Latest News

'Open' Development of Wearable Health & Fitness Wristbands

There are more and more health or fitness wristbands starting to hit the market every few weeks.  According to the latest projections from ABI Research, the total market for wearable wireless devices in sports and healthcare will grow to 170 million units by 2017. While many of these devices currently have limited capabilities, usually measuring just one metric, this is about to change. Read More »

Banning Software Patents & 'Opening' IT Procurement Processes

Paul Matthews, Chief Executive of the Institute of IT Professionals (IITP), congratulated Commerce Minister Foss for listening to the information technology (IT) industry and supporting the nearly unanimous passage of New Zealand's recent law banning software patents. Read More »

NY State Office of Mental Health to Implement DSS vxVistA System

The rumors circulating at the OSEHRA Summit last week have now been confirmed. It has been officially announced here and here that the New York State Office of Mental Health (OMH) will be implementing Document Storage Systems (DSS) vxVistA electronic health record (EHR) system in 23 hospitals and 300 clinics across the state. The prime contractor for this enterprise-wide contract is CGI Group Inc. OMH is one of the largest healthcare delivery organizations in the United States. It has hundreds of facilities across the State of New York. The system, based on the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) award-winning VistA EHR system, will give OMH a stable, flexible platform to leverage technology to improve patient care and safety. Read More »

OSEHRA 2013: VA CIO Stephen Warren Lays out Open Source Strategy at the VA During Summit

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is launching a series of an initiative to fully embrace and leverage its open source strategy, according to Stephen Warren, the Acting Chief Information Officer (CIO). Warren, who gave the keynote presentation at the 2nd Annual OSEHRA Summit, in Behesda, Maryland, laid out in great detail the steps the VA is taking. These include fully embracing OSEHRA as the open source code repository, developing intake mechanisms so the VA can bring VistA enhancements from the private sector into the VA, following recommendations made by the iEHR team to standardize all core VistA modules, migrating all servers to Linux, and standardizing all development on open source tools. Read More »

VistA Academy 2013 - Linux & Open Source EHR Training

Crawford Rainwater, leading expert on the use of Linux as a platform for 'open source' electronic health records (EHR) systems, will be teaching Linux Essentials and Beginning Linux Systems Administration courses during the upcoming VISTA Academy 2013 to be held on October 18-21 in Seattle, Washington. The VISTA Academy is part of a more extensive VISTA Expo & Symposium 2013 conference that is focused on the award-winning VistA electronic health record (EHR) system developed by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). Read More »

OHNews Weekly Summary - 9/7/2013

September 7, 2013-The following is a brief listing of some of the hot news items, selected news clips, feature stories, and blogs posted on Open Health News (OHNews) over the past week that  we believe will be of interest to our readers across the U.S. and around the world. Read More »

Growing Use of GIS Maps by the Government & Healthcare Organizations

Geoplatform.gov is up and running and growing more robust with every passing month. This resource is hosted and supported by the General Services Administration (GSA). This is the same U.S. government agency  that also hosts the government's national repository of government data sets known as Data.gov. The Geospatial Platform is a web-based solution for providing shared and trusted geospatial data, services, and applications for use by the public and by government agencies and partners to meet their mission needs. It was developed by the member agencies of the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) in collaboration with public and private sector partners and stakeholders.

Read More »

Major Upcoming Open Source & Health IT Conferences

There are a number of major upcoming conferences and events related to Open Source & Health IT our readers ought to follow or attend over this next month, e.g. OSEHRA Summit, Open Hardware Summit, Consumer Health IT Summit, LinuxCon North America, FOSS4G, Health 2.0, and more. Read More »

OHNews Weekly Summary - 8/30/2013

The following is a brief listing of some of the hot news items, selected news clips, feature stories, and blogs posted on Open Health News (OHNews) over the past week that  we believe will be of interest to our readers across the U.S. and around the world. Read More »

OpenMRS in Latin America

The OpenMRS community is working to apply health information technologies (HIT) to solve problems, primarily in resource-challenged environments.  It is  a proud, global community of developers, implementers, funders, and users all trying to make the world a better place by using their expertise to improve the health and wellness of people around the globe. Read More »