Open Health: Improving Health the Open Source Way

Welcome to the Health channel on opensource.com

The stories we share and bring to life here are inspired by health innovation happening around the globe. We highlight how the principles of open source—transparency, information-sharing, community-building, and collaboration—are playing a vital role in the new ways people are thinking about health.

Recently, we have seen more global effort toward greater transparency in health. A few examples—

• A program that proposes patient access to doctors’ notes in hopes of better patient health
• A company that aims to cast light on medical costs so we can all know what we are really spending
• A federal menu labeling provision mandating calorie labeling on menus in effort to help people make informed food choices.

The government is leading the cause toward better information sharing though efforts like the Direct Project, which aims to bring health records sharing into the modern age, and the Blue Button project, which allows patients access to and ability to share their own medical records.