Latest Blog Posts

Major developments in open source health information technology are opening all kinds of opportunities for the members of the OSEHRA community. These developments include the open source strategy embraced by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to modernize the state Medicaid IT infrastructure, the rapid adoption of open source APIs, including Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR), and the emergence of blockchain technology and middleware solutions to fix the interoperability crisis.

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The OSEHRA community today submitted a response to the "Draft Open Source Policy for Federal Agencies" released by the White House on March 10. The policy was open for comments through today. This is a major milestone for the OSEHRA community as well as the open source community as a whole. Currently the US Government spends nearly a hundred billion dollars a year on software purchased from the private sector or procured from government contractors. Most of this software acquisition ends up in failure. President Barack Obama has made it a priority to shift technology acquisition policies to solve this problem and restore technology innovation by embracing open source.

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INASP has launched its Open Access Week Competition for 2015. The competition is open to representatives of institutions and organizations from INASP partner or network countries. Open Access Week, a global event now entering its seventh year, is an opportunity for the academic and research community to learn more about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they’ve learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in Open Access developments. For more information, see OpenAccessWeek.org.

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OSEHRA has been holding a "Code Alignment Workshop" in Oakland, CA that has brought together leading corporate members to work out how they can collaborate on a core verion of the open source VistA EHR...More details in the note below and in an online briefing on the meeting tomorrow at 08:30 AM Pacific Time. Read More »

Just got an email from Jill Riley from HANDI Health calling for speakers and panelists for their upcoming conference on November 4th and 5th in Birmingham, UK. HANDI Health is a non-profit organization focused on the development of open source health IT solutions. They have had a series of very successful conferences and workshops and many senior members of UK's National Health System believe that HANDI has contributed more usable code than what they got from the $19.6 billion failure of their previous Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) effort. Read More »

I heard from Clinovo's Olivier Roth a few days ago. He said that Clinovo is looking for a writer who can help them write articles and white papers about their open source clinical research solutions and their implementations. Clinovo is a Clinical Research Organization (CRO) that partners with life science companies to streamline their clinical trials. Clinovo is committed to open source solutions and open innovation. This is discussed in detail in a terrific interview with their CTO Marc Desgrousilliers who is managing the development of ClinCapture, their open source Electronic Data Capture (EDC) system. In this interview, he tells us more about why healthcare needs open source and why it is the future of clinical trials. Read More »

Roger A. MaduroI heard today from Kris Prendergast, OSEHRA's open source community organizer. She gave me a heads up that OSEHRA has posted the full recording "Industry Day" that the US Deaprtment of Veterans Affairs (VA) conducted on June 18. As detailed in this press release, several of the key technical groups in the VA joined forces to host this day-long event. The event provided an intense and productive discussion of the VA's new scheduling application called Medical Appointment Scheduling System, or MASS for short (gosh, can't the folks at the VA come up with good names!).

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The deadline for OSEHRA Summit 2014 abstract submissions and Academic Abstract Competition is coming up on June 7th. The OSEHRA Summit has become the premier open health conference and it is a unique opportunity to present the latest advancements in open source health information technology. This unique forum provides researchers with the opportunity to showcase their findings—resulting in action by government and industry leaders within the greater community. This year's Summit is modeled after last year's which featured more than 100 presentations during the breakout session, covering topics in policy, technology, clinical applications, business models, and others.

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The 6th International Conference e-Health 2014 is coming up in Lisbon, Portugal July 17th to 19th. There is still an opportunity for the open health community to present papers at the conference. Deadline for paper submission is May 5th.

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Have you been paying attention to the topic of Exascale Computing? Perhaps you should. Congress recently provided funding to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to develop a new class of supercomputers capable of a quintillion [billion billion] FLoating Point Operations per Second (FLOPS) needed to model nuclear weapons explosions Read More »

Have you noticed –

For the past decade we've been talking about electronic health records (EHR), personal health records (PHR), health information exchange (HIE), mobile health (mHealth), preventive health, genomics, robots, telemedicine, open source, open access, open data, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. Read More »

By 2020, availability and use of genomic information will contribute to revolutionizing how consumers will make better choices about their personal health.  This became apparent to me and others in the audience during demonstrations at the recent AMIA 2013 Symposium, on how genomics is increasing shari Read More »