Richard Boyd, Director of Emerging and Disruptive Technologies at Lockheed Martin
Last year, on the last day of the HIMSS’11 conference, Richard Boyd of Lockheed Martin Virtual World Labs shared his “Simulation Prescription”; showing how gaming and simulation technology have the potential to further revolutionize health care.
One year later, OATV was able to catch up with Richard, now Director of Emerging and Disruptive Technologies (or as Aneesh Chopra calls him – “Disruptive Man”), on the developments that Lockheed Martin has taken to create a Virtual World Ecosystem Framework. The great news? Lockheed has taken a kernel approach, creating roles for what he hopes is going to become a massively parallel contribution system. AND it’s going to be released with an open license with the goal of getting simulation everywhere on any modern web browser.
Richard says that we can expect to see the software “kernel” made available midway through 2012, thanks in large part to some of Lockheed’s federal partners.
HIMSS 12 – Interoperability at Kaiser Permanente
At HIMSS12 in Las Vegas, Open Affairs TV spoke with Phil Fasano, Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer of Kaiser Permanente, the nation’s largest not-for-profit health plan and health care provider about some of the technology being contributed to the open-source community by KP.
Convergent medical terminology released in 2010, is a dictionary of medical terms that translates between doc-speak and layperson terms for use online. The company hopes that use of this language database will enable and encourage future interoperability between medical systems, and is contributing $1 million annually to help integrate the library both nationally and internationally.
Open Affairs TV at HIMSS 12
The crew at Open Affairs TV is at HIMSS12 in Las Vegas!
But wait, isn’t HIMSS all about silos and proprietary systems? Not quite. Over the last few years, we’ve seen a surge of collaborative platforms popping up across the HIMSS agendas and exhibit halls. Health Information Exchanges are the topic of many-a-session, focusing on standards, implementation and collaboration. Direct and CONNECT projects are adding fueling many community HIE efforts, and they’re well represented in the educational forums and Exhibit Halls. EMR organizations like OpenEMR, Clear Health and Practice Fusion have forged open-source trail, opened their APIs and generally embraced the Todd Park-propelled open government movement.
Todd’s actually here this week, talking about the Health Data Initiative, along with various ONC members talking about patient engagement, privacy and more.
And then there’s the eCollaboration Forum, a partnership between HIMSS and the Collaborative Health Consortium, a series of sessions dedicated to open platforms, and packed with high caliber speakers like Robert Kolodner, Farzad Mostashari, Esther Dyson and more. (Full disclosure, Nate DiNiro and Lizzie Dunklee are co-producers on the event, so of course we think it’s awesome.)
The big news of last week was the announcement of the Open Health Tools collaboration with HIMSS, a new effort to deliver healthcare industry-specific guidance and non-proprietary solutions that aid in enabling a secure and seamless exchange of health information.
Expect to hear more from us in the coming days and weeks as we bring you news and interviews from some of the leaders in the open health IT world.
Open EMR presentation and discussion at Portland Linux User Group
Tony McCormick, Secretary of the Open EMR Project, and Project manager of their Meaningful Use certification gives an introduction to OpenEMR, maybe the most downloaded open source Electronic Heath Records system in the world.
Tony talks about how OpenEMR, a 10 year old project with ~500,000 lines of code became one of the first PHP projects to become a government certified EHR.
There’s also some great discussion on design and engineering choices which have shaped the project, as well as efforts to move forward with out breaking the existing use. ie: upgrade paths and models, etc. What’s also interesting is the feedback and commentary from the attendees about ways to contribute to the project and to open source health IT.
Federal Health and technology leaders on open standards successes; encouraging health IT entrepreneurs at HIMSS ’11 venture fair
Proclaiming “today is the best time to be a healthcare entrepreneur in America”, Unites States Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra stood before a room of health IT and business leaders at the HIMSS 2011 Health IT Venture Fair & Strategic Partner Forum. Kicking off the pre-conference panel of government leaders in health IT, management and policy. Joining Chopra were Peter Levin, CIO of the Veterans Administration, and Farzad Mostashari, MD Deputy National Coordinator of the Office of National Coordinator, the office overseeing technical and policy aspects of US healthcare transformation efforts. The one-day venture forum preceded the HIMSS 2011 Annual Conference & Exposition, and focused on driving healthcare IT related innovation and economic development opportunities in the private sector based on opportunities presented in the HITECH and Affordable Care Acts.
To frame the conversation, Chopra shared examples of recent funding for programs like the national wireless initiative, a $3 billion innovation fund that would spur basic R&D for security and reliability engineering so “wireless communication can be fully leveraged in our healthcare ecosystem.” Chopra said $100 million of that fund is earmarked for healthcare application innovation.
Details were also shared about the Startup America Partnership, an alliance of US entrepreneurs, corporations, foundations, and other private sector leaders working to increase success rates for high-growth enterprises in the U.S. The program was created to support research which shows job growth in the United States is driven entirely by startups.
During the panel session, as well as at many other points during the conference, Chopra outlined the administration’s three-point approach to innovation in Health IT:
- Enabling a “all hands on deck” strategy for R&D and standards, using a “Government as convener” strategy to inspire different players to offer new products and services.
- Investment in the “building blocks of innovation” to enable US health IT outpace America’s economic competitors around the world.
- Enabling market-based innovation, catalyzing entrepreneurship via the Startup America Partnership, and new policy initiatives like simplification of the Research & Experimentation tax credit and the modernization the U.S. Patent Office.
Chopra cited numerous examples as indicators that successful models can be found throughout the healthcare IT space. The NHIN Direct Project which saw dozens of vendors, many of them competitors, working in collaboration with the ONC and each other to establish standards for a simple and secure way to share encrypted health information between parties. The CONNECT project, a reference implementation of these standards being an example of an open source project convened by government and led by the HHS Office of National Coordinator.
Announced in March of 2010, the open collaborative convened and moved quickly to reach consensus on the technical specifications soon after. Within 3 months the first of several firms announced they’d commercialize the spec, The program went live in January of 2011, and as of today over 50 organizations have announced their support of the Direct protocol.
“DC to VC: Investing in Healthcare IT Summit”, which saw participation by the Office of National Coordinator, and companies such as Practice Fusion and Vocera, was also cited as having a positive impact on economic development.
“This will be,” Chopra said, “one of the fastest protocols to go from concept to execution.” To the notion that the public and private sectors continued focus on R&D collaboration and open-standards philosophy, he said, “this is the best time to be an entrepreneur.”
Richard Boyd, Chief Architect for Lockheed Martin Virtual World Labs at HIMSS ’11
On the last day of 2011 Healthcare Information Systems Society’s Annual Conference & Exhibition, Richard Boyd, Chief Architect for Lockheed Martin Virtual World Labs, a renown expert in virtual reality simulation for computer gaming, defense and film industries, shared his “Simulation Prescription”; showing how gaming and simulation technology have the potential to further revolutionize health care. In particular, Boyd demonstrated several examples of interactive 3D simulation technology which could enhance understanding of complex visualization challenges, and better forecast potential disruptive events.
As one of the creators of the Lockheed Martin Virtual World Labs, Boyd leads a group that utilizes cutting edge gaming and virtual world technologies to improve human performance. Before joining Lockheed, Boyd was the General Manager and VP of Sales for Virtus Corporation, where authors Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton were but a few of the collaborators Boys worked with as their gaming titles pushed the envelope of technology. While this session demonstrated very little in the way of open source technology, it does underscore examples of how technology has the potential to be re-purposed in ways that are not initially intended.
David Riley on the landscape of the CONNECT initiative
In addition to his 2010 Government Open Source Conference keynote, David Riley joined us at the conference to talk about details of the CONNECT initiative, with health IT expert and OATV co-founder Jeremy Murtishaw. David outlines the basics of the project, as well as it’s acceptance in the health IT community. He also addresses the structure, the security architecture as well as detailing about how health information exchange happens in detail.
