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Across the Border of Interoperability

Some electronic health record vendors are creating challenges for providers by restricting the kinds of Direct messages their customers can receive or making it hard to open their attachments. According to several sources, Epic Systems, the largest EHR company in the U.S., permits its users to receive only Direct messages that have clinical data architecture (CDA) attachments. Read More »

EHR Vendors Put Up Roadblocks to Direct Messaging

Half of U.S. health care providers now have access to Direct secure messaging through 36 health information service providers, according to DirectTrust, a not-for-profit trade association that accredits HISPs. Yet the policies of certain vendors are impeding physicians' and hospitals' ability to exchange Direct messages, HISPs and providers say. Read More »

Wikipedia and Facebook for Clinical Documentation

Over the past several years I’ve written about the inadequate state of clinical documentation, which is largely unchanged since the days of Osler, (except for a bit more structure introduced by Larry Weed in the 1970s) and was created for billing/legal purposes not for care coordination...In recent lectures, I’ve called on the country to adopt Wikipedia and Facebook for clinical documentation...

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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 »

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 »

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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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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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 »

5 Open Access Journals for Open Source Researchers

While there is no single, quick fix to the problem with the academic journal prices, there is a movement applying the open source way to academic research in an attempt to solve the problem—the open access movement. The goal of open access is to make research freely available upon publication or soon thereafter. Quite often the journal articles are licensed under some form of Creative Commons license or something equally permissive... Read More »

Notes on the October Joint Meeting of the Standards and Policy Committee

Today the future of interoperability was discussed and endorsed by a joint meeting of the Standards and Policy Committees. We began with a preamble clearly stating that the roadmap we’re working on is a process not a finished product. Karen DeSalvo, Jacob Reider, Paul Tang and I offered framing comments for the day... Read More »