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 Opposite of Martin Shkreli: Drug Development Without Profit

Amy Maxmen | Global Health Now | December 14, 2015

From inside the van, Nathalie Strub Wourgaft watches the scene unfold in silence. She looks tired, and a little tense. Wourgaft is the medical director of a Geneva-based organization devoted to developing treatments for syndromes that afflict the poor, called the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi), and she is in Sudan for just 3 days to scope out the setting for a clinical trial that will be the first of its kind. By May, Wourgaft and a Sudanese surgeon, Ahmed Fahal, hope to test a new drug for a potentially lethal, flesh-eating fungal infection called mycetoma...

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The OSEHRA Value Proposition

Keith McCall | Open Source Electronic Health Record Agent (OSEHRA) | July 18, 2013

This post is a follow-up to a presentation made at the OSEHRA lock-down and provides various updates in an attempt to engage dialogue supporting or rebutting various value elements of OSEHRA and the challenges OSEHRA has in becoming a successful organization. Read More »

The Outlook For “Obamacare” In Two Maps

Tracy Weber and Charles Ornstein | ProPublica | November 8, 2012

It wasn’t just President Barack Obama who won Tuesday. His signature health care plan did as well. But while the Affordable Care Act (ACA) remains alive, less clear is how its various mandates will proceed and who will participate. Read More »

The Past Year In Open Access

Timothy Vollmer | Creative Commons | October 21, 2013

Today marks the start of Open Access Week 2013. Open Access Week is a global event for the academic and research community to continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they’ve learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research... Read More »

The Pathway to Patient Data Ownership and Better Health

Katherine A. Mikk, Harry A. Sleeper, and Eric J. Topol | JAMA | September 25, 2017

Digital health data are rapidly expanding to include patient-reported outcomes, patient-generated health data, and social determinants of health. Measurements collected in clinical settings are being supplemented by data collected in daily life, such as data derived from wearable sensors and smartphone apps, and access to other data, such as genomic data, is rapidly increasing. One projection suggests that a billion individuals will have their whole genome sequenced in the next several years. These additional sources of data, whether patient-generated, genomic, or other, are critical for a comprehensive picture of an individual’s health...

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The PC Market Hasn't Been This Bad Since IBM Released Its First PC

Adam Clark Estes | The Atlantic Wire | April 10, 2013

When Microsoft released Windows 8 last fall, a lot of people thought it could be the PC's savior, a hip-looking new thing that made those clunky IBM-compatibles cool again. In fact, it's quite the opposite... Read More »

The Perks And Pains Of Trying To Live An Open-Source Lifestyle

Greg Thomas | Motherboard | September 16, 2013

Sam Muirhead admits that his plan to live an "open-source lifestyle" for one year sounds a bit like a recreation of Super Size Me for privileged techies. But he assures me it's nothing like that—or it's at least a more nuanced undertaking. Read More »

The Permanent Web for Healthcare with IPFS and Blockchain

Peter B. Nichol | CIO | February 24, 2017

How do you determine if your organization is designing innovating experiences? There is a simple question that provides that answer. Ask yourself, “Is the organization talking about IPFS?” If the answer is yes, you’re likely relevant to the healthcare innovation discussion. If, however, the answer is no, your organization has missed the innovation bus. IPFS, a foundational technology, will transform healthcare by 2020...

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The Plus-Size MRI Machine

Christopher Weaver | Wall Street Journal | September 18, 2012

As the percentage of obese Americans continues to rise, hospitals demand larger, more powerful imaging machines that can fit any patient and penetrate greater masses of tissue.

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The Power of Open Education Data

Todd Park and Jim Shelton | Whitehouse.gov | June 8, 2012

Technology, data, and entrepreneurs can help with college affordability—as well as help address our national priorities in K-12 education. That’s why we are excited about the Education Data Initiative, an Administration-wide effort to “liberate” government data and voluntarily-contributed non-government data as fuel to spur entrepreneurship, create value, and create jobs while improving educational outcomes for students.

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The Power Of Open Source Collaboration Increases VistA EHR Security

Maureen Markey | Open Source Delivers | December 2, 2013

Who would like to hear a great story about the power of open source?  I had just started working at the Open Source Electronic Health Record Agent (OSEHRA) and the concept of open source was new to me.  I had yet to be convinced of its influence and impact, when this happened… Read More »

The Power Of The Blue Button

Peter Levin and Lygeia Ricciardi | Health IT Buzz | October 1, 2012

In August 2010, just 25 months ago,  President Obama announced that the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) was going to make Veterans’ personal health records available to them online with something called the “Blue Button.” Read More »

The Price of Wearable Craze: Personal Health Data Hacks

Maggie Overfelt | CNBC.com | December 12, 2015

...in a year when the world's largest technology, medical device and health-care firms are betting big and fast on wearable technology's role in delivering patients a more precise and cost-effective way to manage their health, experts are worried that the pace of updating data-privacy laws and building infrastructures with optimal levels of security doesn't match the speed of the market's technological rollout. The risks to consumers depend on what type of device they're wielding. In rare instances, weak links or endpoints in a cloud-based network powering something like a wearable insulin pump could be life threatening, as it opens the door to hackers tampering with them...

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The Problem of “Copy and Paste” in Electronic Records

Skeptical Scalpel | Skeptical Scalpel | July 7, 2017

A study of 23,630 internal medicine progress notes written by 460 different hospitalists, residents, and medical students found that a mean of only 18% of the text was created by hand with 46% copied and pasted from previous note or somewhere else and 36% imported from another part of the record such as a medication list. The analysis, done at the University of California San Francisco*, was possible because the Epic electronic medical record used there can provide the provenance of every character entered in a progress note...

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The Promise of a Little Blue Button

John Moore | Chilmark Research | September 11, 2012

...despite some shortcomings, the event was focused around what may be the government’s (VA & CMS) finest contributions to promoting patient engagement – the Blue Button.
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