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 -

America’s Prisons: The Worst National Disgrace

Anthony Gregory | The Independent Institute | October 8, 2013

The U.S. correctional system is the worst of America’s domestic disgraces. More people languish behind bars in the United States than in any other country, except perhaps China if we factor in the unknown numbers in labor camps. [...] Read More »

AMGA Defines High-Performing Health Systems

Diana Manos | Healthcare IT News | October 4, 2012

The American Medical Group Association (AMGA) announced Thursday its definition of high-performing health systems. Leaders of the trade association said they issued the definition to educate legislators and the public about the need for meaningful change to improve patient care. Read More »

AMIA Calls For Patient Access to Complete Health Information

Jacqueline Belliveau | EHR Intelligence | June 2, 2016

AMIA has urged the federal government to repeal a regulation on unstructured EHR data that could help patients access their health information. At the 2016 ONC Annual Meeting, the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) has asked the federal government to repeal the prohibition on the use of unstructured data in order to help patients access all of their health information...

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AMIA: 10 Ways To Improve EHR Safety, Usability

Ashley Gold | FierceEMR | January 31, 2013

In response to questions about efficacy and safety of electronic health records, the American Medical Informatics Association published a position paper in its journal outlining 10 ways to reduce errors, imcrease patient safety and improve efficiency. Read More »

AMIA’s Doug Fridsma: Time for the Feds to Truly Open Up Patient Records to Fully Interoperable Data Use

Mark Hagland | Healthcare Informatics | June 13, 2016

Access to information and the ability to integrate and use information has changed how individuals book travel, find information about prices and products, and compare and review services. Information can empower individuals, but health care has lagged behind other fields. It is unconscionable that in 2016 most patients are unable to obtain their entire medical record unless they print it out. While progress has been made in the last several years to support patients’ access to their information through various electronic means, such as Blue Button and patient portals, this is not sufficient to make patients first-order participants in their care, their health and their research efforts...

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Amid adoption Inroads, Texas Looks To Statewide HIT

Anthony Brino | Government Health IT | July 10, 2013

When the Texas Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC) last studied the state’s health IT landscape in 2009, there was fairly broad consensus about the potential benefits of IT, “but provider adoption rates accelerated slowly and many communities lacked the unified visions needed to create and sustain the infrastructure to share records between organizations' [...]. Read More »

Amida Technology Solutions Announces “DRE 2.0”

Press Release | Amida Technology Solutions | December 1, 2015

Amida Technology Solutions, a Washington, DC-based open source software development company, announced today the seventh release of its Data Reconciliation Engine, “DRE 2.0.” The DRE is an open source platform that collects personal health data from a variety of sources, irrespective of format, and transforms it into an easy-to-use model. The DRE enables business intelligence, predictive analytics, decision support, and care coordination for patients, providers, and insurers...This update puts Amida at the vanguard of the latest standards-based, patient-centered health data interoperability.

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An Academic Spring?

Barbara Fister | American Libraries Magazine | April 4, 2012

A successful protest against Elsevier demonstrates that populist rebellions have a place within the information-sharing community. Read More »

An Amazing Year for Open Access in Myanmar

Iryna Kuchma | EIFL | March 31, 2016

“Today, with the unprecedented access to diverse research materials online, we are witnessing encouraging progress in the academic efforts of Myanmar researchers and students,” says Professor Dr Thida Win, Rector of the University of Mandalay. It is a sunny morning, beginning of the dry season, Mandalay is very hot, and we are talking about open access in the oldest university in Upper Myanmar with the Open Access Working Group members...

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An Antibiotic-Resistant Superbug Is Silently Spreading through UK Hospitals

Madlen Davies | New Statesman | March 21, 2017

Lying in a hospital bed, four months pregnant, Emily Morris felt only terror. She had caught a urinary tract infection and it was resistant to common antibiotics. Doctors needed to treat it as it could harm the baby, but the only drugs that could work hadn’t been tested on pregnant women before; the risks were unknown. Overwhelmed, Emily and her husband were asked to make a decision. A few hours later, gripping each other’s arms, they decided she should be given the drugs...

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An App For Healthy Pregnancies Wins Award

Kat Snow | KQED | November 15, 2012

A healthcare app developed in Berkeley is the winner of a $10,000 innovation award from Ashoka Changemakers for technology that improves the lives of women and girls. Read More »

An Automated Routine Childhood Immunization Approach Using OpenEHR

Z. Liu, N. Qamar, and J. Qian | United Nations University (UNU) | July 9, 2013

This project studies a working but manual immunization system in place in Pakistan, subject to concerns such as poor record-keeping, reaching targeted children and unavailability of latest census. We propose an openEHR-based solution [...]. Read More »

An Election On Health Care And Costs

Edmund Billings | Medsphere | November 9, 2012

The recently concluded election was seen by many as a referendum on the 2010 Affordable Care Act, now widely known and even embraced by the president as Obamacare. President Obama’s re-election ensures that the implementation of reform will continue, but how a divided Congress deals with it while trying to control federal spending will remain an open question for some time. Read More »

An End To Medical-Billing Secrecy?

Steven Brill | Time | May 8, 2013

Our hospital bill is about to get a thorough examination. [...] Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius released an enormous data file on May 8 that reveals the list—or “chargemaster”—prices of all hospitals across the country for the 100 most common inpatient treatment services in 2011. Read More »

An Epic Conflict of Interest: Part 2

Pejman Yousefzadeh | The Daily Caller | January 2, 2012

So we are left to wonder whether patient care and best practices are being sacrificed on the altar of favoritism, cronyism and special deals. If it matters to you what kind of care patients are receiving and how HIT systems contribute to the quality of patient care, then Faulkner’s willingness to prioritize political back-scratching above quality HIT practices ought to raise alarms.

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