The FDA launches #openFDA to give access to public health data

Yesterday, the FDA announced a new initiative called openFDA to give developers, health care researchers, clinicians, and the public access to important public health data. openFDA is currently in beta, but it's definitely looking quite promising.

OpenFDA utilizes a search-based Application Program Interface (API) to collect large amounts of existing publicly available data, offering developers the ability to search through text within that data, ranking results much like a search using Google would do. This method then allows them to build their own applications on top of openFDA, giving them a large amount of flexibility to determine what types of data they would like to search and how they would like to present that data to end-users. This enables a wide variety of applications to be built on one common platform.

The openFDA Initiative was formally launched with the creation of the Chief Health Informatics Officer (CHIO) and the Office of Informatics and Technology Innovation (OITI) at the FDA.

EHR & Open Source at OSEHRA Summit

What role does open source play in the landscape of health IT?

"Migrating to open standards supports cost containment strategies, and will increase VA's flexibility and ability to interoperate with multiple vendors."
Roger Baker, Assistant Secretary for Information and Technology, Department of Veterans Affairs

Don’t miss the exciting discussion on the future of EHRs and Open Source at the inaugural OSEHRA Summit & Workshop, Wed., Oct. 17, 2012, to Thurs., Oct. 18, 2012 at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center.

Secretary Baker and more than 30 other speakers from government agencies, private industry and academia will discuss health IT innovation, industry trends and more.

Learn more about the OSEHRA Open Source EHR Summit here.

First Annual Open Source EHR Summit & Workshop

Yes, there are still open source EHRs that are out there!

First Annual Open Source EHR Summit & Workshop

The Summit will be hosted by Open Source Electronic Health Records Agent (OSEHRA), a nonprofit organization established by the United States Department of Veterans Affairs dedicated to accelerating innovation in open source electronic health record software.

Wednesday, Oct. 17 & Thursday, Oct. 18, 2012

Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center
201 Waterfront Street
National Harbor, MD 20745

Topics include:

• Open source initiatives in Federal agencies; VA, DoD, HHS and others
• Best practices in open source software development
• Lessons learned from related industries
• Open source software development in health care
• Trends in the open source software industry
• New open source initiatives

Learn more about this event here.

Accelerating the Adoption of EHR Virtual Seminar

Successful EHR adoption must be built on the right technology (storage, server, and mobile platforms) that ensure you meet meaningful use requirements. But time is running out to implement the technology infrastructure that will be needed.

Attend the "Accelerating the Adoption of EHR" Virtual Seminar that's coming up on Sept 14.  Learn how to:

• Select EHR technology that will get you to meaningful use
• Rationalize and unify multiple EHR systems
• Optimize the performance and scalability of your infrastructure
• Improve EHR system accessibility with the latest Web portal technologies
• Meet capacity and bandwidth requirements for PACs integration
• Identify the pros and cons of vendor vs. open-source mobile apps

Click here for more information.

What is a virtual seminar? You’ll enter a vibrant interface – along with several hundred of your peers – and experience expert informational sessions, peer interaction and the sharing of technology solution insights. You'll attend sessions with our HIT experts, you'll visit vendor booths with product demo information and live reps to answer your questions, you'll download background information on best practices for implementing EHR, and you'll interact with your peers. We've held many virtual seminars with rave reviews on both the content received and the easy-to-navigate online experience.

Virtual Box gets updated

If you're using a Mac and you need to run Windows, then you may want to try Virtual Box by Sun Microsystems. Speaking of Sun, when I was a student at MIT, almost all of our Athena workstations had the "Sun Microsystems" logo on the hardware. Those were the days...

Going back to the Mac - instead of getting VMware or Parallels Desktop (which will cost around $79), Virtual Box is free. That's right, it's free. And it's recently been updated to version 2.1.4. You may have also heard of Open Office. That's a free alternative to the Microsoft Office suite. All these free options are legitimate and you won't have to go to a P2P, torrent, or warez site to find any of these.

Speaking of free, have you tried Ubuntu? This is a simple Linux operating system that runs really well on laptops, desktops, and UMPC tablets. The last time I installed Ubuntu on my Samsung Q1 Ultra, it recognized the touch screen and automatically installed all the drivers for my device. It's great to see dedicated workers supporting open source projects like Virtual Box, Open Office, and Ubuntu.

The future of free EHR solutions

Will the future of EMR and EHR be open source and/or free advertisement-supported platforms? Marketing and advertising are so important to pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, so there shouldn't be any problem funding EHR solutions that are ad-based. Will that be the future model for success?

So many physicians are unable to afford paying for standard EHR solutions. They can't afford the software + hardware + support that is needed to effectively run EHR in their practice. However, if the software cost = $0, then uptake could rise tremendously. Furtheremore, if support could also be FREE, then we'd have a winning solution.

The Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology (CCHIT) is using the term EHR over EMR, so I think that will become standard terminology. Free or open source EHR solutions should be CCHIT certified if they want to be competitive.