open source software

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Glucosio App Helps Diabetics Track Blood Sugar

One of the top-rated apps in the Google Play Store right now when you search for glucose tracker is Glucosio. The app is designed to track blood glucose test results, and after installing it to test it out, I found it easy and simple to use, with not a lot of settings to deal with to get straight to using it. In just a few short months since its release in October 2015, Glucosio has received great ratings and reviews and over a thousand downloads. Glucosio was also recently listed on Black Duck's list of Open Source Rookies of the Year, which honors innovative, sophisticated projects in open source...

Healthcare Lessons from the Data Sages at Strata

Most healthcare clinicians don't often think about donating or sharing data. Yet, after hearing Stephen Friend of Sage Bionetworks talk about involving citizens and patients in the field of genetic research at StrataRx 2012, I was curious to learn more...With this in mind, I arrived at this February's Strata conference wondering what I could extrapolate from other more sophisticated data users to healthcare.

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HIMSS19: Open Source Software for Disaster Preparedness and Response

Although not officially listed as a track at the HIMSS19 conference, there are a series of very important presentations on the use of open source software for disaster preparedness and response. This is a critical topic that we have covered extensively in Open Health News. As we detailed in this article, there was a major failure in being able to provide victims of Hurricane Harvey, as well as Hurricane Irma and Hurricane Maria with access to their medical records. Few emergency medical responders could access their records either. The two success stories that came out of the hurricanes were two open source electronic health record (EHR) systems, OpenEMR and the VA's open source VistA EHR.

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HLN Releases Upgrade of Open Source Immunization Forecasting Tool

Press Release | HLN Consulting | February 18, 2020

HLN Consulting has released a new version (v1.22.1) of the Immunization Calculation Engine (ICE). ICE is a state-of-the-art open-source software system that provides clinical decision support for immunizations for use in Immunization Information Systems (IIS), Electronic Health Record (EHR) and Personal Health Record (PHR) Systems. This version includes important updates including...

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HLN's Immunization Calculation Engine (ICE) chosen as a Digital Public Goods Standard

Press Release | HLN Consulting | November 1, 2021

HLN Consulting is thrilled to announce that the Immunization Calculation Engine (ICE) project has been chosen by the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA) as an innovative openly licensed technology and listed in their Digital Public Goods registry. Technologies included in the list are considered to be digital public goods in alignment with the Digital Public Goods Standard. ICE now appears in the Digital Public Goods registry where it is discoverable as a digital public good and reflected on a growing network of catalogs and aggregated lists of digital public goods.

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How Open Source Hardware Increases Cybersecurity

Hardware hacks are particularly scary because they trump any software security safeguards-for example, they can render all accounts on a server password-less. Fortunately, we can benefit from what the software industry has learned from decades of fighting prolific software hackers: Using open source techniques can, perhaps counterintuitively, make a system more secure. Open source hardware and distributed manufacturing can provide protection from future attacks...security is one of the core benefits of open source. While open source is not inherently more secure, it allows you to verify security yourself (or pay someone more qualified to do so). With closed source programs, you must trust, without verification, that a program works properly.

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How Radical Transparency Is Transforming Open Source Healthcare Software

At Tidepool, where I work as a Community and Clinic Success Manager, the company's mission is to make diabetes software more accessible, meaningful, and actionable. Operating in the open is how we achieve that. Tidepool's diabetes management software is an open source platform free for both clinicians and people impacted by diabetes. And, because the company is a nonprofit, it also operates according to the transparency rules that govern 501(c)(3) organizations.

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How to Contribute to Open Source Healthcare Projects for COVID-19

Many of those that are familiar with the maker movement, including me, believe there is a significant opportunity to apply open source design principles and mass-scale collaborative distributed manufacturing technologies (like open source 3D printing) to at least partially overcome medical supply shortages during the COVID-19 pandemic...Many people agree there is enormous potential with the approach despite the challenges and have started to self-organize to develop open source hardware to fight COVID-19. The largest group is Project Open Air. They are a group of "Helpful Engineers" who have congregated to aid in the COVID-19 pandemic response by developing both open source hardware and open source software. The Helpful Engineers are working on medical devices such as open source ventilators, to create a solution that can be quickly reproduced and assembled locally worldwide. Read More »

How To Make App Stores Friendly To Open Source

Microsoft recently seemed to propose that Open Source software didn’t belong in the Windows app store. Excuse me? After the news broke, Giorgio Sardo, Microsoft’s General Manager of the Microsoft Store, argued on Twitter that it wasn’t Microsoft’s intent. “We absolutely want to support developers distributing successful OSS apps. In fact, there are already fantastic OSS apps in the Store! The goal of this policy is to protect customers from misleading listings.” Predictably, confusion results. And the kerfuffle over FairEmail and the Google Play Store earlier this year is a good example of how this sort of confusion is not entirely new, leading to questions about intent. I’ve talked with developers and business managers about their experience in preparing software packages for commercial app stores. Universally, everyone reports having issues with app stores’ packaging. These include...

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Hybrid Open Source Software Development & Business Models

Starting in the early 2000s, a number of companies began to release a portion of their product's source code to the open source community, while keeping key parts closed. This allowed them to make claims that their company and products were open source. These products were termed commercial open source or hybrid open source software, to distinguish them from true free and open source software (FOSS). In hybrid open source business models, some of the software products are released using a business-friendly open source license, but some of the special source code add-ons are only available for a fee. There currently appear to be two major forms of the hybrid open source business model...

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Hydroelectricity and Transmission Planning in Chile Use Open Source Geospatial Tools

We were able to leverage a number of open source geospatial tools, such as QGIS, GDAL/OGR, and the PostGIS extension to the PostgreSQL open source relational database, in order to control the quality of the geospatial data at hand. These tools also helped us carry out the types of spatial analysis necessary to determine relationships between the various objects of value and, on the one hand, the potential hydropower projects, and on the other, the possible alternative transmission corridors. The key to hydroelectric capacity planning in Chile is the ability to generate the maximum amount of electricity, given certain restrictions, while assuring a fixed level of interaction with objects of value.

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IBM To Acquire Red Hat, Completely Changing The Cloud Landscape And Becoming World's #1 Hybrid Cloud Provider

Press Release | IBM, Red Hat | October 28, 2018

IBM and Red Hat the world's leading provider of open source cloud software, announced today that the companies have reached a definitive agreement under which IBM will acquire all of the issued and outstanding common shares of Red Hat for $190.00 per share in cash, representing a total enterprise value of approximately $34 billion...."The acquisition of Red Hat is a game-changer. It changes everything about the cloud market," said Ginni Rometty, IBM Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer. "IBM will become the world's #1 hybrid cloud provider, offering companies the only open cloud solution that will unlock the full value of the cloud for their businesses.

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Improve Open Source Community Sustainability By Tracking These Two Metrics

In early 2020, I wrote an article on three metrics for tracking and measuring offline, in-person community-building activities. Little did I (or the world) know then that offline, in-person activities of any kind would soon become unfeasible for the foreseeable future. So, I started thinking: With open source projects being online by default, and with everything else moving online and virtual, what should creators of open source technologies measure as we continue in this COVID and (hopefully soon) post-COVID world? There are plenty of metrics you can track—stars, forks, pull requests (PRs), merge requests (MRs), contributor counts, etc.—but more data doesn't necessarily mean clearer insights. I've previously shared my skepticism about the value of these surface-level metrics, especially when assessing an open source project's health and sustainability. In this article, I propose two second-order metrics to track, measure, and continually optimize to build a strong, self-sustaining open source community...

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Interview With LibreHealth Open Source Health IT Project Leader Judy Gichoya

Andy Oram | EMR & HIPPA | December 7, 2016

LibreHealth is the largest health IT project to emerge recently, particularly in the area of free and open source software. In this video, Dr. Judy Gichoya of the LibreHealth project explains what clinicians in Africa are dealing with and what their IT needs are. Both developed and developing countries need better health IT systems to improve patient care. In the developed countries, electronic records and other health IT systems sprout complexities that reflect the health care systems in which they function. But these IT systems are far removed from real-life needs of doctors caring for patients, and have transformed physicians in the US into its largest data entry workforce...

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Interview with Stefano Maffulli First Executive Director of the Open Source Initiative

The Open Source Initiative has served as the key steward of open source software since its formation in 1998. In September 2021, the Open Source Initiative board hired Stefano Maffulli as its first Executive Director. I recently interviewed Stefano to learn more about him and his vision for the Open Source Initiative.