Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)

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ONC Taps Redesign Winners As Blue Button Continues Evolution

Jennifer Bresnick | EHR Intelligence | January 23, 2013

Continuing its pursuit of a widely-adopted, interoperable, and user-friendly patient portal, the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) has announced the winners of its competition to provide a comprehensive redesign of the Blue Button interface.  The design improvements come alongside a rebranding of the initiative, now known as Blue Button+. [...] Read More »

ONC Unveils Blue Button Plus In Preparation For Stage 2 MU

Jennifer Bresnick | EHR Intelligence | January 18, 2013

The Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) has released the initial specifications for a rebranding of its Automated Blue Button Initiative, now known as Blue Button+. Read More »

Once they start sharing notes with patients, docs don't want to stop

Tom Delbanco | Government Health IT | November 5, 2013

...the practice of sharing physician notes is mired in conjecture about elongated visit times, numerous questions outside normal encounters, curtailed productivity, and the concern that doing so will either offend or unnecessarily worry patients. Read More »

One Nation, One EHR –The Direct Project

CureMD | CureMD EMR Blog | January 8, 2013

The essence of Health Information Exchange (HIE) lies in easily accessible health information to improve the quality of care delivered by the healthcare community. Complicated formats intrinsic to many EHR systems are generally counterproductive to this basic nature of HIEs and can prove to be a hindrance against delivering quality care. So the natural question arises... Read More »

One U.S. Veteran Attempts Suicide Every 80 Minutes: Hidden tragedy Of Afghanistan And Iraq Wars

Staff Writer | Daily Mail | November 3, 2011

One U.S. veteran of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan attempts suicide every 80 minutes, according to new study. Read More »

Op-Ed: Open Data Policy Has Far-Reaching Implications For Health Care

Viet Nguyen and Rob Sax | Nextgov | January 10, 2014

In May 2013, the [OMB] released an executive order that requires federal agencies to use machine-readable and open formats -- in addition to data standards and other regulations -- for creating and collecting information. This new policy will have a significant impact on how public and private organizations access and leverage information. Read More »

Open Data Executive Order Compliance: The Bad And The Good.

Matthew Rumsey and Ginger McCall | Sunlight Foundation | December 2, 2013

The first major deadline for agency compliance with President Obama's open data Executive Order arrived this past Saturday. Agencies were required to, among other things, provide the Office of Management and Budget with an "Enterprise Data Inventory" and release a list of all their public data via a /data page on their websites. Read More »

Open Innovation Works in the Public Sector, Say Federal CTOs

Alex Howard | O'Reilly Radar | February 13, 2012

On his last day at the White House, Chopra released an "open innovator's toolkit" that highlights twenty different case studies in how he, his staff and his fellow chief technology officers at federal agencies have been trying to stimulate innovation in government.

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Open Letter to Chuck Hagel: DoD still doesn’t know what the hell they are doing

...I fear that you are paving a road to a hellish destination.  Rather than lifting up the VA eligibility problem to a shiny new common information system, you are on the verge of dragging health IT into the same bureaucratic vortex that has already done so much damage in the past.  AHLTA was declared “intolerable” in a Congressional hearing 4 years ago.... Read More »

Open Source and EHRs: A proven reality and invaluable opportunity

Michael J. Doyle | Healthcare IT News | September 20, 2011

The marriage between open source technology and electronic health records is at first blush, greeted by many with skepticism regarding robustness and efficacy. In truth, persistent myths obscure an intriguing reality: Open source EHR systems are not only possible but already in place. Read More »

Open source EHRs empower America's community health centers

How the economics of open source make sense for large scale, national healthcare infrastructure projects. A recent study  published by the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, examined "the use of open source electronic health records within the federal safety net."

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Open Source Electronic Health Records: A Cost Solution For Hospitals

Zina Moukheiber | Forbes | August 24, 2012

When Oroville Hospital decided to digitize its patient medical records three years ago,...chief executive Robert Wentz...did something almost unheard of for a health care executive: he went open source. As the saying goes in this conservative industry, no one gets fired for picking Epic. Wentz’s decision is not for the squeamish or the straight-laced. It forced long-time hospital administrators with tight schedules and deadlines to loosen up and collaborate with a network of free agents—open source programmers who voluntarily support a publicly available electronic health record called VistA...

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Open Source Is So Much More Than Free Code

Roger Baker | FCW | December 6, 2016

In 2011, the Department of Veterans Affairs officially moved its most critical software, the VistA electronic health record system, into open source by establishing the Open Source Electronic Health Record Alliance (OSEHRA). Along the way, VA officials solicited and followed advice from numerous open source experts, including Red Hat, Carnegie Mellon University and the Industry Advisory Council...

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Open Source Summit v3.0: Communities

Nick Skytland | open.NASA | June 18, 2013

Over the past few years, we have been working hard at NASA to modernize the way we approach software development. Open Source is a critical component to our strategy. In 2011, we started a conversation around open source in government [...]. Read More »

Open source tools, OSEHRA gain momentum at VA

Mary Mosquera | Government Health IT | October 18, 2012

Todd Park, the White House chief technology officer, spoke briefly at the conference and said that...“OSEHRA is catalyzing another ecosystem for open source software and health IT innovation that no closed system could do," Park said. "This is unbelievably cool."
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