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Clueless or Craven? The White House Gets the VA Story Exactly Backwards
Sad to say, the Obama administration seems clueless about what might be broken at the VA and how to fix it. Either that, or it is just cravenly saying and doing whatever it thinks is necessary to make the story go away. Evidence for the clueless hypothesis came on Friday, when White House Deputy Chief of Staff Rob Nabors weighed in with his diagnosis (pdf) of what ails the VA. The document is extraordinary in its contradictions, sloppy formulations, and non-evidence-based conclusions.
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Is Robert A. McDonald Fit to be VA Secretary?
President Obama's nominee to head the [VA] is now Robert A McDonald, former CEO of Procter and Gamble...Yet aside from a single article on the Ring of Fire web site, all news coverage and discussion so far has ignored Mr McDonald's previous experience in health care leadership, but also that his relevant track record ought to raise questions about his fitness for the VA position.
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How Three College Students Built a Health Provider Search Site in Six Weeks - A Lesson for the Federal Government
In six weeks, a team of three college students with no industry experience and only academic software-specific knowledge, developed and designed a health care provider search system using only open source software. To tell you how they got there, let's start with a little history of open source software in the US federal government workspace... Read More »
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7 Rules of Thumb for Your Open Science Project
Tips for creating and maintaining open source software for science. Read More »
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Doctors Use Wikipedia to Collaborate in the Production of Quality Medical Information
Six years ago, Doctor James Heilman was working a night shift in the ER when he came across an error-ridden article on Wikipedia. Someone else might have used the article to dismiss the online encyclopedia, which was then less than half the size it is now. Instead, Heilman decided to improve the article. “I noticed an edit button and realized that I could fix it. Sort of got hooked from there. I’m still finding lots of articles that need a great deal of work before they reflect the best available medical evidence.”
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Scientists Manage Research with Open Source Zotero
Citation management tools are an easy way to organize electronic citations and PDFs into a single interface. They also allow you to export citations as a formatted bibliography. Many of them will also interact with a word processor for in-text citations. The two biggest cost-free, client-based tools are Mendeley and Zotero. I’m going to focus on Zotero, which is free and open source. It’s also the tool I like most for handling my own citations...
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Mozilla's Science Lab Is a Hub for the Open Research Community
Since the launch last June of Mozilla Science Lab, we’ve been working to unpack what science on the web and like the web means, and what Mozilla can do to support it. The Science Lab was created to serve as a neutral broker and hub for the open science community—a means of bridging the gap between the early adopters and the many scientists who understand the value of open science, but who have not yet (for a number of reasons) mapped that understanding onto their day-to-day workflow...
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The VA Waitlist Fiasco: VistA Should Not be Thrown Out With the Bathwater
Without a doubt, the death of American veterans as a result of the VA waitlist debacle is tragic and unacceptable. The Obama administration must move quickly and deliberately to fix the underlying problems and restore faith in the agency. If these issues were common throughout the VA network of hospitals and clinics, it might make sense to consider dramatic, earth-shaking alternatives like moving veterans to private providers and shuttering the VA. But they are not common. Indeed, as Washington Monthly reporter Phillip Longman has documented, the VA’s challenges are regional, not pervasive. Read More »
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21st Century Healthcare: the Open Platform that will Transform
As we begin, we restate the widely held view that 21st Century healthcare is under pressure, in a state of near-crisis in many places where the burden of disease and the limitations of current healthcare systems are becoming ever more apparent. We acknowledge that at the clinical frontline that staff are already working under immense pressure , in unsustainable ways and that we must find ways to “work smarter, not harder”. So too we must find ways to improve the quality, safety, timeliness and cost effectiveness of modern medicine. We must become more effective at efforts to improve through clinical audit and ensure our clinical research efforts are more enlightening than ever before..
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Open Humans Project Allows Volunteers to Share Their Personal Health Data
While many researchers encounter no privacy-based barriers to releasing data, those working with human participants, such as doctors, psychologists, and geneticists, have a difficult problem to surmount...A new project, Open Humans, seeks to resolve the issue by finding patients who are willing—even eager—to share their personal data. Read More »
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