 2013

Today the State Department launched its official “Imagery to the Crowd” web site. This solidifies the State Department’s established practice of providing aerial imagery to the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) for fast sourcing of geo data in emergencies... Read More »

OpenStreetMap’s Redesign Goes Live! More Focused, More Inviting, More Map

John Firebaugh | Mapbox | December 2, 2013

A redesign of OpenStreetMap.org has just gone live. Since we kicked off with State of the Map US in San Francisco, we have been working closely with the OpenStreetMap community to implement this new design that is more focused — a better experience for newcomers and creates more space for the map. Read More »

OpenStudent Replaces Traditional Student Achievement System

Jen Wike | opensource.com | February 20, 2013

The province of British Columbia started out with a vision over 10 years ago to have "one student record, stored in one location, accessed by all authorized users." And all but four districts in the province, and many independent schools, followed this vision [...]. Now, after eight years in production, the system will be discontinued by the vendor in 2015... Read More »

OpenVista Live in American Samoa’s LBJ Tropical Medical Center and Department of Health Clinics

Press Release | LBJ Tropical Medical Center, Medsphere | October 14, 2015

Medsphere Systems Corporation, the leading provider of affordable and interoperable healthcare IT platform solutions, today announced that the company’s OpenVista® electronic health record (EHR) is live throughout the American Samoa healthcare system. Specifically, OpenVista is up and running in the LBJ Tropical Medical Center and 13 outpatient clinics run by the American Samoa Medical Center Authority (ASMCA), as well as four of the eight clinics in the American Samoa Department of Health (DOH). The EHR will be rolled out to two additional DOH clinics later this year and two more in the near future.

OpenWFD Aims To Bring Wireless Display Streaming To Tablets, Phones

Christopher Tozzi | The Var Guy | November 4, 2013

Wireless connectivity between devices and display monitors remains mostly fantasy today, Google's Chromecast notwithstanding. But it could become a big deal for tablets, smartphones and even traditional PCs in the future. And it may even work on Linux, if the nascent OpenWFD project succeeds—which would be very good news for open source hardware vendors. Read More »

OpenWorm Is An Open-Source Virtual Worm, Accurate In Every Way

Shaunacy Ferro | PopSci.com | May 2, 2013

Predictive models are essential in engineering fields, but less common in biology, though accurate simulations of living organisms could help us understand disease, drug efficacy and neuroscience. Read More »

Opinion: 'Teach Young People To Be Innovative'

Roberta B. Ness | CNN | September 24, 2012

The world has an insatiable appetite for innovation. To feed this desire for technologic and scientific breakthroughs, nations invest in our celebrated universities. Tax and tuition dollars go to educate students -- the next generation of open-minded thinkers -- but also toward fostering research. After all, academia is the quintessential innovation incubator. Isn't it? Read More »

Opinion: Academic Publishing Is Broken

Michael P. Taylor | The Scientist | March 19, 2012

Academic publishers are currently up in arms about the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA)—a bill that has the perfectly reasonable goal of making publicly funded research available to the public that funded it. Read More »

Opinion: How a Few Costly EHRs Could Harm the Healthcare System

Erin Dietsche | Becker's Health IT & CIO Review | March 9, 2017

In a recent blog post, Medsphere President and CEO Irv Lichtenwald outlined his thoughts on how EHRs' prices affect the larger healthcare system. A CNN Money article from last September found healthcare costs increased more in August 2016 than in any other month since 1984. The reason behind the rising costs is, as Mr. Lichtenwald wrote, complex. But technology is largely contributing to such increases...

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Opinion: In Wake Of Aaron Swartz’s Death, Professors Should Consider Open Access

David Scheuermann | The Daily Reveille | January 22, 2013

I would like to focus on what I think was most important to Swartz: his determination to provide free and open access to scholarly research. As college students, it’s easy to take our access to the latest scholarly journals and research for granted. Paid for by our institution, most articles we need can be easily found and read in the library. Unfortunately for the general public, most scholarly research is sealed away behind paywalls.

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Opinion: Open-Access For The 3rd World

Cherry Mae Ignacio | The Scientist | March 21, 2013

Scientists should submit their work to open-access repositories to support research in parts of the world that don’t have access to the vast libraries of pay-wall-constrained literature. Read More »

Opinion: See the Most Vulnerable -- See the Human Landscape

Rhiannan Price | Devex | July 10, 2017

The world is currently experiencing the worst humanitarian crises since World War II. Over 20 million people are at risk of starvation and famine across Yemen, South Sudan, Nigeria and Somalia. Now entering its seventh year of conflict, the Syrian civil war rages on without an end in sight, representing the largest portion of refugees and internally displaced people globally. To be effective in helping these IDPs, relief organizations must have easy access to relevant and accurate locational data...

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Opinion: The US Needs to Invest Foreign Aid Dollars in Smaller NGOs

John Lyon | Devex | August 29, 2017

Last month, U.S. Republican congressional House members released a budget that proposes a gradual reduction in spending on domestic programs and foreign aid from $511 billion to $424 billion through 2027. This is marginally better for global health programs that aid poor countries compared to President Donald Trump’s 2018 proposed budget, which calls for cutting about 32 percent from foreign aid budgets, or nearly $19 billion in total...

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Opinion: VA System Inadequate To Meet Veterans’ Health Care Needs

Gretchen Hammer | Health Policy Solutions | November 7, 2012

The promise of access to high-quality, affordable health care is one we can deliver on for our veterans if we continue to work together in communities to understand and address the health needs of veterans and their families and if we pursue all avenues to increase health insurance options for veterans who are currently without adequate health coverage.
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Opscode Named Best of Show at Bio-IT World 2012

Press Release | Opscode | May 7, 2012

Opscode®, the leader in cloud infrastructure automation, today announced that Opscode Chef™, its leading systems-integration framework, was named "Best of Show" at Bio-IT World Conference and Expo in the event's Information Technology (IT) Infrastructure category. Read More »