Latest Blog Posts

Andrew Slavitt and the Opportunity Offered by Open Medicaid IT

As we reported in the December 15 issue of OpenMedicaidIT News, Andrew Slavitt, Acting Administrator of CMS, has openly discussed the opportunity offered by CMS' open Medicaid IT strategy in multiple blog posts and meetings. We have reported on this opportunity in an article titled CMS To Invest $5+ Billion a Year in Open Source and Cloud-based IT Infrastructure for Medicaid and recently started a newsletter provide our readers with news of the opportunities for tech companies as they emerge. We reprint here the article from the newsletter presenting that opportunity in Slavitt’s own words.

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OSEHRA to Launch Workgroup to Develop Strategy for Open Health Community

Major developments in open source health information technology are opening all kinds of opportunities for the members of the OSEHRA community. These developments include the open source strategy embraced by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to modernize the state Medicaid IT infrastructure, the rapid adoption of open source APIs, including Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR), and the emergence of blockchain technology and middleware solutions to fix the interoperability crisis.

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OSEHRA to Hold Community Calls to Discuss VA Digital Health Platform [Updated]

OSEHRA is holding a community call today and next Thursday, Sept. 29, with the open health community to discuss the response of the open source community to the recently release RFI by the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) for a "digital health platform." Notice with details from Seong K. Mun below..."According to the RFI (which is attached to this message), VHA "desires a Next Generation Digital Health Platform that is integrated, future-proof and optimizes the cost of operations. To achieve these goals, VA is considering establish an interoperable digital health platform that leads to Easier Access to Care for the Veteran, Better Outcomes for the Veteran and more efficient operations for the VHA"

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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OSEHRA 2016: Call for Abstract Submissions for Open Source Conference

OSEHRA will be holding its annual Summit June 27 through June 29 in Bethesda, Maryland. Over the past several years the OSEHRA Summit has become the leading confernce for the VistA community as well as the Open HealthIT community. This year the conference will be expanding with a half-day focused on Open Health IT presentations.  The 2016 OSEHRA Open Source Summit Program Committee invites abstract submissions for presentations, roundtables, and posters by March 8, 2016.

INASP Launches Open Access Week Competition 2015

INASP has launched its Open Access Week Competition for 2015. The competition is open to representatives of institutions and organizations from INASP partner or network countries. Open Access Week, a global event now entering its seventh year, is an opportunity for the academic and research community to learn more about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they’ve learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in Open Access developments. For more information, see OpenAccessWeek.org.

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Open Health News Continues To Grow-Visitors Cross the 375,000 Mark

We have been very busy lately and did not have time this year to write a recap of major events related to our news web site. Well, a bit late, we start here with a review of our traffic figures. Traffic to the website continues to grow and we are now approaching 20,000 unique visitors per month. As the table shows below, the total number of unique visitors since we launched the site nearly four years ago has surpassed 375,000 and the total number of Page Views has broken the 8 million mark.

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OSEHRA Holds Code Alignment Workshop-Webinar Report 11/21

OSEHRA has been holding a "Code Alignment Workshop" in Oakland, CA that has brought together leading corporate members to work out how they can collaborate on a core verion of the open source VistA EHR...More details in the note below and in an online briefing on the meeting tomorrow at 08:30 AM Pacific Time. Read More »

OSEHRA Calls for Comments to VA Open Source Policy

Just got an email from Kris Prendergast, community organizer for the Open Source Electronic Health Record Alliance (OSEHRA) calling on the community to provide input to the open source strategy for the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). The VA, which developed the VistA EHR, widely recognized as the world's best hospital-based EHR, is seeking comments to their next generation IT contract. They are specifically requesting comments and suggestions to their open source strategy. This strategy will be discussed in great detail at the OSEHRA conference next week. Read More »

HANDI Health Apps Looking for Workshop Speakers/Panelists

Just got an email from Jill Riley from HANDI Health calling for speakers and panelists for their upcoming conference on November 4th and 5th in Birmingham, UK. HANDI Health is a non-profit organization focused on the development of open source health IT solutions. They have had a series of very successful conferences and workshops and many senior members of UK's National Health System believe that HANDI has contributed more usable code than what they got from the $19.6 billion failure of their previous Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) effort. Read More »

Opensource.com Publishes 18 Interviews with Speakers of the Upcoming OSCON Conference

For those of you who have not noticed yet, the folks at Opensource.com just completed the publication of an entire series of interviews with speakers at the upcoming O/Reilly OSCON conference. This conference is one of the most important and interesting open source conferences of the year and the wide variety of interviews conducted which show the depth and breadth of the conference topics. `

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Clinovo Is Looking for a Writer/Evangelist

I heard from Clinovo's Olivier Roth a few days ago. He said that Clinovo is looking for a writer who can help them write articles and white papers about their open source clinical research solutions and their implementations. Clinovo is a Clinical Research Organization (CRO) that partners with life science companies to streamline their clinical trials. Clinovo is committed to open source solutions and open innovation. This is discussed in detail in a terrific interview with their CTO Marc Desgrousilliers who is managing the development of ClinCapture, their open source Electronic Data Capture (EDC) system. In this interview, he tells us more about why healthcare needs open source and why it is the future of clinical trials. Read More »

Pistoia Alliance Wins Bio-IT World Grand Prize-Continues Innovation Mission

I received an email newsletter this morning from the Pistoia Alliance and it was so full of information and updates that I decided to post the entire newsletter as an article. A note on the Pistoia Alliance is long overdue. I had meant to write an article on the Alliance back in April after the 2014 Bio-IT World conference organizers announced that Pistoia's HELM project had been chosen as one of the Grand prize winners. Read More »

OSEHRA Posts Video of Scheduling System Industry Day

Roger A. MaduroI heard today from Kris Prendergast, OSEHRA's open source community organizer. She gave me a heads up that OSEHRA has posted the full recording "Industry Day" that the US Deaprtment of Veterans Affairs (VA) conducted on June 18. As detailed in this press release, several of the key technical groups in the VA joined forces to host this day-long event. The event provided an intense and productive discussion of the VA's new scheduling application called Medical Appointment Scheduling System, or MASS for short (gosh, can't the folks at the VA come up with good names!).

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UC Davis Conducting Research Survey on What Motivates Open Health Developers

Mona Alsaffar, a health informatics graduate student at University of California-Davis is conducting a study about developers involved in healthcare open source projects. She contacted Open Health News for help in informing the open health community about the project.

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OSEHRA 2014: Deadline for Summit Abstract Submissions & Academic Competition is May 31st

The deadline for OSEHRA Summit 2014 abstract submissions and Academic Abstract Competition is coming up on June 7th. The OSEHRA Summit has become the premier open health conference and it is a unique opportunity to present the latest advancements in open source health information technology. This unique forum provides researchers with the opportunity to showcase their findings—resulting in action by government and industry leaders within the greater community. This year's Summit is modeled after last year's which featured more than 100 presentations during the breakout session, covering topics in policy, technology, clinical applications, business models, and others.

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Luis Ibáñez to be Interviewed in vxJourney Program on Thursday

Luis Ibáñez, one of the best known advocates of open source solutions in healthcare will be interviewed Thursday, May 1, by Fabian Lopez in the popular vxJourney weekly webinar. Ibáñez a contributing author to Open Health News as well as other publications, in particular Opensource.com, will talk about the VistA course that he has been teaching at the State University of New York at Albany. Read More »

Call for Papers-6th International Conference e-Health 2014

The 6th International Conference e-Health 2014 is coming up in Lisbon, Portugal July 17th to 19th. There is still an opportunity for the open health community to present papers at the conference. Deadline for paper submission is May 5th.

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Open Health News About to Cross the 225,000 Visitor Milestone

Open Health News has continued growing in leaps and bounds and we are close to crossing a major milestone, 225,000 unique visitors to the site since we launched a little over three years ago. Not bad considering that when we launched the site, we thought the maximum number of people interested in a web site providing news related to open health would top off at 30,000 max!

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Exascale Computing & Open Source Solutions

Have you been paying attention to the topic of Exascale Computing? Perhaps you should. Congress recently provided funding to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to develop a new class of supercomputers capable of a quintillion [billion billion] FLoating Point Operations per Second (FLOPS) needed to model nuclear weapons explosions Read More »

Munnecke on "Dots-First" vs. "Links-First" Metadata Approach, or Why ICD10 is Going to Fail

Note that, even in 1986, the Committee on Veterans’ Affairs was savvy to, and advocating the use of metadata (then called the “data dictionary – a roadmap to the database.”  It understood its use in VistA (then called DHCP), its role in portability (then with the Indian Health Service), and hopes to use it for the Department of Defense’s Composite Health Care System. Read More »

Musings at the start of the New Year - 2014

Have you noticed –

For the past decade we've been talking about electronic health records (EHR), personal health records (PHR), health information exchange (HIE), mobile health (mHealth), preventive health, genomics, robots, telemedicine, open source, open access, open data, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. Read More »

Making Way for the Next Generation

After more than 3 years as a senior editor and writer for Open Health News (OHNews), I am stepping down at the end of this month and finally heading off to retirement. I've spent almost 40 enjoyable years working in the healthcare industry, but the time has come to depart. Read More »

AMIA 2013: Presentation on Genomics and Precision Medicine

By 2020, availability and use of genomic information will contribute to revolutionizing how consumers will make better choices about their personal health.  This became apparent to me and others in the audience during demonstrations at the recent AMIA 2013 Symposium, on how genomics is increasing shari Read More »

What does the future hold for Healthcare and Health IT – From 2015 thru 2030 and Beyond

One of the best ways to try and come up with some reasonably sound predictions about the future of healthcare and health information technology (IT) over the next several decades, is to do a little 'crowd sourcing' – tapping into a wide range of individuals, groups, and sources of information on the web to see what they have to say. A review of over a hundred articles, interviews and reports written over the past 2-3 years about the future of information technology and healthcare has led to my compilation of the following list of predictions for the next 10-15 years - from 2015 thru 2030 – and beyond.

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