Feature Articles

Ending Poverty: There's an Open Source App for That!

Rural Africa presents changemakers with intractable challenges across sectors, but one American investor, Grameen Foundation, believes it all comes down to access to information. Grameen Foundation has invested millions to develop mobile-phone applications that leapfrog over a lack of electricity, education, and income. Building on their legacy of leading-edge ideas, Grameen Foundation has evolved from funding microfinance to designing disruptive solutions to the kind of poverty that's most challenging to reach, in remote rural areas, and to the poorest of the poor. Since more people have access to cell phones than toilets in Africa, Grameen Foundation brings increased agricultural productivity, access to prenatal and infant healthcare, and a portfolio of financial services, to the poor--right into the palm of their hands.

Read More »

On the Financial Conflicts of Interests of Medical Societies and Rising Drug Prices

The notion that health care prices are high and are rising continuously in the US should hardly be novel...We first posted about high drug prices in July, 2005, with the example of BilDil...But only a few days later we noted that three cancer costs had yearly costs in the five figures, and one, Erbitux, cost as much as $100,000.  Most amazingly we noted that Thalidomid was priced at $25,000  a year...Since then, the ridiculously high prices of many tests and treatments, but most notably new drugs and devices, has been so widely covered, our discussion has been limited to special cases.,,

Read More »

HHS CTO on the Power of Connection

A learning system for health is not a new concept. It is an ancient instinct to share our experiences and stories. But technology allows us to widen the network of people we can talk with, increase the velocity of those conversations, inject them with more source material, then archive and make them searchable. For patients and caregivers, building that system means connecting people who share a diagnosis so they can share insights with each other – and with researchers. For example, the FDA is now partnering with PatientsLikeMe to explore how patient-reported data can shed light on drug safety.

Read More »

Halamka's Report on the June 2015 HIT Standards Committee

The June 2015 HIT Standards Committee focused on celebrating the accomplishments of those individuals who have reached their federal advisory committee term limits.  Most served 6 years...Karen DeSalvo thanked each one and I offered comments about their unique contributions, changing the fundamental trajectory of standards in the US from a 1990’s “EDI” payload model to a 2015 “Facebook” Application Program Interface model.   Their leadership has brought modern, open web standards to the healthcare domain, specified controlled vocabularies, and established appropriate security. They will be missed.

Read More »

Dutch Healthcare Trade Group To Validate Open Source Solutions

The Dutch Association of Research Quality Assurance (DARQA), a trade group representing about 600 health care institutions and suppliers, will assist in validating open source software solutions for use in health care. Approved solutions will be given so-called vendor compliance statements, asserting compliance with European and global health care ICT standards. DARQA hopes to endorse hospital information systems, document management tools, archiving solutions and software for data analysis.

Read More »

Open Data Key To Tackling Neglected Tropical Diseases

Open data access could promote collaborations among researchers in Africa and help in the fight against malaria, tuberculosis (TB) and neglected tropical diseases such as sleeping sickness, also called African trypanosomiasis. At a time when demand for open data in health and drug discovery is dominating the digital space, some researchers say the model could work for Africa and alleviate the sufferings of many from these diseases. Following the call on 23 April this year from the WHO for the disclosure of all results from clinical trials of new medicines, there is a push towards greater transparency.

Read More »

European Union's 5-year Roadmap for IT and Open Source

After months of preparation, the European Commission (EC) released its broad 5-year roadmap in early May for information and communications technology (ICT) policy, the Digital Single Market Strategy, or DSM. The plan is structured around three main pillars or goals, which include...

Read More »

Standards Alone are not the Answer for Interoperability

Today I have the honor of presenting a guest blog by David McCallie MD, SVP Medical Informatics, Cerner. He summarizes the collective feeling of the industry about the trajectory of interoperability..."I have been honored to have served on the HIT Standards Committee from its beginning in 2009. As I reach my term limits, I have reflected on what we have all learned over the past six years of helping to define the standards for the certified EHR technology that lies behind the Meaningful Use program...

Read More »

Are jackalopes and information blocking similar?

Looking to dupe urbanite travelers, bartenders and bar owners in rural Western taverns sometimes fasten antelope horns to the head of a large jackrabbit. They then mount the whole thing, hang it over the bar and tell visitors looking for a craft brewed IPA to watch for vicious jackalopes when they’re out and about. So, are we having a jackalope moment in health IT? Do we believe in something we can’t see? The suggestion has been made that some vendors are actively engaged in “information blocking”—a basic refusal to exchange patient data with other systems. Either that or they’re charging boatloads of money to do so, which is framed as a form of information blocking in a way, but not exactly.

Read More »

This Actually Is a Test

When it comes to health care, testing is not what it used to be, or what it is going to be in the not-too-distant future. For example, confirmation of a cancer diagnosis is getting much easier.  The New York Times reported that blood tests -- known as "liquid biopsies" -- have now been shown to generally match the results of a tumor biopsy.  The blood tests look for DNA fragments from the tumor that signal its presence.  The liquid biopsies are useful for both detecting the presence of a tumor and its ongoing monitoring. The current generation of tests are not perfect, with as many as 15% of tumors not generating enough DNA to be detected, but they do offer the advantage of not requiring an invasive procedure...

Veterans Adding Life Story to Medical Records

“Doctors don’t generally have time to listen to your life story,” said Eileen Ahearn, a psychiatrist at Madison who launched the “My Life, My Story” program in March 2013. “But they do have time to read a one or two page summary in your medical chart. It helps them understand who it is they’re treating. You’re no longer just a collection of symptoms. You’re a human being.” Ahearn remembers reading the life story of a patient she was about to begin treating for chronic depression.

Read More »

How Telecoms Can Escape Vendor Lock-In With Open Source NFV

Today, Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) takes software applications that run on proprietary hardware and allows them to run on standard x86 servers. This allows  core network infrastructure to dynamically allocate network, compute and storage to satisfy workloads on-demand. It also allows you to  move these workloads to different servers, or even different data centers as needed, and to scale up or scale down without changing the underlying hardware. NFV provides you with a modern agile environment to respond to customers needs, get to market quickly with new services, and reduce both capital and operational expenditures...

Read More »

Why My Doctor Prescribed Me Open Hardware

I recall a senior medical doctor once saying that being a practitioner nowadays is much more difficult than ever before, because when people get diagnosed, they go home to search the web, and often come back with tough questions. Open hardware for physiological computing isn’t making it any easier, but it seems like that’s not a bad thing...

Read More »

Interoperability and the Trough of Disillusionment

Every technology has an adoption journey. The classic Gartner hype curve travels from a Technology Trigger  to the Peak of Inflated Expectations followed by the Trough of Disillusionment. It often takes years before organizations reach the Slope of Enlightenment and finally achieve a Plateau of Productivity. Have you noticed that Congress and the popular press have entered the Trough of Disillusionment for EHRs and interoperability over the past month? Congressional staffers writing the 21st Century Cures bill (which is not yet law) seem to have concluded...

Read More »

Building Better Assistive Technology With Open Hardware

For many people, technology assists and augments our lives, making certain tasks easier, communicating across long distances possible, and giving us the opportunity to be more informed about the world around us. However, for many people with disabilities, technology is not an accessory but essential to living an independent and quality life...Unfortunately, the majority of assistive technology devices are unsettlingly expensive, and they age rapidly, with little in the way of customer-serviceable parts...

Read More »