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 -

Shinseki Wants A Budget For The VA

Anthony Brino | Government Health IT | October 9, 2013

Veterans will still receive medical and hospital care no matter how long the federal government is shut down, Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki told lawmakers, but funding for benefits and other programs may run out in November, threatening veterans’ financial health. Read More »

Shinseki: Utah VA ‘Superb’ In Pilot Of New System For Disability Claims

Kristen Moulton | Salt Lake Tribune | June 25, 2013

Veterans can now file their disability claims online, a move that will help the Department of Veterans Affairs erase its backlog of claims in 2015, V.A. Secretary Eric Shinseki said Tuesday in Salt Lake City. Read More »

Shinseki: VA to move forward with electronic records

Amber Corrin | FCW | April 15, 2013

Veterans Administration Secretary Eric Shinseki insisted at an April 15 congressional hearing that the VA will move forward on a joint electronic health records system with the Defense Department, even as Pentagon officials are pausing to review their approach. Read More »

Shinseki’s Critics Will Eat Their Words

Stewart Hickey | The Hill | June 19, 2013

There is nearly universal agreement that too many American veterans are made to languish unnecessarily under the current Department of Veterans Affairs claims backlog. [...] Some critics have even called for the resignation of VA Secretary Eric K. Shinseki... Read More »

Short-Sighted Conservative Gloating On Obamacare

Ed Kilgore | Washington Monthly | October 23, 2013

Truth be told, some of the more interesting writing on the travails of the Obamacare enrollment system is coming from conservative Ross Douthat of the New York Times. On Sunday, he warned Republicans that their cackling over the enrollment mess was obscuring the realization that the Medicaid single-payer element of the Affordable Care Act was functioning better than the private insurance part of the insurance expansion... Read More »

Shortened Bidding Process Limited Obamacare Contractor Options

Sophie Novack | Nextgov | November 4, 2013

The Oct. 1 deadline to launch HealthCare.gov made the Obama administration use an accelerated bidding system that limited the choice of contractors to only four companies, Bloomberg reports. Read More »

Should All Academic Research Be Free And What Wikipedia Can Teach Us About Publishing

Kalev Leetaru | Forbes | June 14, 2016

Last month the European Union offered a bold and striking call for all scientific literature to be made available to the world free of charge. Many questions remain regarding how such a vision can be made into reality, especially where the funding for such a mandate will come from. Such calls, happening amidst a sea change in the open access debate, offer a powerful moment of reflection into why the vast majority of scholarly research is still walled off from the public that largely pays for it...

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Should Consumers Bear The Cost To Upgrade The Grid?

Fawn Johnson | Nextgov | March 17, 2014

Given that it will cost upward of $4 trillion over the next 20 years to modernize electricity, gas, and water lines, is it OK to allow utilities to tack on extra charges to customers' bills to pay for those upgrades? How can customers voice their opinions? The first question is one that utility regulators deal with on a daily basis. The second question is only just beginning to surface.

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Should Learned Societies be in Charge of Peer Review?

Michael Satlow | The Chronicle of Higher Education | May 18, 2016

How, then, might we rethink academic publishing to increase accessibility while maintaining the benefits of peer review? More important, how might we do this while recognizing the fundamental dual realities that (1) universities are already too stretched to devote significant resources to peer reviewing and (2) publishers are companies whose right to thrive financially should be respected? One solution is to cut the Gordian knot of review and dissemination.

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Should Mobile Apps Be Regulated?

Matt Mattox | Axial Exchange | July 12, 2013

Two opposing groups of stakeholders recently petitioned the government, one urging the administration not to rush into any regulation, the other asking for regulatory guidance as soon as possible. What do you think? [...] Read More »

Should Samsung Ditch Android?

Shane O'Neill | InformationWeek | October 23, 2013

Mobile analysts debate whether Samsung should free itself from Android and use its homemade OS, Tizen. Read More »

Should the DoD Buy Epic, or Cerner, or GE, or...?

Margalit Gur-Arie | On Health Care Technology | July 12, 2013

After a lengthy foray into building its own EHR from scratch (AHLTA) [...] and another shorter detour through the fantasy land of an open-source integrated EHR (iEHR) [...], the DoD announced that it will begin looking for a commercially available product to suit the DoD’s unique needs. Read More »

Should The DoD Buy Epic, Or Cerner, Or GE, Or…?

Margalit Gur-Arie | HIT Consultant | July 23, 2013

The Department of Defense (DoD) is in the market for an EHR solution… again. After a lengthy foray into building its own EHR from scratch (AHLTA), [...] and another shorter detour [...] with the Veteran Administration (VA), [...] the DoD announced that it will begin looking for a commercially available product to suit the DoD’s unique needs. Read More »

Should Your NGO Go Open Source?

Catherine Cheney | Devex | February 26, 2016

The open source model of universal access and collaborative intelligence has extended from Web development to global development. NGO leaders can maximize the impact of their organizations either by taking their models to scale or opening the books on their projects and programs and allowing peer organizations to take them and run with them. Whether proprietary information belongs in the business of fighting poverty is open to debate. On one hand, intellectual property can drive competition and innovation, but on the other hand, collaborative models can lead to greater success stories.

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Shouldn’t All Those Internet Scientists Be Curing Cancer?

Klint Finley | Wired | April 29, 2013

[...] In 2008, Mike Miller and two other MIT physicists founded Cloudant, a company that offers a database service that lets you store information on the net. For years, he led a double life, working both as chief scientist for Cloudant and as an assistant professor at the University of Washington. But in 2012, he resigned from the university, in favor of the internet. Read More »