News Clips

careMESH Raises $5M in Seed Funding to Scale Integration of its Healthcare Communications Platform

Press Release | careMESH | June 16, 2020

careMESH today announced that it has closed an initial $5M seed round led by Assurance Capital and Pavey Family Investments, with participation by other early-stage investor funds and individuals. The funding will be used to scale adoption of its first-of-a-kind communications platform, which brings a National Provider Directory, patient event notifications, secure communications, and transition of care workflows into a single service for hospitals, health systems and other healthcare delivery organizations

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Mozilla Announces Second Set of COVID-19 Solutions Fund Recipients

Press Release | Mozilla | June 8, 2020

Innovations spanning food supplies, medical records and PPE manufacture were today included in the final three awards made by Mozilla from its COVID-19 Solutions Fund. The Fund was established at the end of March by the Mozilla Open Source Support Program (MOSS), to offer up to $50,000 each to open source technology projects responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. In just two months, the Fund received 163 applicants from 30 countries and is now closed to new applications.

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Mozilla Announces the First Set of COVID-19 Solutions Fund Recipients

Press Release | Mozilla | June 6, 2020

In less than two weeks, Mozilla received more than 160 applications from 30 countries for its COVID-19 Solutions Fund Awards. Today, the Mozilla Open Source Support Program (MOSS) is excited to announce its first three recipients. This Fund was established at the end of March, to offer up to $50,000 each to open source technology projects responding to the COVID-19 pandemic...In the coming weeks Mozilla will announce the remaining winning applicants. The application form has been closed for now, owing to the high number of submissions already being reviewed.

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WELL Health Completes its Seventh EMR Acquisition with the Closing of Indivica Acquisition

Press Release | WELL Health Technologies Corp. | June 1, 2020

WELL Health Technologies Corp...is pleased to announce that is has closed the previously announced acquisition of Indivica Inc...With the acquisition of Indivica, WELL expands its EMR services footprint to approximately 1,900 primary health medical clinics and 10,000 physicians across Canada. "We are very pleased to welcome the talented team at Indivica to our WELL EMR Group," said Hamed Shahbazi, Chairman and CEO of WELL. "Indivica is a proven and well-respected OntarioMD certified EMR vendor that has developed unique intellectual property to secure and support electronic records for medical clinics across Ontario."

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2020 Guide to Laboratory Informatics and Information Systems Released

Press Release | LabLynx | May 14, 2020

The latest edition of the longtime industry reference guide to systems, vendors, information and resources concerning laboratory data management has been made available to the public. Always free and accessible as an online ebook or .pdf download, the Guide contains the latest updated content. Originally simply a listing of available LIMS and LIMS vendors with information about their products and services and, importantly, their pricing, the Guide has expanded over the last decade or so to provide a great deal of information and resources relating to data management for laboratories.

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OpenEMR Vendor Launches Digital Solution to help Healthcare Providers Meet Pandemic Challenges

Press Release | Health Tech, Inc. | May 13, 2020

Handling an influx of sick patients can be challenging at any time, but today with the Coronavirus pandemic, it becomes even more crucial to have procedures in place to manage crowded areas and maintain social distancing. To meet the increasing demands of technology for Health Clinics, Urgent Care and Private Practice, HealthTech has launched new solutions that streamline e-Prescribing and Patient Scheduling, increasing the efficiency of the way patients and healthcare providers connect.

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McMaster University Announces Strategic Alliance with WELL Health to Support Canadian Doctors and Patients

Press Release | WELL Health Technologies, McMaster University Department of Family Medicine | May 1, 2020

WELL Health Technologies Corp....is pleased to announce it has entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (the "MOU") with McMaster University's Department of Family Medicine that authorizes WELL to use the OSCAR brand...OSCAR, an acronym for "Open Source Clinical Application Resource", is an open-source EMR or Electronic Medical Records system created by McMaster and the open-source community to enable better care, connect clinicians and data for continuous learning, and deliver improved outcomes for patients and the health system. By using the OSCAR brand, WELL affirms its commitment to the core brand principles of open collaboration, clinician-driven innovation and ethical data practices. The MOU outlines a Strategic Alliance between WELL and McMaster for Technology Enabled Positive Health and Social Impact. Through this strategic alliance, WELL and McMaster will collaborate on initiatives that leverage OSCAR in ways that strengthen their shared commitment to ethical, innovative leadership in health and society. Read More »

Marc Andreessen: It is Time for America to Build

Marc Andreessen | a16z | April 18, 2020

...I think building is how we reboot the American dream. The things we build in huge quantities, like computers and TVs, drop rapidly in price. The things we don't, like housing, schools, and hospitals, skyrocket in price. What's the American dream? The opportunity to have a home of your own, and a family you can provide for. We need to break the rapidly escalating price curves for housing, education, and healthcare, to make sure that every American can realize the dream, and the only way to do that is to build.

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LabLynx Joins the COVID-19 Fight by Introducing Laboratory System Dedicated to Infectious Disease Diagnostic Testing

Press Release | LabLynx | April 9, 2020

LabLynx, Inc., long-time leader in enterprise-level cloud-hosted LIMS/LIS, today announced it has developed the world's first LIMS (Laboratory Information Management System) dedicated specifically to COVID-19 diagnostic testing. Called "CovidLiMS," its main features include, crucially, swift setup-to-live time: 2-5 days, including training, according to LabLynx President John H. Jones.

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Coronavirus Lessons From the Asteroid That Didn't Hit Earth

Benny Peiser and Andrew Monfort | Wall Street Journal | April 2, 2020

London: The coronavirus pandemic has dramatically demonstrated the limits of scientific modeling to predict the future. The most consequential coronavirus model, produced by a team at Imperial College London, tipped the British government, which had until then pursued a cautious strategy, into precipitate action, culminating in the lockdown under which we are all currently laboring. With the Imperial team talking in terms of 250,000 to 510,000 deaths in the U.K. and social media aflame with demands for something to be done, Prime Minister Boris Johnson had no other option. But last week, a team from Oxford University put forward an alternative model of how the pandemic might play out, suggesting a much less frightening future and a speedy end to the current nightmare.

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Mozilla Open Source Support Launches COVID-19 Solutions Fund

Press Release | Mozilla | March 31, 2020

Mozilla is announcing today the creation of a COVID-19 Solutions Fund as part of the Mozilla Open Source Support Program (MOSS). Through this fund, we will provide awards of up to $50,000 each to open source technology projects which are responding to the COVID-19 pandemic in some way. The MOSS Program, created in 2015, broadens access, increases security, and empowers users by providing catalytic funding to open source technologists. We have already seen inspiring examples of open source technology being used to increase the capacity of the world's healthcare systems to cope with this crisis.

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RSNA Building an Open Repository of COVID-19 Imaging Data

Press Release | Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) | March 30, 2020

The medical imaging community around the world is uniting to help address the COVID-19 pandemic. The Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) continues to build on its extensive body of COVID-19 research and education resources, announcing a new initiative to build a COVID-19 Imaging Data Repository. The open data repository will compile images and correlative data from institutions, practices and societies around the world to create a comprehensive source for COVID-19 research and education efforts. The image hosting, annotation and analysis framework will enable researchers to understand epidemiological trends and to generate new AI algorithms to assist with COVID-19 disease detection, differentiation from other pneumonias and quantification of lung involvement on CT for prognosis or therapy planning.

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Michigan Tech Engineering Team Joins Open Source Ventilator Movement

Press Release | Michigan Technological University | March 20, 2020

As COVID-19 continues to spread, the research community is looking for solutions. In addition to work on vaccines and medicine, medical technology is needed. In severe cases of COVID-19, the disease attacks the respiratory system, and one of the major bottlenecks in treatment is having enough ventilators. The open-source hardware community wants to change that. Joshua Pearce...an open-source hardware expert and co-editor-in-chief of HardwareX [explained] that 3D-printed lab hardware and other open-source tech can be cost-effective and encourages design improvement. "Even complex medical devices are not outside the realm of possibility anymore."

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White House Call to Action to the Tech Community on New Open Access Machine Readable COVID-19 Dataset

Press Release | White House | March 16, 2020

Today, researchers and leaders from the Allen Institute for AI, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), Microsoft, and the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health released the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19) of scholarly literature about COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, and the Coronavirus group. Requested by The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the dataset represents the most extensive machine-readable Coronavirus literature collection available for data and text mining to date, with over 29,000 articles, more than 13,000 of which have full text.

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COVID-19 Will Be The Ultimate Stress Test For Electronic Health Record Systems

Eric D. Perakslis and Erich Huang | STAT | March 12, 2020

As the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19 continues its march around the world and through the United States, it is spawning another kind of infection: Covid-19 cyber threats aimed at individuals and health systems. We aren't crying wolf here. Disaster planning experts know all too well that preexisting weaknesses become worse during crises. The WannaCry cyber attack that devastated the United Kingdom's National Health Service is a good example. Outdated infrastructure containing components with long-understood vulnerabilities are a hacker's paradise...The undeniable fact that electronic health record systems are designed to track and bill procedures rather than provide optimal patient care is likely to be on full display as the health system becomes increasingly saturated with Covid-19 patients.

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