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...The use of digital technology in health care has enormous promise, to be sure. But, as the Wall Street Journal's coverage of Google's Project Nightingale revealed, there is also a potential dark side to these projects. Ascension, it noted, "also hopes to mine data to identify additional tests that could be necessary or other ways in which the system could generate more revenue from patients, documents show." That detail raises a key question that's largely overlooked in our health care debates: should the drive to maximize corporate revenues determine how health information technology develops and becomes integrated into medical practice, or should that be determined by medical science and the public?...An alternative path exists. In the 1970s, the Veterans Affairs Administration (VA) developed VistA, an open-source code system that was the country's first EHR system... Read More »

High prices, poor customer service, a lackluster reliability of products: Customers despise their cable TV provider, but lack a sufficient alternative to cut the cord...

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...The Electronic Frontier Foundation announced Tuesday that Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow has been commissioned to tackle digital rights management technologies (DRM) that the rights group says threatens security, privacy, and undermines public rights and innovation...

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The Department of Defense needs to move past open source myths that have been debunked and jump on the open source bandwagon or the Department of Defense (DoD) and U.S. military will not be able to maintain tech superiority, warns a Center for a New American Security (CNAS) report. Open source software is used in the Pentagon, which should strongly suggest that open source is not an unsecure and vulnerable hot mess. Yet the DoD overall is stuck in the past, clinging to “erroneous and unfounded misunderstandings about open source software.” Those misconceptions often mean open source is not even considered as a viable option for DoD software projects...

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Electronic health records slow doctors down and distract them from meaningful face time caring for patients. That is the sad but unsurprising finding of a time and motion study published in Tuesday’s Annals of Internal Medicine1. A team of researchers determined that physicians are spending almost half of their time in the office on electronic health records (EHRs) and desk work and just 27 percent on face time with patients — which is what the vast majority of doctors went into medicine to do. Once they get home, they average another one to two hours completing EHRs...

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A group of 23 technology companies operating in Europe from 14 different countries and a business association of more than 45,000 digital SMEs announced today a new coalition to advocate for fair rules in digital markets. The Coalition for Competitive Digital Markets aims to contribute to a more balanced and open digital environment. Today’s internet is dominated by services and products offered by a small number of dominant online platforms, such as Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon. These so-called “gatekeepers” control consumers’ access to information and abuse their position in order to limit market access for European businesses that offer alternative business models and services such as search, email, social media, operating systems and browsers.

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