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Open Health News Continues To Grow-Visitors Cross the 375,000 Mark

We have been very busy lately and did not have time this year to write a recap of major events related to our news web site. Well, a bit late, we start here with a review of our traffic figures. Traffic to the website continues to grow and we are now approaching 20,000 unique visitors per month. As the table shows below, the total number of unique visitors since we launched the site nearly four years ago has surpassed 375,000 and the total number of Page Views has broken the 8 million mark.

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Posted February 19, 2015 - 3:42pm by Roger A. Maduro

Open Source Health IT Solutions for Governments to Consider

Peter Groen | GovLoop | January 5, 2012

Healthcare is a major budget item for government at all levels. There are now many high quality, free and open source Health IT systems that community hospitals and clinics should consider using as an alternative to more expensive commercial systems. This could save state & local governments 'big' bucks...

Open Textbooks Gain in Push for College Affordability

Michael Melia | eCampus News | February 19, 2016

The standard textbook for Fundamentals of General Chemistry I at the University of Connecticut has a list price of $303. For students who use the version professor Edward Neth is preparing for the fall semester, the cost will be zero. An early adopter of open source textbooks, Neth said he turned to the new technology out of frustration with spiraling prices of commercial textbooks. “It’s seeing the costs go up every semester and almost feeling powerless,” Neth said...

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Petition calls on White House to hand Healthcare.gov code to open source community

Tom Sullivan | Government Health IT | October 22, 2013

Thus far, 1,278 people have signed a petition on WhiteHouse.gov asking for CGI Federal to turn the code that comprises Healthcare.gov over to the open source community. Read More »

Petition Launched To Get The White House To Open Source Healthcare.gov Code

Mike Masnick | Techdirt | October 21, 2013

After the disastrous technological launch of the healthcare.gov website, built by political cronies rather than companies who understand the internet, there has been plenty of discussion as to why the code wasn't open sourced. [...] And, now, a "We the People..." petition has been launched, asking the White House to open source the code to Healthcare.gov... Read More »

Physicians Prefer VistA-So Should Decision Makers

By Edmund Billings, MD | July 25, 2014

In their 2014 EHR Report—a survey of 18,575 physicians on their EHR preferences—Medscape concludes that doctors like using the VA’s Computerized Provider Record System (CPRS), the core electronic record in the broader VistA platform, more than any other solution. Here’s what they said, "The highest-rated EHR, with a score of 3.9, is the Veterans Administration EHR: VA-CPRS. It’s regarded as one of the best overall by our physician respondents"

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Presenting the Open Aid Movement at Open Source Bridge

Devin Balkind | Sahana Foundation Blog | August 28, 2017

“Open source” is a method for putting intellectual property in the public domain, allowing anyone to use it however they see fit. I’m an advocate of the “open source way” because I believe that if more people shared intellectual property of all types – whether its farming techniques, software code, music, etc – then we’ll eventually be able to meet the basic needs of everyone in the world, allowing all people to pursue their own happiness without fear of material scarcity...

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RightsCon Redux: Working Toward A Progressive Copyright Framework For Europe

By Timothy Vollmer | April 4, 2017

RightsCon is an annual conference that focuses on awareness-raising, organising, and advocacy on global issues at the intersection of technology and human rights. The event is produced by the international nonprofit organization AccessNow. RightsCon participants include members of digital rights organisations, legal experts, civil society, government, and business representatives. Creative Commons, Mozilla, and the Wikimedia Foundation organized a panel discussion on the work being done to reform the European Union copyright rules...

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Scientists Are Accidentally Helping Poachers Drive Rare Species to Extinction

By Benjamin Scheele, and David Lindenmayer | July 16, 2017

If you open Google and start typing “Chinese cave gecko”, the text will auto-populate to “Chinese cave gecko for sale” – just US$150, with delivery. This extremely rare species is just one of an increasingly large number of animals being pushed to extinction in the wild by animal trafficking. What’s shocking is that the illegal trade in Chinese cave geckoes began so soon after they were first scientifically described in the early 2000s. It’s not an isolated case; poachers are trawling scientific papers for information on the location and habits of new, rare species...

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Sense and Censorship

Sunil Abraham | The Indian Express | January 20, 2012

The loss of generic medicines, hardware based on open standards, public domain content, free and open source software, open access journal articles, etc. will equally impoverish consumers in the US and in India. SOPA and PIPA, therefore, do not represent the will of the average American but rather the interests of the IP sector, which has tremendous influence in the Hill. 

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The Final Leaked TPP Text is All That We Feared

By Jeremy Malcolm | October 10, 2015

Today's release by Wikileaks of what is believed to be the current and essentially final version of the intellectual property (IP) chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) confirms our worst fears about the agreement, and dashes the few hopes that we held out that its most onerous provisions wouldn't survive to the end of the negotiations. Since we now have the agreed text, we'll be including some paragraph references that you can cross-reference for yourself—but be aware that some of them contain placeholders like “x” that may change in the cleaned-up text. Also, our analysis here is limited to the copyright and Internet-related provisions of the chapter, but analyses of the impacts of other parts of the chapter have been published by Wikileaks and others.

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Transparency International Reports on Massive Corruption in the Pharmaceutical Sector - Media Hardly Notices

Roy M. Poses | Health Care Renewal | June 8, 2016

In 2006, TI published a report on health care corruption, which asserted that corruption is widespread throughout the world, serious, and causes severe harm to patients and society. "Corruption might mean the difference between life and death for those in need of urgent care. It is invariably the poor in society who are affected most by corruption because they often cannot afford bribes or private health care. But corruption in the richest parts of the world also has its costs"...

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Why All Software Needs A License

Simon Phipps | InfoWorld | November 7, 2014

All software developers should add a copyright license. Why? Because open source licensing is all about granting permission in advance...

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Why Open Drug Discovery Needs Four Simple Rules For Licensing Data And Models

Antony J. Williams, John Wilbanks, and Sean Ekins | PLoS Computational Biology | September 27, 2012

As we see a future of increased database integration, the licensing of the data may be a hurdle that hampers progress and usability. We have formulated four rules for licensing data for open drug discovery, which we propose as a starting point for consideration by databases and for their ultimate adoption. Read More »