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 -

The Congo Mines That Supply "Conflict Minerals" For the World's Gadgets

Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan | Gizmodo India | September 20, 2013

Most people who own a smartphone-or a laptop, or a new car-aren't familiar with tantalum, the rare, blue-gray metal that conducts electricity through these devices. But thanks to skyrocketing demand from electronics makers, tantalum-along with a handful of other rare minerals-is now one of the most sought-after metals on Earth. And it's fueling the ongoing conflict in Congo.

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The Conservative Case For A Higher Minimum Wage

Ron Unz | The Unz Review: An Alternative Media Selection | February 3, 2014

Over the last couple of months the minimum wage has moved into the political headlines, but most of the arguments for raising it have come from liberals. That’s fine, but since I’m not a liberal, I’d rather focus on the conservative reasons for supporting a much higher minimum wage, which are just as compelling. Read More »

The Copyright Rule We Need To Repeal If We Want To Preserve Our Cultural Heritage

Benj Edwards | The Atlantic | March 15, 2013

The anti-circumvention section of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act threatens to make archivists criminals if they try to preserve our society's artifacts for future generations. Read More »

The Cornerstones Of The Hardware Revolution

Liam Boogar | Rude Baguette | February 26, 2014

Anyone who worked in technology before 2003 can tell you that it’s no coincidence that startups have exploded in the past 10 years – when servers costs when to zero, and open source software caught up to its proprietary counterpart,  it didn’t matter how many people (a lot) were on the web, because scalability was born. [...] Read More »

The Cost of Knowledge: Open Sourcing and the ‘Academic Spring’

James Appleton | openDemocracy.net | May 7, 2012

Academic publishing in the UK has conventionally been channelled through by a small number of companies who maintain high fees for journal subscriptions. But as open source software continues to provide high quality free alternatives for autodidacts and beyond, the lifespan of this model is increasingly being called into question.  Read More »

The Cost-Benefit Calculation Of Electronic Health Records Systems

Gienna Shaw | FierceHealthIT | August 19, 2013

It's discouraging to read that more than half of physicians say the costs of electronic health records systems outweigh the financial benefits. But it's also heartening to see that, in the survey of 1,200 employed and independent physicians, most agree the benefits to patient care do justify the investment. Read More »

The Costly Darkside Of EMR Implementations

Edmund Billings | HIT Consultant | January 3, 2013

Dr. Billings explores the costly darkside of EMR implementations significant maintenance, development and consultancy costs after implementing an EMR system Read More »

The Crazy Price of College Textbooks Is Pushing More US Universities to Adopt an “Open-Source” Solution

Jenny Anderson | Quartz | September 27, 2016

Seven Rhode Island universities, including Brown and Rhode Island College, will move to open-license textbooks in a bid to save students $5 million over the next five years, the governor announced Tuesday (Sept. 27). The initiative is meant to put a dent in the exorbitant cost of college and, more specifically, college textbooks. Mark Perry, a professor of economics and finance at the University of Michigan Flint, and a writer at the American Enterprise Institute, estimated last year that college textbook prices rose 945% between 1978 and 2014, compared to an overall inflation rate of 262% and a 604% rise in the cost of medical care...

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The Criminology Of Firearms

Don Kates | JURIST | February 27, 2013

JURIST Guest Columnist Don Kates of The Independent Institute says that empirical evidence has shown that gun bans are not only ineffective at reducing violent crime, but may even be counterproductive... Read More »

The Crypto-Currency Ecosystem

Andreas Antonopoulos | O'Reilly Radar | June 27, 2013

Just like the IP protocol, bitcoin is the culmination of several important advancements, all combining to form a paradigm-changing innovation. Read More »

The Culprit Behind High U.S. Health Care Prices

Uwe E. Reinhardt | The New York Times | June 7, 2013

Elizabeth Rosenthal’s eye-opening article about health care costs in The New York Times on Sunday was a reminder of how much more Americans pay for given procedures than citizens in health systems abroad. What was probably more surprising to most readers was the huge price differentials for identical procedures... Read More »

The Cure Project Aims To Give Providers A Place At The HIT Table

Tom Sullivan | Government Health IT | March 4, 2013

Anyone wondering where the #EHRbacklash hashtag might be headed may have found some clarity at HIMSS13. The man behind the Twitter hashtag, Mosaica Partners vice president Bob Brown, along with Steven Waldren, MD, senior strategist for the American Academy of Family Physician's Center for Health IT, are spreading word about The Cure Project. Read More »

The Cures

Jasmina Tesanovic | Huffington Post | October 4, 2012

Salvatore Iaconesi is my friend and sometime collaborator, a Roman hacker engineer and artist. Recently he went out public with the private crisis of his brain cancer. He hacked the illegible format of the hospital documents and put the scans online. He then invited the online community to help him in finding a cure (La Cura). I applauded his bravery.

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The Curious Case Of Blue Button

Ken Congdon | Healthcare Technology Online | July 2, 2012

While it may not be the answer to all HIE and patient engagement challenges, Blue Button does prove one thing — there is a large contingent of patients out there that want control and access to their health records...Rather than dwell on its perceived weaknesses, the health IT industry would be wise to consider the progress Blue Button has made and improve upon the concept. Read More »

The Dangers Of A Post-License Era

Bruce Byfield | Linux Magazine | April 10, 2013

You don't see many discussions about free software licenses any more. Once a burning issue, licenses and their implications hardly seem to be mentioned these days. Increasingly, we seem to be moving into a post-license era, and the implications for free and open source software are potentially troubling. Read More »