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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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How Open Source Is Changing the Pace of Software Development

...as new computing architectures and approaches rapidly evolve for cloud computing, for big data, for the Internet of Things (IoT), it's also becoming evident that the open source development model is extremely powerful because of the manner in which it allows innovations from multiple sources to be recombined and remixed in powerful ways. Consider the following examples...

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The State of Health IT in Europe

...In the UK, I heard a great deal about misalignment between IT departments and clinicians.  IT departments are reluctant to embrace social, mobile, analytics, and cloud, instead insisting on centralized command and control of Windows desktop devices, often running Citrix/Virtual Desktop. Clinicians want mobile devices, universal access to applications anytime from anywhere on any device, and big data visualizations... Read More »

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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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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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 »

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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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 »

Ebola in the United States: Short on Accountable 'Open' Information, Effective Systems Planning and Decision Making

Events in the present Ebola crisis prompt unease that the United States deployment of Web based, standardized population health and biosurveillance information services is fragmented, incomplete and insufficient, prompting me to write this blog. The United States has made significant progress in public health and medical preparedness since the 9/11 terrorist attacks; yet, poorly interconnected information systems add to our vulnerability to planning and response to viruses like Ebola or enviro virus EV-D68 that threaten the health of large populations. Today, a gap exists between information technology specialists and public health programmatic or scientific personnel. 

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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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