Open Source in Good Health and Vice Versa

ComputerworldUK, April 5, 2011 — Glyn Moody
Last week I wrote about the UK government’s “new” IT strategy, which is designed in part to avoid some of the costly mistakes of the past. And as far as the latter go, there aren’t many bigger or costlier than the NHS National Programme for Information Technology (NpfIT)…
READ MORE >

Smart Apps for Health Challenge – Nudging You to Participate

New Media Medicine (MIT Media Lab), March 29, 2011
We want to spread the word about the Smart Apps for Health Challenge and encourage you to participate. The SMART (Subsitutible Medical Apps, reusable technologies) platform is a project funded by The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology through the Strategic Health IT Advanced Research Projects (SHARP) program. Its goal is to provide a common API for developing applications across multiple health information technology platforms…
READ MORE >

SMART + OpenMRS: Google Summer of Code

OpenMRS has been funded for its fifth consecutive Google Summer of Code!

Among a host of exciting projects, SMART is working with OpenMRS to propose:

Enabling SMART Apps in OpenMRS

SMART challenge and P4: open source projects look toward the broader use of health records

O’Reilly Radar, March 23, 2011 — Andy Oram
In a country where doctors are still struggling to transfer basic patient information (such as continuity of care records) from one clinic to another, it may seem premature to think about seamless data exchange between a patient and multiple care organizations to support such things as real-time interventions in patient behavior and better clinical decision support. But this is precisely what medicine will need for the next breakthrough in making patients better and reducing costs. And many of the building blocks have recently fallen into place…
READ MORE >

Hospital Designs a Development Platform for Medical Web Apps

Government Technology, March 14, 2011 — Sarah Rich
Web app contests like NYC BigApps continue fostering new ways to access public data — and these challenges are now making their way into the medical field. But before these medical apps get too far along, they need the proper platform and interface. That’s where the Substitutable Medical Applications, reusable technologies (SMART) platform comes in. In April 2010, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology awarded $15 million to researchers at the Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School to design SMART…
READ MORE >

US CTO Aneesh Chopra Blogs SMART Challenge

Read Mr. Chopra’s White House blog here. He states, “This development will dramatically expand the market for health IT by offering applications that can meet any niche and any need – from individual consumers to small practices to large organizations—thereby making the transformative power of health IT felt more fully and broadly.”

Ecosystems for Innovation: An interview with U.S. CTO Aneesh Chopra

Deloitte Review, 2011 — Vikram Mahidhar
The fast-moving frontier of new technologies and business models is challenging traditional models of innovation. Historically, larger companies, universities or government agencies with deep pockets have often brought forth the ideas that shape business and society. More recently, though, the advent of new digital infrastructures such as cloud computing, mobile and online social networks is enabling small groups of individuals with small investments to create big impact…
READ MORE >

Researchers Unveil Platform To Kick Off Contest for Health Apps

iHealthBeat, March 10, 2011
Researchers at Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School recently announced the public release of an interoperability platform and interface designed to support the development of innovative health-related Web applications, Modern Healthcare reports…
READ MORE >

SMArt Prize for Patients, Physicians, and Researchers

The White House, March 10, 2011 — Aneesh Chopra
This week a research team at Children’s Hospital of Boston and Harvard Medical School launched a prize to encourage innovative app developers to build new products and services that benefit patients and providers. The prize was created with funding from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT within the Department of Health and Human Services, and constitutes just the latest in a growing number of examples of the Federal government fostering R&D collaboration through open innovation…
READ MORE >