News

Healthy Skepticism – Jared Sinclair's Critique of HealthKit as Both an iOS Developer and Registered Nurse

Of the many new APIs announced at WWDC this summer, HealthKit has been particularly thought-provoking for me. At the risk of sounding like that guy, I think I have a somewhat priviledged perspective of HealthKit. There can’t be that many former registered nurses who’ve switched to iOS app development and tried to start a healthcare data company.

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Open Digital Science Journal Gains Users

The medical image community embraced open source as a standard practice back in 2000, with the adoption of the Insight Toolkit (ITK). ITK is sponsored by the US National Library of Medicine and was built as a C++ library. It is the equivalent to a usable encyclopedia of image processing algorithms... Read More »

Can Open Science Help Patients And Save Pharma?

Open science research and development hybrid development model can protect pharma company profits while reducing costs of medicines for consumers Read More »

International Team of Scientists Open Sources Search for Malaria Cure

The Open Source Malaria (OSM) project operates along very similar lines to traditional medicinal chemistry projects in that the team is looking for an antimalarial drug candidate suitable for Phase 1 clinical trials. However, the day to day running of the project works quite differently and is probably most clearly defined by the team’s commitment to The Six Laws of Open Science... Read More »

Coalescing Interest in Geospatial Standards for Health Domain

During the recent OGC Health DWG meeting, participants supported advancing the HL7 – OGC Statement of Underst...The OGC geospatial standards are expected to enrich health information. Guest presenters provided insight on potential alignment of OGC Health DWG activities with health domain requirements for standardization and interoperability.

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Notes on the June Meeting of the HIT Standards Committee

The June HIT Standards Committee focused on an update and evaluation of the standards and interoperability framework initiatives, consistent with the overall theme of ONC’s recent reorganization and strategic plan to focus on fewer goals with a greater depth. Steve Posnack, who now leads the ONC Office of Standards and Technology, introduced the topic... Read More »

Where did the issue of health data exchange disappear to?

There has been extensive talk about the scandals at the VA and remedies for them, including the political and financial ramifications of partial privatization. Republicans have suggested it for some time, but for the solution to be picked up by socialist Independent Senator Bernie Sanders clinches the matter. What no one has pointed out yet, however–and what makes this development relevant to the Datapalooza–is that such a reform will make the free flow of patient information between providers more crucial than ever. Read More »

Just how long are those wait times at the VA really?

You probably saw headlines earlier this week like this one from CNN “Audit: More than 120,000 veterans waiting or never got care.” Sounds pretty bad, and so does the lede CNN used...Want to know what that audit actually shows? Click here (pdf), or trust me to give you the main findings and some context...

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Who Should Head the VA?

...last Saturday, Cosgrove suddenly withdrew his name from consideration, stating that he still had work that needed doing at the Cleveland Clinic. What might that work be? Just hours before Cosgrove made his announcement, the intrepid trade magazine Modern Healthcare published a little noticed article that revealed a long pattern of safety problems at the Cleveland Clinic—problems that were so serious that the federal government repeatedly threatened to shut off the $1 billion a year the clinic collects from Medicare.

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The ONC 10 Year Vision

On June 5th 2014, ONC released  “Connecting Health and Care for the Nation: a 10-Year Vision to Achieve an Interoperable Health IT Infrastructure." The plan is divided in 3 year goals, 6 year goals, and 10 year goals. Five specific tactics support the strategies. Below is a summary of the report and a few comments from my Massachusetts experience that support the reasonableness of the ONC goals.

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