White House

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OSEHRA Community Responds to the Federal Government's Proposed Open Source Policy

The OSEHRA community today submitted a response to the "Draft Open Source Policy for Federal Agencies" released by the White House on March 10. The policy was open for comments through today. This is a major milestone for the OSEHRA community as well as the open source community as a whole. Currently the US Government spends nearly a hundred billion dollars a year on software purchased from the private sector or procured from government contractors. Most of this software acquisition ends up in failure. President Barack Obama has made it a priority to shift technology acquisition policies to solve this problem and restore technology innovation by embracing open source.

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Pandemic and all-hazards preparedness, response law emboldens U.S. disaster recovery efforts

Kim Reilly | Homeland Preparedness News | June 25, 2019

The Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness and Advancing (PAHPA) Innovation Act, S. 1379, became law on Monday with the president's signature, prompting accolades from national stakeholders, company executives and federal lawmakers. The far-reaching law ensures the United States will be better prepared to respond to a wide range of public health emergencies, whether man-made or occurring through a natural disaster or infectious disease. Overall, the law aims to bolster the nation's health security strategy, strengthen the country's emergency response workforce, prioritize a threat-based approach, and increase communication across the advanced research and development of medical countermeasures (MCMs), among numerous provisions contained in the law.

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PCORI Announces PCORnet Partner Networks’ Pledge to Facilitate Patients’ Access to Their EHR Data

Press Release | Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), National Patient-Centered Clinical Research Network (PCORnet) | February 25, 2016

Today at the Precision Medicine Initiative Summit at the White House, Joe Selby, MD, MPH, Executive Director of the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), announced an initiative to enable individuals to access data in their electronic health records (EHRs) and share it for research that could improve care for their conditions. The initiative involves a pledge by 20 Patient-Powered Research Networks (PPRNs) to help their participating patients more readily obtain information from their EHRs...

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Pentagon Resists Administration’s Mandate for an Open Source Health Records System

Bob Brewin | Nextgov | April 22, 2013

President Obama has backed open standards for an integrated electronic health record system to serve the Defense and Veterans Affairs departments since his first term, but Pentagon plans to acquire commercial software to replace the department’s current EHR are “manifestly inconsistent” with that approach, J. Michael Gilmore, the Pentagon’s director of operational test and evaluation wrote in a blistering memo. Read More »

Petition Launched To Get The White House To Open Source Healthcare.gov Code

Mike Masnick | Techdirt | October 21, 2013

After the disastrous technological launch of the healthcare.gov website, built by political cronies rather than companies who understand the internet, there has been plenty of discussion as to why the code wasn't open sourced. [...] And, now, a "We the People..." petition has been launched, asking the White House to open source the code to Healthcare.gov... Read More »

Pilots Move NSTIC From Theory To Practice

Molly Bernhart Walker | FierceGovernmentIT | September 24, 2012

The National Institute of Standards and Technology awarded Sept. 20 five pilot projects worth more than $9 million in grant funding to demonstrate identity solutions under the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace, or NSTIC. Read More »

Ready or Not: New Report on Protecting the Public's Health

The Trust for America's Health (TFAH) released its 2019 edition of what it hopes will be an annual report, Ready or Not: Protecting the Public's Health from Diseases, Disasters and Bioterrorism last February. The ground-breaking report warns about key global challenges ahead, like the risk of a flu pandemic; the impact of weather pattern changes due to climate change; the dangers of antimicrobial resistance, and others, and tries to offer advice on how to prepare for them.

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Rush Medical Center Demoes Patient-Centered Blue Button 2.0 Mobile App at White House Event

Press Release | Rush University Medical Center | August 17, 2018

Information technology has changed the world, and now it’s changing health care in dramatic and fast-moving ways. Rush is a nationally-recognized leader in using IT to achieve better outcomes, lower costs and improve the patient experience. This leadership reached the White House on Monday, when...Rab and Boutrs presented MyRush Mobile, an app for mobile phones developed by Rush’s information systems department, to representatives of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, including CMS director Seema Verma. The presentation was part of the Blue Button 2.0 Conference, a gathering of software developers held in the White House South Court Auditorium.

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Safety Datapalooza Shows Power Of Data.gov Communities

Lisa Nelson | DigitalGov | September 24, 2012

The White House Office of Public Engagement held the first Safety Datapalooza illustrating the power of Data.gov communities.  Federal Chief Technology Officer Todd Park and Deputy Secretary of Transportation John Porcari hosted the event, which touted the data available on Safety.Data.gov and the community of innovators using it to make effective tools for consumers. Read More »

SafetyData.gov Review: Long On Text, Short On Data Tables

Brand Niemann | AOL Government | September 26, 2012

"The liberation of government datasets is important in itself, but data are truly powerful when used in the development of informative apps." So proclaimed Todd Park, Brian Forde and Jo Strang in a recent White House Blog, Safety Data Jam connects Tech Innovators with Public Safety Officers. Read More »

Sage Bionetworks Advocates for Open Systems in Health Research

Press Release | Sage Bionetworks, mPower | July 20, 2016

Sage Bionetworks, a nonprofit biomedical research organization, continues its work to redefine the way in which health data is gathered, shared and used through the use of open systems, incentives and norms. In a Nature commentary published today, a set of governing principles for digital health data analysis that are designed to maximize the contribution of large-scale digital data to advancing medical care are described. This commentary was co-authored by John Wilbanks, Chief Commons Officer at Sage Bionetworks and Eric Topol, MD, Director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute, and Chief Academic Officer of Scripps Health. The two work together on the NIH-funded Precision Medicine Initiative that was announced earlier this month.

Tech Giants Back White House Open Source Health IT Initiative

Six major technology companies have thrown their support behind the White House's initiative to use an open source, collaborative, approach to accelerate the progress of health data standards and interoperability and to give patients access and control of their medical records. The companies; Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Salesforce signed a pledge that was presented at the White House's Blue Button 2.0 developer conference. The conference took place last Monday. Dean Garfield, president and CEO of the Information Technology Industry Council (ITI) told the press that “As transformative technologies like cloud computing and artificial intelligence continue to advance, it is important that we work towards creating partnerships that embrace open standards and interoperability.

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Tech Industry Pledges to Improve Healthcare Through Open Source Health IT

Press Release | Information Technology Industry Council (ITI) | August 13, 2018

Today, ITI President and CEO Dean Garfield and several ITI member companies participated in the Blue Button 2.0 Developer Conference at the White House where they announced their commitment to removing barriers for the adoption of technologies for healthcare interoperability, particularly those that are enabled through the cloud and AI...“Today’s announcement will be a catalyst to creating better health outcomes for patients at a lower cost,” said ITI president and CEO Dean Garfield. “As transformative technologies like cloud computing and artificial intelligence continue to advance, it is important that we work towards creating partnerships that embrace open standards and interoperability.

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The Past Year In Open Access

Timothy Vollmer | Creative Commons | October 21, 2013

Today marks the start of Open Access Week 2013. Open Access Week is a global event for the academic and research community to continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they’ve learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research... Read More »

The Power of Open Education Data

Todd Park and Jim Shelton | Whitehouse.gov | June 8, 2012

Technology, data, and entrepreneurs can help with college affordability—as well as help address our national priorities in K-12 education. That’s why we are excited about the Education Data Initiative, an Administration-wide effort to “liberate” government data and voluntarily-contributed non-government data as fuel to spur entrepreneurship, create value, and create jobs while improving educational outcomes for students.

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