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 -

Patents As Weapons: How 1-800-CONTACTS Is Using The Patent System To Kill An Innovative Startup

Mike Masnick | Techdirt | April 26, 2013

We've talked many times about how patents are often used as weapons to kill innovative startups that threaten legacy players. Ryan alerts us to a perfect example of this in practice. 1-800-CONTACTS, the giant online contact lens/glasses space, is trying to kill off an upstart innovative competitor called Ditto... Read More »

Patient Engagement Gains Momentum

Mary Mosquera | Healthcare IT News | February 6, 2014

Consumers and patients are gradually taking a greater role in their health but still are the most under-utilized resource in healthcare. Mobile health devices, sensors and information technology are helping them participate more fully. Read More »

Patient Engagement Via mHealth Will Be Key To Stage 3 Meaningful Use

Greg Slabodkin | FierceMobileHealthcare | January 24, 2013

With the Meaningful Use Stages 1 and 2 rules focused on electronic health records, healthcare industry observers are starting to look ahead to Stage 3 and its implications for mHealth. Read More »

Patient Engagement, Data Liberation And Portability

Christine Årdal and John-Arne Røttingen | PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases | September 20, 2012

Open source drug discovery can be an influential model for discovering and developing new medicines and diagnostics for neglected diseases. It offers the opportunity to accelerate the discovery progress while keeping expenditures to a minimum by encouraging incremental contributions from volunteer scientists.
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Patient Groups Call For Direct To Help Accelerate Data Exchange

Dan Bowman | FierceHealthIT | May 3, 2013

The Direct standard, which enables participants to send authenticated and encrypted health data directly to trusted recipients online, could help to accelerate health information exchange efforts, according to a pair of consumer coalitions. Read More »

Patient Health Information Precariously Safeguarded, According to Privacy Analytics

Terry Dawes | Cantech Letter | September 22, 2015

According to a new infographic compiled by Ottawa data privacy company Privacy Analytics, costs associated with a data breach, including notification, legal fines, legal fees, forensics, PR, etc., amounts to approximately $208 per person. While data breaches across the board are damaging, from major corporate leaks like Target to member-based services like Ashley Madison, it’s the leaking of personal health information (PHI) that is most sensitive and which Privacy Analytics specializes in...

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Patient Health Information: Building Access, Encouraging Action And Changing Attitudes

Luke Gale | HealthImaging | September 11, 2012

A patient-centered future is in sight. That was the message delivered at the 2012 Consumer Health IT Summit. Read More »

Patient List to Launch Open Source App

Chris Thorne | EHealth Insider | July 30, 2012

Patient List, the winners of the first NHS Hack Day, are set to release their open source software app next month, arguing that it has the potential to save the NHS £3m per year. Read More »

Patient Portals: More Than Meets The Eye

Gary Hamilton | Healthcare IT News | July 16, 2013

Despite many healthcare organizations employing patient portals, the portal remains an underutilized resource. This low rate of adoption may stem, at least in part, from first-generation solutions developed in years past that offer little more than a website for patients and providers to communicate... Read More »

Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute To Invest Up To $68 Million To Develop A National Patient-Centered Clinical Research Network

Press Release | The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) | April 23, 2013

The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) issued two funding announcements today for up to $68 million to support development of a National Patient-Centered Clinical Research Network. Read More »

Patient-Centered Security Program

Andy Oram | EMR & HIPPA | August 29, 2016

Andy OramThe HIMSS report certainly appears comprehensive to a traditional security professional.They ask about important things–encryption, multi-factor authentication, intrusion detection, audits–and warn the industry of breaches caused by skimping on such things. But before we spend several billion dollars patching the existing system, let’s step back and ask what our priorities are. It’s a long-held tenet of the security field that the most common source of breaches is internal: employees who were malicious themselves, or who mistakenly let intruders in through phishing attacks or other exploits. That’s why (you might notice) I don’t use the term “cybersecurity” in this article, even though it’s part of the title of the HIMSS report.

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Patient-Centered Security Program (Part 2)

Andy Oram | EMR & HIPPA | August 30, 2016

Andy Oram

The previous part of this article laid down a basic premise that the purpose of security isto protect people, not computer systems or data. Let’s continue our exploration of internal threats. This is a policy issue that calls for involvement by a wide range of actors throughout society, of course. Policy-makers have apparently already decided that it is socially beneficial–or at least the most feasible course economically–for clinicians to share data with partners helping them with treatment, operations, or payment. There are even rules now requiring those partners to protect the data. Policy-makers have further decided that de-identified data sharing is beneficial to help researchers and even companies using it to sell more treatments. 

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Patient-Controlled Data: The Key to Interoperability?

Akanksha Jayanthi | Becker's Health IT & CIO Review | March 17, 2016

Mr. Nagpal argues the issue here is one of who controls patient data — is it the patients themselves or care providers and vendors? He says if patients control their data — choose who gets access to it and see who's doing what with it — many of the proposed barriers to interoperability would dissolve. "Being able to access our own information from across our care team in a joined up manner, and then being able to determine who can access that information and for what uses, I think of these as fundamental rights," Mr. Nagpal says. "Given these rights, each one of us can grant any member of our care team, including our friends and family, researchers and any innovator with an interesting solution, with access to our data under our control"

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Patient-Generated Data Is The Future Of Care, VA Official Says

Neil Versel | MobiHealthNews | July 18, 2013

Patient engagement is on the minds of a lot of people in healthcare, spurred not only by a requirement in Stage 2 Meaningful Use regulations, but by imperatives to improve the quality of care and boost patient satisfaction. [...] Read More »

Patients As Hamburgers

Joel Cooper | Medium.com | January 23, 2013

Most of the doctors I know went into medicine because they really truly wanted to help people. But medicine, long honored as a calling as well as a profession, is facing some tough new challenges... Read More »