open health

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A Snapshot of ONC's Global Health IT Efforts

On today's World Health Day, I'd like to give you an inside look at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology's (ONC) global health IT work. Advancing digital health (or e-health) is gaining worldwide momentum as nations seek to leverage health IT. While each country and jurisdiction has a different approach to healthcare, global digital health advancements are becoming a common thread across the world. In December 2010, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the European Union (EU) signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to galvanize cooperation on advancing digital health in both regions. The MOU focuses on three areas: interoperability, workforce, and innovation.

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AcademyHealth Becomes Host Organization for 2016 Health Datapalooza

Press Release | Academy Health | November 23, 2015

AcademyHealth will host the 7th Annual Health Datapalooza, May 8-11, 2016, in Washington, DC. “As the national organization working with the producers and users of evidence to improve health and the performance of the health system, and the home of the EDM Forum, AcademyHealth has long been a champion for data liberation and a catalyst for its use in decision making and quality improvement,” said AcademyHealth President and CEO, Dr. Lisa Simpson. “As hosts of the Health Datapalooza, we’ll build on our work in this area to shape an agenda that engages the broad community of data liberation champions -- patients, advocates, researchers and delivery system and industry leaders -- in focused discussions about how we turn data into evidence, and evidence into actions that improve health outcomes.”

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Accessibility In Open Source For People With ADHD, Dyslexia, And Autism Spectrum Disorder

For a long time, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism, Asperger syndrome, dyslexia, and other neurodiverse conditions were considered things that hold people back. But now, many researchers and employers recognize that neurodiversity is a competitive advantage, especially in technology, and especially when certain accommodations are provided. This is certainly true for me. I'm a 39-year-old teacher in Sweden diagnosed with ADHD and Asperger's (also referred to as Autism Level 1). I'm also an intermediate Linux user and use it daily for Java programming, productivity, and gaming. I've been using Linux since the late 1990s, and I've learned ways open source programs can be made more accessible for people with these conditions.

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Advancing 'Health for All' through Telemedicine: Intelehealth joins Digital Public Goods Alliance

Press Release | Intelehealth | September 28, 2022

Intelehealth was added to the Digital Public Goods Alliance DPG Registry last week. This underscores Intelehealth's commitment to developing and championing digital public goods that will help achieve 'Health for All' and contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Intelehealth is a non-profit delivering high-quality healthcare for the last -mile population where there is no doctor through telemedicine. Using our open-source technology platform that's driven by an innovative digital health assistant, we connect patients and frontline health workers at the last mile with qualified doctors, diagnostics & medications.

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AEGIS Announces Touchstone for HL7 FHIR Interoperability Testing

Press Release | AEGIS.net | November 12, 2015

AEGIS.net, Inc. (AEGIS)...introduces the Touchstone Project - a next generation cloud-based Testing Platform which applies Conformance and Interoperability testing in a Test-Driven-Development (TDD) integrated ecosystem.  As organizations new to the Health Level Seven® (HL7®) Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) specification begin to explore and evaluate this new HL7® standard and start projects with a goal of being an early adopter, AEGIS' Touchstone Test Platform will guide those implementations towards a high degree of conformance and interoperability in a continuous model.

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Affordable COVID-19 Diagnoses for Hospitals: How Open Source Software Helps

The most common COVID-19 symptoms—such as coughing, fever, and shortness of breath—are shared with many other diseases. Diagnosing a patient accurately is therefore a challenge. Although a diagnosis of COVID-19 might not affect treatment, it would help a hospital predict a patient's trajectory and anticipate the need for urgent intervention. But current tests, relying on blood or mucus samples, are not particularly accurate. In this article, we'll see how open source software can help hospitals make better diagnoses. I'll concentrate on one specific role, and on the ways open source facilitates finding a solution and keeping it affordable. Many aspects of the problem feed into the solution discussed here. The article is based on work by researcher Trevor Grant.

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AIRA 2018: Is Open Source the Key to Immunization Software Sustainability?

On August 14-16, 2018 the American Immunization Registry Association (AIRA) held its 2018 National Meeting. This meeting brought together more than 350 informatics professionals, public health officials, EHR vendors, and other stakeholders who all care passionately about Immunization Information Systems (IIS) and their role in the healthcare community. IIS projects leverage interoperability with EHRs, PHRs, and other systems to promote clinical practice at the point of care; enable public health surveillance, and reduce cost by assisting in preventing both under and over immunization.

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Amazon hires openFDA trailblazer Kass-Hout for healthcare project: report

Nick Paul Taylor | FierceBiotech | March 19, 2018

Amazon has hired former FDA chief health informatics officer Taha Kass-Hout, M.D., CNBC reports. Kass-Hout led the groundbreaking openFDA initiative and rehabilitated the reputation of the FDA’s IT department during his three years at the agency. Details of what Kass-Hout will do at Amazon are scarce....during his time at the FDA, Kass-Hout lead the precisionFDA program that established a collaborative, open approach to genomic testing references. Across the initiatives, Kass-Hout deployed approaches that were established in tech circles but alien to the FDA prior to his arrival. Open-source projects that embraced the cloud, shared their code on GitHub and invited programmers to hackathons became commonplace.

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An Epic Fight For the Metaverse—Fortnite Takes on the Big Tech Oligopolies

You might have missed it amongst all the headlines about the U.S.P.S., the 2020 elections, and, of course, that little thing we call the pandemic, but Fortnite got kicked off Apple's App Store (and subsequently Google Play). I'm not a gamer, but I am fascinated by gaming, because, as Steven Johnson put it, "The Future is where people are having the most fun." Tim Sweeney, the founder and CEO of Epic Games, Inc., which makes Fortnite, seems to be having a lot of fun. And he thinks the future is the Metaverse. Healthcare, take note. The tech giants were reacting to Epic allowing "permanent discounts" on developer fees for in-game purchases made directly, rather than going through Apple or Google. Developers thus avoid the 30% commission charged in those Stores. Mr. Sweeney has been railing about the commission level for some time, leading to the recent decision.

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An Inside Look At The Latest Telemedicine Instruments In Action With VSee & Open Source PTZoptics

Press Release | PTZoptics | October 22, 2015

VSee TeleMedicine Software announces robotic PTZ camera control support for the PTZOptics camera line...PTZOptics and VSee have teamed up to produce a video demonstrating the latest telemedicine instruments in a quick 5 minute presentation. In this video Paul Richards, Dir of Business Development for PTZOptics, reviews the latest telemedicine instruments with Dr. Anne Chang of VSee. This inside look at the technology doctors will be using to perform remote telehealth appointments demonstrates the following healthcare tools in an online patient survey...

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An Open Source Project To Improve The Accuracy Of CDC's Mortality Data

Paula Braun | HealthData.Gov | June 4, 2015

As part of the National Day of Civic Hacking, which will take place world-wide on Saturday, June 6th, CDC would like to launch an open-source project to develop a Cause-of-Death companion application that will a) help guide medical certifiers through the process of filling out a death certificate and b) provide real-time feedback for common mistakes at the point of data entry. 

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Anatomy of a Public Health Open Source Project: HLN's Immunization Calculation Engine (ICE)

An immunization information system (IIS) aggregates immunization information for children (and some adults) living or receiving immunization services in a jurisdiction. One of the core components of an IIS is its immunization evaluation and forecasting system: the computerized algorithm that is used to determine if vaccine doses that were administered to the patient are clinically valid (evaluation) and to project what doses are due now and in the future (forecasting). These algorithms are used to support clinical decision support (CDS) at the point of care and also to help public health agencies understand and manage the immunization status of whole populations.

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Andrew Slavitt and the Opportunity Offered by Open Medicaid IT

As we reported in the December 15 issue of OpenMedicaidIT News, Andrew Slavitt, Acting Administrator of CMS, has openly discussed the opportunity offered by CMS' open Medicaid IT strategy in multiple blog posts and meetings. We have reported on this opportunity in an article titled CMS To Invest $5+ Billion a Year in Open Source and Cloud-based IT Infrastructure for Medicaid and recently started a newsletter provide our readers with news of the opportunities for tech companies as they emerge. We reprint here the article from the newsletter presenting that opportunity in Slavitt’s own words.

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ApacheCon 2020 features Natural Language Processing for Electronic Medical Records in dedicated track on Apache cTAKES

Press Release | Apache Software Foundation | September 21, 2020

ApacheCon, the official conference series of The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the world's largest Open Source foundation, announced today its first dedicated track on Apache cTAKES. The track will be held on all three days of the ApacheCon@Home virtual conference, taking place online 29 September - 1 October 2020. Registration is free of charge for all participants and is required in advance to participate. Now in its 22nd year, ApacheCon is the primary gathering of the collective Apache community worldwide, drawing attendees from more than 130 countries. ApacheCon showcases the latest breakthroughs from dozens of Apache projects, upcoming innovations in the Apache Incubator, and sessions on developing community-led Open Source projects "The Apache Way".

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Apple Announces ResearchKit Available Today to Medical Researchers

Press Release | Apple | April 14, 2015

Apple® today announced ResearchKit™, a software framework designed for medical and health research that helps doctors, scientists and other researchers gather data more frequently and more accurately from participants using mobile devices, is now available to researchers and developers. The first research apps developed using ResearchKit study asthma, breast cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and Parkinson’s disease, and have enrolled over 60,000 iPhone® users in just the first few weeks of being available on the App Store™.* Starting today, medical researchers all over the world will be able to use ResearchKit to develop their own apps and developers can also contribute new research modules to the open source framework. Read More »