News

Simply put, 2014 is a big year for electronic health record vendors. They must adhere to stricter standards under the federal government's meaningful use program while convincing healthcare providers that they can meet future needs for information exchange, patient engagement and data analytics. Not everyone will make the cut. Read More »

When the government first launched Healthcare.gov as an informational site back in June, open source advocates were delighted to hear that the code would be available for anyone to see on the public programming library GitHub... Read More »

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has long been ahead of the private sector in health IT. Its VistA electronic health record (EHR) system, for example, was in use throughout the VA's hospitals and ambulatory clinics long before non-VA providers began to adopt EHRs en masse in the past few years. And as recent VA figures show, the department has also left the private sector in the dust in the area of telehealth. Read More »

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) is on the chopping block — again — and supporters are gearing up for what could be their biggest fight yet to save the little-known agency. In his fiscal year 2018 budget proposal, President Donald Trump has proposed eliminating AHRQ’s funding and folding the agency into the National Institutes of Health, which itself is facing a proposed 18% cut to its current $31.7 billion budget, and a requested $1.2 billion cut in FY 2017 funding.

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No one knows what started the Rim Fire, the 160,000 acre blaze that's ripping through the western side of Yosemite National Park. But nearly 4,000 firefighters have been dispatched to try to stop it using helicopters, bulldozers, and flame retardants. Although the situation is starting to look up—20 percent of the fire is now contained, up from 7 percent just two days ago—the authorities predict the fire will keep spreading... Read More »

When Sarah Sharp was a 20-year-old university student in Portland, she took on an extra-credit project writing USB driver code for the Linux kernel. She was too young to stay past 10 p.m. in some of the brew pubs where the local Linux-heads met, but she hung in as long as she could, learned a lot about Linux, and embraced the community. Read More »

[...] This year's "biological desert" (NOAA's phrase) is much bigger than last year's, below, which was relatively tiny because Midwestern droughts limited the amount of runoff that made it into the Gulf. At about 2,900 square miles, the 2012 edition measured up to be about a third as large as Delaware. Read More »