Feature Articles

Health Hack 2014-The Power of Open Source, Open Data, and Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration

ThoughtWorks, an agile developement and design company, hosted and sponsored (among other sponsors, like Red Hat) the second annual Health Hack in Melbourne, bringing researchers together with technologists at their office in Melbourne’s central business district for 48 hours to create software that solved a problem in the health sciences. All the code developed at Health Hack would be released under an open source license, and in most cases, took advantage of some form of open data...

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Help This Open Access Journal Plan Their Upcoming Open Source Strategy Issue

The TIM Review is an open access journal with an upcoming Open Source Strategy issue they want you to contribute to. Mekki MacAulay is the guest editor for the issue, and in this interview find out more about the journal, this issue, and how you can share your expertise on the subject.

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Albania Considering Care2x as a National Open Source Health Information System

The government of Albania would benefit from using free and open source for managing the country’s hospitals and health clinics, says Gjergj Sheldija. The ICT consultant is implementing Care2x, an open source Hospital Information System (HIS), for the Mother Teresa Hospital in Tirana, Albania. According to Sheldija, the Albanian government is currently considering a national HIS, and is weighing the pro’s and con’s of proprietary versus open source software alternatives.

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Open Source Isn’t Just About Code – Other Ways In Which You Can Contribute!

Talking to developers and reading about open source I often get the feeling that the general notion is that open source is just about code and commits...Sure, code is what ultimately ships and has a direct impact on the users of an open source project, so yes commits and code are important. But it’s by no means the only way you may contribute to a project. Projects mostly are a whole ecosystem, which is about more than just code. Here are a couple of other ways you may contribute to a project.

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The Impact of the Linux Philosophy

All operating systems have a philosophy. And, the philosophy of an operating system matters. What is the Linux philosophy and how does it affect the community? How has it changed software development for the ages?

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How Closed EHR Records Cause Paralysis

Take a step back from the challenges that surround health information technology (HIT) interoperability and you will recognize that market forces and a desperately fragmented health care system make hospitals and vendors act the way we do...The predominant proprietary HIT vendors know about the interoperability gap yet engage in prolonged foot-dragging on even basic data interfacing. Read More »

The Changes at ONC and Next Steps

In 2014, there have been many changes at the Office of the National Coordinator. Although I do not have access to an organizational chart, I believe the leadership of ONC and the changes in 2014 are as follows... Read More »

Open Access Isn't Just About Open Access

This Open Access Week, we are celebrating and advocating for unfettered access to the results of research, a movement that has shown considerable progress over the last few decades. Let's all take a step back, though. Much of the open access movement is forward thinking, offering solutions and policy changes that will help improve access to future scholarship and research. This is crucial, but if we want real and meaningful open access, we must look backward as well. Read More »

Open Source Companies-Key Tasks: Marketing and Press Relations

Steven Vaughan-Nichols...is here to tell us that marketing is a big part of your job if you want a successful open source company. He has heard a lot of people saying that marketing isn’t necessary anymore. The reason it’s necessary is because writing great code is not enough – if no one else knows about it it doesn’t matter. You need to talk with people about the project to make it a success...

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Why Open Data Matters in Education

Similar to the way open source changed the way technology is built and used, open data has begun to change the way the world looks at data. Open data provides an opportunity to resolve some of the world's most complicated problems, whether in private sector or public sector.

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Ibáñez Talks about Open Health and VistA at All Things Open Conference

Luis Ibáñez...was up next to talk to us about Open Source in Healthcare. Luis’s story was so interesting – I hope I caught all the numbers he shared – but the moral of the story is that hospitals could save insane amounts of money if they switched to an open system.

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Take Control With Open Source Hardware

Free and open source software is no good without open hardware. If we can't install our software on a piece of hardware, it's not good for anything. Truly open hardware is fully-programmable and replicable. Read More »

Halamka on China's Expanding Healthcare System

On Monday and Tuesday I met with government, industry, and academic stakeholders  in Qingdao and Shenzhen China to discuss healthcare technology,  patient empowerment, and process improvement in the rapidly expanding Chinese healthcare system. Over the past few years, I’ve watched the Chinese government gradually change policy - from promoting a fully public healthcare system, to limited pilots of private facilities, to embracing public/private partnerships... Read More »

Neuron Health: Building Clinical Applications On An Open Source Platform

Here are four reasons building on the Tolven Platform can benefit healthcare application development, along with lessons learned through the experiences of Roberts-Hoffman Software.  Our team created the clinical functions of an inpatient EHR, many of which are available as open source plugins to Tolven under the Neuron Health project.

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Commodity Data Analytics For Health Care

Analytics are expensive and labor intensive; we need them to be routine and ubiquitous. I complained earlier this year that analytics are hard for health care providers to muster because there’s a shortage of analysts and because every data-driven decision takes huge expertise.

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