Feature Articles

Sharing Your Internet Connection as a Humanitarian Act

uProxy is a browser extension that lets you share your Internet connection with people living in repressive societies. Much of the world lives in countries that severely censor and restrict Internet access. uProxy makes it a little easier to bring the free and open Internet to some of the darkest corners of the world. How does it work? Find out in this interview with Lucy He, Raymond Cheng, and Salome Vakhtangadze. Lucy and Salome are engineers at Google Ideas, a team at Google that builds tools against oppression. Raymond is a core developer for uProxy and PhD student at the University of Washington, where uProxy is being developed. Together they talk a bit about the future of uProxy and plans for the Open Source Day codeathon taking place during Grace Hopper's Open Source Day later this year...

Largest Email Group for Women in Tech Teams Up with Peace Corps

Systers is the world's largest email community of women in tech. First a little history, from Anita Borg.org: Systers was founded by in 1987 as an email mailing list for women in "systems." At last official count, the community has over 5,500 members from at least 60 countries. Women technologists of all ages and at any stage of their studies or careers are welcome to contact the current Systers-keeper, Rose Robinson. In this interview Rose Robinson talks with me about Systers' participation in the Open Source Day Codeathon taking place at the Grace Hopper Conference (GHC) in Houston, Texas this year—where attendence will hit record numbers. (You can still register!) Systers is one of a group of participating organizations during the codeathon...

National Patient Identifier with FHIR is the answer

Direct Secure messaging has been implemented across the country by many physicians and hospitals due to ONC Meaningful Use requirements. Direct is great for clinician to patient interaction or even consults in some cases. Is this really the way that we should be sharing patient information? Ideally, we want the information in the patient record not just between two clinicians out of band and not stored in the patient history. This way anyone entering later in the patient care scenario has access to the information should it become necessary and the patient has also consented to the release. Read More »

The Right to Repair Ourselves

Geoffrey Fowler wrote an interesting article in The Wall Street Journal: We Need the Right to Repair Our Gadgets.  He describes how manufacturers have made it difficult for us to fix our personal tech gadgets (The Guardian concluded the same earlier this year), and discusses how he's managed to overcome some of those obstacles. As I was reading it, I kept thinking, boy, replace "gadgets" with "our bodies" and "manufacturers" with "health care professionals," and he could be talking about health care.

Local Data Underpins Tanzania’s Next Malaria Plan

Tanzania’s health ministry is set to revisit the way it goes about collecting data to control malaria following new insights into the disease. The ministry is preparing to sign a strategic plan that will focus more on data collection at village and district level to intensify the national fight against malaria. This revision is needed because changing temperatures and growing travel habits among Tanzania’s people are spreading malaria-bearing mosquitoes, say policymakers.

The Free Software Foundation: 30 Years In

The Free Software Foundation was founded in 1985. To paint a picture of what computing was like back then, the Amiga 1000 was released, C++ was becoming a dominant language, Aldus PageMaker was announced, and networking was just starting to grow. Oh, and that year Careless Whisper by Wham! was a major hit. Things have changed a lot in 30 years. Back in 1985 the FSF was primarily focused on building free pieces of software that were primarily useful to nerdy computer people. These days we have software, services, social networks, and more to consider...

Mozilla Pays It Forward

Mozilla and seven other organizations will be participating in the Grace Hopper Open Source Day codethon taking place during the main conference event, on October 14. Emma Irwin is a Community Education Lead with Mozilla, and talks to me about why Mozilla is involved in the codethon, what she gets out of it, and what participants learn from it...

Halamka's Report on the Joint HIT Standards and Policy Committee Meeting

All the members of the ONC Federal Advisory Committees met in Washington to review delivery system reform and the Interoperability Roadmap. We began the meeting with a thank you to Jodi Daniel, who will be leaving ONC after 10 years of service. Elizabeth Holland presented a data update on the Meaningful Use program. She noted that 2015 attestation will open Jan 4, 2016-Feb 29, 2016. The Meaningful Use Stage 2 final rule has not yet been released (but rumor suggests it may be released later today). Next, Karen DeSalvo presented a Delivery System Reform Update  setting the context for the kinds of interoperability needed in the future as fee for service is replaced by population-based payment.

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Solving the Provider Directory Problem for the Country

In many previous posts, I’ve written about the importance of enabling infrastructure to accelerate interoperability. The standards are not the rate limiting step, but the lack of a provider directory, patient identifier, and consent registry are. David McCallie of Cerner has solved the provider directory problem of the country. He downloaded the NPPES national provider database. He created a FHIR-based Application Program Interface to the database by writing 300 lines of Python code and put it live on Amazon Web Services (for $15/month). You can try it yourself here...

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Usability, Accessibility and Telehealth

This month there are two healthcare conferences that we will be attending here in Washington DC. One is the American Telehealth Association’s Fall forum and the other is The Interagency Committee on Disability Research (ICDR)’s Accessibility and Usability in Health Information Technology (HIT)...The ATA Fall Forum focuses on specific telemedicine topics and allows attendees to network and make lasting professional connections in a smaller-scaled environment. Tackle telemedicine, telehealth and mHealth industry issues right at the health care policy epicenter, Washington, DC.

Health innovations need much more than research

Previously known as the Global Forum for Health Research, the Global Forum for Research and Innovation for Health, held August 24-27 in the Philippines, has been freshly rebranded to reflect the distinction between research and the development of innovation as a product or service. This new title also acknowledges that health research is not the only research that affects health. Health outcomes are determined by a complex web of social, environmental and governance issues. A new multidisciplinary, cross-sectoral approach to research was referenced explicitly throughout the conference — often as a salutary example of the kind of collaboration that can help translate research into innovation.

openFDA Unveils Cache of Medical Device Data

OpenFDA is releasing information on medical devices that could spur innovation and advance scientific research. OpenFDA’s Application Programming Interface (API) expands the previous openFDA resources about medical device-related adverse events and recalls by incorporating information from the total medical device product life cycle. This includes current data on device classification (6000 records), 24,000 registrations of device companies and establishments, and the companies’ listings of over 100,000 devices. Data since 1976 on 30,000 device approvals and approval supplements, and 141,000 device clearance decisions (510(k) and de novo types) are now on openFDA.

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Failure of Amazon Consumer Devices as a Cautionary Tale for mHealth

Something Amazon just did is worth those of us in health care paying attention to.  It doesn't have anything to do with their long-rumored interest in health care, and it wasn't even The New York Times disturbing profile of Amazon's supposedly brutal workplace culture.  Instead, it was the layoff of "dozens" of engineers at Lab126, Amazon's hardware development center, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal.  These were the first layoffs in the division's history...What makes this is a cautionary tale for the rest of us is that even Amazon -- which is noted for their prowess with their online consumer experience -- can't necessarily get the physical consumer experience right.  I think Wired captured the problem best, asserting that Amazon's consumer devices would have been more successful "if Amazon focused more on consumers, and less on consuming."

Is there a teaching moment in the Ashley Madison hack?

Academia depends on verifiable information, and one of the fundamental values of academia is that we share important insights. One of those is that privacy is under siege online, and we need to do better with our passwords, with our social technologies, with our control over personal information. Education, putting our hard-earned knowledge to use, must act as the opposite of the shameless commerce of AshleyMadison.com and its ilk – reconstituting in the individual affect the public virtue for which it substitutes. Czech writer Milan Kundera urged: "When it becomes the custom and the rule to divulge another person’s private life, we are entering a time when the highest stake is the survival or the disappearance of the individual." But he was writing about surveillance-riddled totalitarian Czechoslovakia in 1975, not about the United States in 2015.

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Why Intel Made Stephen Hawking's Speech System Open Source

Intel has announced the release Stephen Hawking's speech system as open source, encouraging innovation and improvements that could open up the technology to people with physical disabilities throughout the world. Stephen Hawking, who is probably one of the best scientific minds of our time, was diagnosed with ALS at the age of 21. This slowly paralyzed him and eventually took his ability to talk, but with the help of a unique speech system, he found his voice again...