OSCON 2011 Features Healthcare Track

The O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON 2011) to be held in Portland, Oregon, is offering a health care track for the second year in a row. We had a wonderful health care track last year (summarized in our report to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; I'll also post some links to videos, interviews, and blogs at the end of this article), and we're planning to build on our coverage of last year's topics as well as add some topics that got short shrift last year.

Topics that didn't receive as much coverage last year as [I think] they deserved, and that we hope to feature this year, include:

• Roles of standards in health record formats, and weaknesses that need to be addressed
• Communication with devices (ranging from ordinary cell phones to specialized medical devices) and their use to improve care

Use of electronic records and clinical decision support outside the United StatesImportant topics that we covered last year and whose developments we should continue to follow include:

• The use of electronically collected data for research and evidence-based medicine
• How to deploy electronic health records (particularly open source) in clinical settings
• Secure health record exchange through CONNECT and the Direct Project
• Programming electronic records, including web APIs, in order to add, extract, and perform calculations on data
• Security, identity management, and patient control over records

Please share this article with any appropriate forums or individuals and let them know about the conference's Call for Proposals.