News

OSEHRA 2014 Summit to Rock EHR World

The world of electronic health records (EHRs) is going to be rocked next month as the Open Source Electronic Health Record Alliance (OSEHRA) holds its third annual summit in Bethesda, Maryland. After four years of quietly building a organization to promote VistA and open source in healthcare, as well as a central host for the core VistA code, OSEHRA is now emerging as a major force in the world of EHRs. The conference has become a gathering place for not just the VistA community but for major health IT players in the federal government, including the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), and Indian Health Service (IHS), and major forces in the open health field. The three-day conference will feature more than 120 speakers addressing 90 separate sessions. Read More »

US Digital Service is Born

Yesterday, the White House announced the formation of the US Digital Service, a cadre of technology sherpas meant to inject more modern commercial practices into government IT, especially the development of websites and mobile applications. It’s obviously inspired by the Government Digital Service, a similar effort in the UK, and the early success of the GSA’s 18F team. Read More »

Delivering a Customer-Focused Government Through Smarter IT

A core part of the President’s Management Agenda is improving the value we deliver to citizens through Federal IT. That’s why, today, the Administration is formally launching the U.S. Digital Service. The Digital Service will be a small team made up of our country’s brightest digital talent that will work with agencies to remove barriers to exceptional service delivery and help remake the digital experience that people and businesses have with their government. Read More »

WHO Declares Ebola An International Health Emergency

The director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO) has proclaimed the Ebola outbreak in West Africa as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, triggering an urgent international step-up in the response to the crisis, which it now sees as a serious threat to other countries, too. Read More »

Using Open Source PDF Technology to Solve the Unstructured Data Problem in Healthcare

If there’s one major challenge to single out in healthcare IT today, it would be leveraging the growth and usage of big data. While consumer IT made big advances in the past decade to get a handle of data by marking up content, indexing it, and annotating it for use, enterprise, and healthcare IT in particular, still need to catch up on making data actionable...This article provides insights into how using the Portable Document Format (PDF) and accompanying tools within healthcare organizations can be a powerful way to help solve the unstructured data challenge, speed up processes, and reduce the costs for document handling.

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The Road to a Career in Open Source and Science

My journey from bench scientist to open science software developer and how I develop better tools for open, reproducible scientific research. Read More »

Costa Ricans Design Mobile App to Report Dengue Breeding Sites

A free app that allows the public to report pools and other areas of water where dengue-carrying mosquitoes have laid their eggs could help control outbreaks of the disease in Costa Rica and beyond, say its developers and health officials. Costa Rican company GeoTecnologías joined forces with the country’s Ministry of Health to develop the Dengue Breeding Report application. The app allows the public to report mosquito ‘hatcheries’ to the ministry and will allow the ministry to map this data. Read More »

Universal Language: The Pistoia Alliance Takes on Indescribable Biology

Best Practices WinnerThe Pistoia Alliance has previously sponsored new methods for querying databases and the scientific literature, and a more effective algorithm for compressing and sharing genetic sequencing data. Over the past year, another Pistoia project, HELM, has entered the public domain after gradual development by an assortment of Alliance members. An open source language and set of editing tools for working with large biomolecules, HELM has already become a foundational part of research in at least three large pharmaceutical companies. Read More »

The Future of Scientific Discovery Relies on Open Science Models

Ross Mounce is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bath studying the use of fossils in phylogeny and phyloinformatics, completing his PhD at the University of Bath last year. Ross was one of the first Panton Fellows and is an active member of the Open Knowledge Foundation, particularly the Open Science Working Group. He is an advocate for open science, and he is actively working on content mining academic publications to reuse scientific research in meta-analyses to gain higher level insights in evolutionary patterns... Read More »

Drones Spread Wings From War Zones To Disaster Areas

While lawmakers around the world struggle to keep up with the growth in the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) — commonly known as drones — innovation and community participation are changing how this weapon of modern warfare can be used for humanitarian purposes. Read More »