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 -

You Should Control Your Own Health Care Data

Niam Yaraghi | US News & World Report | February 16, 2016

If you have ever stayed at a hospital, visited a physician's office or filled a prescription at a U.S. pharmacy, your medical information – stripped of identifying data – is most likely collected, shared and analyzed for various medical and marketing purposes. Your data may have helped a pharmaceutical company sell more drugs, a researcher find a better treatment option for a disease or a government agency predict the next flu outbreak. This is done through a multibillion-dollar industry that feeds on your medical data and reaps millions of dollars from analyzing it, without asking your permission or sharing the resulting profits with you...

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You Won't Believe the Outrageous Ways Big Pharma Has Bribed Doctors to Shill Drugs

Martha Rosenberg | The Influence | July 18, 2016

At the 2010 meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in New Orleans, a psychiatrist from the East coast shared her anger with me about the recent clamp down on Pharma financial perks to doctors. Before news organizations and the 2010 Physician Financial Transparency Reports (also called the Sunshine Act, part of the Affordable Care Act) reported the outrageous amount of money Pharma was giving doctors to prescribe its new, brand-name drugs, there was almost no limit to what was spent to encourage prescribing...

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Young "Dare Devils" Map Their World With ODK And FormHub

Yaw Anokwa | Open Data Kit | June 20, 2013

For the last two years, University of Columbia's modi research group have been working to help a group of children in Kolkata, India use ODK Collect and formhub to map social issues in their community. Read More »

Your Car Is About To Go Open Source

Lucas Mearian | Computerworld | October 9, 2013

Automakers want to standardize on a Linux-based OS that would make vehicle infotainment systems act more like smartphones Read More »

Your Creative, Open Hackathon Is Ripe For Ownership Disputes

Scott Popma and Scott Allen | Wired | July 22, 2013

NASA’s Space Apps Challenge recently became the world’s largest open hackathon, with over 8,000 participants spanning 44 countries. Meanwhile, many of the features many of us use every day — sometimes more than once a day — such as Facebook’s Like button and Timeline, debuted at closed (internal, employee-only) hackathon events. Read More »

Your Current Supply Chain Is Toast, But Its Replacement Will Be Awesome

Paul Brody | ReadWrite | June 24, 2013

3D printing, robotics and open-source hardware will usher in a superior alternative: Software defined supply chains. Read More »

Your EHR Doesn't Have To Be A Liability

Irv Lichtenwald | Healthcare IT News | September 13, 2012

Shed the status quo in favor of a customer-centric approach to healthcare IT Read More »

Your Garbage Data Is A Gold Mine

Christina Farr and Mark Sullivan | Fast Company | August 22, 2016

One of the lesser understood aspects of what you can do with massive stockpiles of data is the ability to use data that would traditionally have been overlooked or in some cases even considered rubbish. This whole new category of data is known as "exhaust" data—data generated as a by-product of some other process...

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Your iPhone Is Tracking You Again

Rebecca Greenfield | Atlantic Wire | October 11, 2012

The iPhone 5 and any phone running iOS 6 not only by default tracks users for advertising purposes, but also makes it difficult to opt out. After Apple told developers to stop tracking users with the UDID system, basically eliminating this privacy breach completely, it has implemented a new targeting system. [...] Read More »

Your Mama’s Data’s So Big…

Joseph Marks | Nextgov | January 15, 2013

Steven VanRoekel opened his keynote address at the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s cloud and big data conference Tuesday morning with a setup but no punchline. Read More »

Your Medical Records Are An Open Book

Linda Gorman | National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) | June 7, 2013

Bloomberg is reporting that states hungry for revenue and flush with the power to requisition individual medical records are moving to capitalize on the value of that information by selling the information in them to all comers. Read More »

Your Money or Your PHI: HHS Issues New Guidance on Ransomware

Jocelyn Samuels | HHS Blog | July 11, 2016

To help health care entities better understand and respond to the threat of ransomware, the HHS Office for Civil Rights has released new HIPAA guidance. One of the biggest current threats to health information privacy is the serious compromise of the integrity and availability of data caused by malicious cyber-attacks on electronic health information systems, such as through ransomware. The FBI has reported an increase in ransomware attacks and media have reported a number of ransomware attacks on hospitals...

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Your TV Is Spying On You

Brian Fung | Nextgov | June 28, 2013

Political messaging is moving back to the living room. After an election in which Internet tactics seemed to captivate the public, political strategists are turning—or perhaps more accurately, returning—their attention to television advertising. Read More »

Your Vegetables Are Alive — And They Change In Response To Light And Dark

Mary Beth O'Leary and Jade Boyd | Elsevier Connect | June 20, 2013

The discovery, reported in Current Biology, suggests that what time we store and eat our produce may affect its nutritional value Read More »

Zambian Minister Says Open Source DHIS2 Is Vital for Healthcare

Chali Mulenga | Zambia Daily Mail | June 5, 2015

[Zambia's] Deputy Minister of Health Chitalu Chilufya says district health information systems are critical for surveillance and planning in the provision healthcare services. Dr Chilufya said the health sector in collaboration with co-operating partners commenced the implementation of a web-based health facility data base called district health information system (DHIS2). He was speaking in Livingstone on Wednesday during the DHIS2 academy training conducted by Oslo University.

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