health

In six weeks, a team of three college students with no industry experience and only academic software-specific knowledge, developed and designed a health care provider search system using only open source software. To tell you how they got there, let's start with a little history of open source software in the US federal government workspace. » Read more

This year at Opensource.com, we challenged our contributors to give us the best and most useful guides, how-tos, and tutorials they could produce from their experiences and work in various open source industries and sectors. In this Best of Opensource.com, our top guides and tutorials this year fell within the four buckets you see below.

If you can answer YES to any of the following questions, there's an open source way guide here for you!

Do you... » Read more

Companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon are collecting enormous amounts of information all day, every day. They use powerful supercomputers to analyze this data. Many people use this to better market products to consumers, for instance.

But, how can big data do more? We see companies and inventors coming out with ideas for improving healthcare, for one, by tracking human biometrics. I think we can take it to the next level and make more wide-scale improvements to our health and our lives. » Read more

If yu waa good, yu nose affi run. "Success requires hard work" is the meaning of this Jamaican proverb.

With a bright Caribbean sun and an even brighter welcoming crew, GNU Health unshipped in a new bay recently. In cooperation with the Jamaican Ministry of Health, a group from GNU Solidario visited the country and officially inaugurated the project of deploying GNU Health, a free health and hospital information system, within their public health care system.

This step is a tipping point in health history worldwide; Jamacia is the first country to embrace GNU Health nationwide.

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Rare diseases are defined as as those afflicting populations of fewer than 200,000 patients, or about 1 in 1,500 people. There are about 7,000 rare diseases, the majority of which are genetically related and commonly affecting the very young (infants). At first glance, rare diseases seem to only affect a small number of people, but in reality their aggregate impacts close to 30 million patients in the US, and about 25 million in the EU alone. This impact also extends to the millions of caregivers and families, who also feel and live with the disease, just in a different way.

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This year, I was privileged enough to speak at the Open Hardware Summit. It was a wonderful experience, and I hope to return again in the years to come. During my time making cool projects for Hackaday, I regularly experienced that fantastic feeling that came with the realization that people really enjoyed the things I made. I had a few that turned out to be fairly popular. This Portal Gun that levitates a companion cube, for example, has more than 1.6 million views. The Thor's Hammer with embedded Tesla coil showed up on TV screens in subways in China.

Even though I felt really good about them, there are other projects that feel even better. Those projects are simple gaming controllers for people who have physical disabilities that make it difficult for them to operate standard, off-the-shelf controllers.

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Back in January, we launched our translation pilot for Open.Michigan, focusing on two video series for health education. We are thrilled to report that the translation activities are still going strong—57 volunteers to date, 53 videos that include 128 completed translations covering 11 languages, and expansion into our family medicine video series. We are amazed at the skill and dedication of our volunteer translators.

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In part one of this tutorial, I introduced the integration between the hierarchical data structures of the M database and the hierarchical structures of the Node.js language.

Here, in part two, I focus on the fact that this integration is equivalent to incorporating persistance storage in the Node.js language using a data model similar to JSON structures. This built upon a proven database that is known to deliver high performace for demanding applications. » Read more

As the open source ethic has changed the way that we share and develop resources, crowdsourcing is redefining how we can create new resources based upon that willingness to share. One example of crowdsourcing at work for the betterment of us all is public health researchers turning to Twitter to collect real-time data about public health.

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Join the M revolution and the next big thing in healthcare IT: the integration of the node.js programming language with the NoSQL hierarchical database, M.

M was developed to organize and access with high efficiency the type of data that is typically managed in healthcare, thus making it uniquely well-suited for the job.

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