healthcare

A few weeks ago Colin Hansen - a politician in the governing party in British Columbia (BC) - penned an op-ed in the Vancouver Sun entitled Unlocking our data to save lives. It's a paper both the current government and opposition should read, as it is filled with some very promising ideas.

In it, he notes that BC has one of the best collections of health data anywhere in the world and that, data mining these records could yield patterns - like longitudinal adverse affects when drugs are combined or the correlations between diseases - that could save billions as well as improve health care outcomes. » Read more

The Ohio Lottery is now 500+ million. $700 million has already been taken in on this drawing, not a bad for the state. Lotteries work and Vegas was built on this simple notion: we believe we can beat the odds, we all believe we are a little special.

Part of our notion of being special, of our ability to beat the odds comes from our notion of our own narrative, our own story of our life in which we take a starring role. If we can imagine it, » Read more

Dave Chase (@chasedave), CEO of Avado, spoke at the Collaborative Health Consortium's weekly Pilots and Collaborations call last Friday.

Dave led with the quote from Dr. Josh Umbehr: » Read more

Are you a geek?

If so, driving the future of healthcare is now within your grasp.

What do you have to do?

Learn the M programming language, and teach it to others.

What’s the M programming language?

The M programming language is also known as MUMPS. Which stands for Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System.

M is a multi-user, strongly imperative language designed to » Read more

This year has seen a good deal of discussion about the escalating costs of healthcare and shrinking access to it. Most of the discussion has centered around how to fix the problems with a series of buzzwords entering our lexicon,  ACO, patient-centered health, EHR-EMR-HIT interoperability, and pay-for-performance among them. » Read more

Paul Graham coined the term 'ramen profitable' to describe the sort of start-up companies that can quickly reach profitability because they have low overhead and few expenses. I think of OpenNMS as 'sushi profitable'--that is, profitable enough to provide a few of the finer things in life. Like employee benefits. » Read more

Not long ago, I was in the audience at a symposium organized by the leaders of the Henry Ford Health System, a $4-billion-a-year health-and-hospital company based in Detroit. The organization's leaders had called the symposium to explain to local executives why they were making the biggest strategic bet in the system's history since its founding by Henry Ford himself back in 1915. » Read more

Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Entrepreneur-in-Residence, Todd Park joined us on July 7 to talk about the power of open data for improving health. His position with HHS was created by the Obama administration as a change agent. And he's taking that role seriously.
» Read more

attachments: 

Todd Park webcast recording

Today the Department of Health and Human Services and the Institute of Medicine are holding their second forum to discuss how health data can be used to support healthcare systems and patients in informed decision making.

More than 40 companies will be participating, and the featured speakers include Aneesh Chopra, US CTO; Tim O'Reilly, O’Reilly Media; Matt Miller, NPR; Harvey Fineberg, IOM President; Todd Park, HHS CTO. » Read more

"If I tell you that this is the greatest good for a human being, to engage every day in arguments about virtue and the other things you have heard me talk about, examining both myself and others, and if I tell you the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being, you will be even less likely to believe what I am saying. But that's the way it is."
- Passage from Socrates' famous speech at his trial.