Veterans Health Administration (VHA)
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Hepatitis C Drug Costing VA, DoD Millions
One of the costliest drugs on the market threatens the Veterans Affairs Department's health budget — to the point that VA, which added the medication to its formulary in April, provides it to only the sickest patients who need it...
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HIMSS14: Annual Conference and Exhibit Opening with Open Source Session
The 2014 Annual HIMSS Conference & Exhibition opens today in Orlando, FL. (February 23-27). The more than 37,000 attendees can notice an important and growing breakthrough for the health IT industry. For the first time, HIMSS invited OSEHRA to hold a four hour session today beginning at 12:45 pm, Convention Center 203C. The day’s formal OSEHRA session, among the traditional industry businesses, marks a breakthrough recognition for the emerging benefits and impacts that open source solutions and their many new models of business are generating around the globe.
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HIMSS14: Open Health Presentations at Annual Health IT Conference
As we outlined in our earlier article, "HIMSS14 Annual Conference and Exhibit Opening with Open Source," open source software as well as collaboration and interoperability in health information technology (HIT) has reached break out levels and the HIMSS conference in Orlando, Florida. Below are some of the conference presentations related to open health. Note the large number of presentations the award-winning VistA EHR developed by the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and its derivative RPMS developed by the Indian Health Service (IHS). Read More »
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HIMSS14: OSEHRA Organizes Open Source EHR Panel at the HIMSS Conference
OSEHRA has been invited to organize an Open Source EHR session at the 2014 Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Annual Conference and Exhibition on Sunday, February 23 in Orlando, Florida. More than 37,000 healthcare IT professionals, clinicians, executives, and vendors from around the world are expected to participate in the HIMSS conference. We are enthusiastic about engaging this community, especially with our unique session focused on user-driven innovations, interagency collaboration, and future investments. Our session will feature success stories from VistA users including Lutheran Medical Center, the North Carolina Department of Health, Oroville Hospital, and the College of St. Scholastica...
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HIMSS20 - The Open Health Companies That Were Going to Participate
The HIMSS20 conference has been cancelled as a result of concerns due to the global spread of the coronavirus. Although the conference is not taking place, we have decided to publish a variation on our annual HIMSS conference Open Health Guide. Open Health News has published Open Health Guides to HIMSS conferences almost since our founding. They were widely read with thousands of reads each. So they are now a tradition for our publication and there were many great open health companies that were going to have exhibits at the HIMSS20 conference as well as presentations. Dominant health IT vendors spend over a billion dollars a year in PR and marketing for their lock-in solutions. Unable to match that kind of PR power, the annual HIMSS conference has been one of the few opportunities where Open Health companies have had to present their solutions to the world.
- The Future Is Open
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How The VA and UL Created an Orchestrated Approach to Healthcare Cybersecurity Assurance
In today's high-risk Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) and cyber-warfare environment, one tool or individual line of cybersecurity solutions would likely not be able to satisfy the requirements for security and safety put forth by an HDO; hence, the aggregation of solutions branded as MedFusion was derived. The VA UL CRADA discovered that healthcare is strengthened in terms of security and safety of connectable medical devices through in-depth cybersecurity defense...Learning from the VA and UL cybersecurity research results, with respect to product-level management of vulnerabilities and threats to medical devices and their associated software algorithms, we can impact the quality of adoption of electronic health records and other data collection systems connected to the IoMT and consumers...
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How VA Is Using Big Data To Keep Patients Out Of The Hospital
The Partnership for Public Service and IBM Center for The Business of Government recently issued “From Data to Decisions III: Lessons from Early Analytics Programs,” which examines successful early government users of data to see how they got started, what sustained them and how the data was used to improve mission-critical programs. Read More »
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How VA Reform Turned Into a Fight Over Privatization
In 2014, the Department of Veterans Affairs was mired in a scandal. An inspector general’s report had found “systemic” manipulation by government officials to hide lengthy and growing wait times at its medical centers. Veterans were waiting months for appointments, and dozens may have died because they could not get treated in time. Spurred to action, Congress created a program aimed at temporarily alleviating the strain on the VA: Veterans who lived more than 40 miles from a health-care facility or who had to wait more than 30 days for an appointment could take their benefits outside the system and seek treatment from private doctors...
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Hurricanes Harvey and Irma Draw the Line - Time for the US to Embrace Open Source Emergency and Disaster Response
For nearly 20 years now the global open source community and applications have been a keystone to disaster relief efforts around the world. The enormous number of disaster relief applications and knowledge that has been developed through all these years, should, and needs to be leveraged in the current crisis. For that reason, Open Health News is starting a series of articles to highlight some of the most important solutions. A substantial portion the open source applications for emergency and disaster response that exist are actually already on the news website in the form of articles and resource pages.
- The Future Is Open
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IBM, Epic Unveil Advisory Group As They Vie For Big Military EHR Contract
IBM Corp. and Epic Systems Corp., likely hoping to show why their joint bid should win the Defense Department's $11 billion, 10-year EHR contract, Wednesday unveiled a 17-person group they've assembled to help advise the department and guide it through implementation if they win the work. Read More »
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Innovation At VA: App Offered To Hurricane Sandy Victims
A mobile app originally developed to aid veterans has been offered to mental health personnel helping Hurricane Sandy's victims, an example of how innovation and technology within the federal government can have a broader reach than ever before. Read More »
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Inside The Quest To Prevent Suicides Through Better Data
Something as impersonal and mundane as incomplete datasets could be exacerbating a national tragedy: the suicides of thousands of veterans and hundreds of active-duty service members every year...
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Instead of Medicare for All, How about VA for All?
I wonder -- why would people be calling for a new system that would still have thousands of private hospitals/facilities and millions of healthcare professionals, practicing FFS medicine using countless systems and data structures? In short, why aren't people calling for VA for All? Like Medicare, the VA -- more especially, its healthcare component, the Veterans Health Administration -- is charged with providing healthcare to a designed population, in this case, veterans. Unlike Medicare, though, it does so as an integrated health system (by far the largest in the U.S.), with 170 VA Medical Centers, over a thousand outpatient facilities, and somewhere over 100,000 physicians...it offers some of the finest care in the world. It offers a range of services that Medicare can only dream of, and it does so at, it is believed, lower costs than private coverage or even Medicare. Plus, it also was an innovator in electronic health records and is today in telehealth. What's not to like?
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Intermountain, Cerner Collaborate On Defense Health IT Bid
Cerner Corp., one of several major electronic health-record system vendors competing for a multibillion-dollar contract to replace the Military Health System's EHR, has entered what it terms a “strategic agreement” on its bid with Intermountain Healthcare...
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iPad Apps Provide Mobile Tools For Military Veterans' Caregivers
The Department of Veterans Affairs is working on a yearlong pilot to see how iPads help more than 1,000 family caregivers tend to injured post-9/11 veterans. The department has distributed 900 iPads to caregivers, and it's developing mobile apps to help veterans manage their care. Read More »
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