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 -

Todd Park, CTO of Health and Human Services, On Improving Healthcare with Open Data

Ruth Suehle | OpenSource.com | March 13, 2011

Todd Park, CTO of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS), joined an enthusiastic audience at SXSW to talk about the power of open data and innovation to improve health. His role is not to run technology for HHS, but he serves an an entrepreneur in resident to start "virtual startups" within HHS to improve the health of Americans. HHS wants to create an environment that helps markets and the public transform healthcare. As part of the Recovery Act, HHS is implementing Medicare/Medicaid incentive payments to physicians and hospitals for meaningful use of electronic health records. To get the money, you can't just use EHRs. You have to use them to actually improve care.

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Todd Park: Patient Engagement Will 'Vastly' Improve Healthcare

Dan Bowman | FierceHealthIT | June 7, 2013

Addressing a packed room at the Health Privacy Summit in Washington, D.C., this week, U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park emphasized the importance of federal efforts to engage patients in their own healthcare. Read More »

Todd Park: President Obama's Tech 'Entrepreneur-In-Residence'

Staff Writer | The Takeaway | February 5, 2013

Congress created the Office of Science and Technology Policy in 1976, but Barack Obama was the first president to appoint a White House chief technology officer. In 2012, Todd Park became the second person to hold the position. Read More »

Tolven-The “Unified Platform” that Delivers All-in-One EHR/PHR/HIE

It is hard to miss the fact that the healthcare industry in the United States and other countries are finding that their existing health IT solutions are not interoperable and are simply unable to distribute, or even acquire, critical patient information. There are two fundamental approaches to fixing this problem. First try to bolt on capabilities that will create kludge systems that have partial interoperability capabilities, or start from scratch with a fully unified platform that has all the interoperability capabilities built-in from the ground up. That would be the Tolven Platform, and that is what this article examines. Read More »

Tomorrow’s Surveillance: Everyone, Everywhere, All The Time

Jon Evans | TechCrunch | June 29, 2013

Everyone is worried about the wrong things. Since Edward Snowden exposed the incipient NSA panopticon, the civil libertarians are worried that their Internet conversations and phone metadata are being tracked; the national-security conservatives claim to be worried that terrorists will start hiding their tracks; but both sides should really be worried about different things entirely. Read More »

Tony Shannon: The Practicalities Of Implementing VistA

Tony Shannon | Nuffield Trust | July 5, 2012

In this slideshow, Dr Tony Shannon, Consultant in Emergency Medicine and Chief Clinical Information Officer, Leeds Teaching Hospitals, outlines the practical considerations for implementing VistA in the NHS, in the context of people, processes and technology. Read More »

Too Awesome: Federal CTO Todd Park 'joins' GovLoop!

Steve Ressler | GovLoop | August 21, 2012

...last Friday I was honored to spend time with Todd Park and his staff, talking about the power of collaboration within government. It was music to my ears as he discussed how much power government had within its own agencies and employees.  He talked about the need to improve the sharing of best practices, ideas, and connecting the innovators.

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Too Many Agencies Rely On Costly, Ineffective Training

Brittany Ballenstedt | Nextgov | September 18, 2012

A new report by the Government Accountability Office points out that many federal training programs are duplicative, costly and/or ineffective, and that governmentwide virtual training may be agencies’ best solution to centralizing training and saving money. Read More »

Too Many Wars, Too Few U.S. Soldiers

Robert H. Scales | Washington Post | March 13, 2012

I guess I knew it would eventually come down to this: Blame the Army’s institutions in some way for the horrific and senseless slaughter of 16 innocent Afghan civilians in Kandahar, allegedly by a U.S. infantry non-commissioned officer (NCO)... Read More »

Too Soon to Tell If EHRs Provide Good ROI

Marla Durben Hirsch | Fierce Healthcare | July 20, 2016

There’s been a lot of hoopla about the role of electronic health records in patient safety, Meaningful Use, data sharing and security. But the elephant in the room is always "do EHRs provide a good return on investment? Will EHR users make more money?" It seems, based on recent research, that the answer might be yes. First, there’s the study that EHRs are adept at increasing a provider’s charge capture. By using their EHR’s automation and enhanced coding capability, pediatric primary care physicians saw an $11.49 increase on average, per-patient collections and an $11.09 increase on average, per-patient charges, as well as an improvement in collection ratios...

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Toolkit Designed To Make Biomedical Data Exploration Easier

Susan D. Hall | FierceHealthIT | October 18, 2013

Researchers have developed an open-source platform for creating software applications that make complex data understandable and accessible to those without sophisticated informatics expertise. Read More »

Top 10 Amazon Cloud Challengers

Christine Burns | InfoWorld | August 30, 2013

Amazon may rule the roost for now, but these companies could take a big bite out of the cloud market Read More »

Top 10 Malaria Innovations

Anna Scott | The Guardian | April 29, 2013

Last week we asked readers to send in the best innovations they had seen that help eliminate malaria. Read More »

Top 10 Medical Research Trends To Watch In 2013

Margaret Anderson | Huffington Post | January 11, 2013

Congress has pushed the date of the "sequester" off another two months, delaying the prospect of automatic 8.2 percent cuts in the budgets of NIH, FDA, and other federal science programs. But a sequester (or other cuts) could still happen. [...] Read More »

Top 12 Reasons Health Providers Pay too Much for IT

Tom Sullivan | Government Health IT | July 17, 2012

Healthcare pays more than any other industry for information technology. At least according to a new survey. "Our analysis shows healthcare organizations pay an average 17 percent more than that of the other 29 industries we sampled," write the authors of a paper by Net(net), which bills itself as a consultancy specializing in IT optimization, "and 33 percent more than the industry with the lowest average costs (food service).” Read More »