Technology

submitted by Alister Wm Macintyre

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ushahidi.com - by Prateek Budhwar

The VGI data obtained from the Ushahidi-Haiti platform during the first 72 hours of Earthquake in Haiti can be used for predicting the locations of ‘Emergency and damaged areas’ using Ushahidi Reports in Port-au-Prince. Two rapid and very successful VGI deployments helped coordinate disaster response after a devastating magnitude 7 earthquake struck Haiti in January 2010.

OpenStreetMap (OSM) project volunteers working outside Haiti created a digital street map of Port-au-Prince and other places in Haiti very rapidly using fine-resolution imagery to trace vector maps of streets and other features.

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submitted by Janine Rees

by Andy Oram - radar.oreilly.com - February 6, 2012

I've come to look forward to the Massachusetts Heath Data Consortium's annual HIT conference because--although speakers tout the very real and impressive progress made by Massachusetts health providers--you can also hear acerbic and ruthlessly candid critiques of policy and the status quo. Two notable take-aways from last year's conference (which I wrote up at the time) were the equivalence of old "managed care" to new "accountable care organizations" and the complaint that electronic health records were "too expensive, too hard to use, and too disruptive to workflow." I'll return to these claims later.

The sticking point: health information exchange

This year, the spears were lobbed by Ashish Jha of Harvard Medical School, who laid out a broad overview of progress since the release of meaningful use criteria and then accused health care providers of undermining one of its main goals, the exchange of data between different providers who care for the same patient.