“It looks like 2009 will be the year that LifeCOMM finally makes its debut!
We’ve been hearing dribs and drabs about LifeCOMM for a long time. I remember Don Jones, VP Business Development for Qualcomm, first talking about plans for LifeCOMM at the Healthcare Unbound conference in 2005.
While we await final details, in this discussion I’d like to:
* Place LifeCOMM in the same category with the other personal health information (PHI) platforms — Google Health, Microsoft HealthVault and Dossia
* Ask a central question about how LifeCOMM will play in this new ecosystem: Will LifeCOMM exchange patient data with Google Health, HealthVault and Dossia? Or will it be a closed platform, more akin to an iPhone?
These are complex issues, but I’ll try to explain things in plain old English.”
Article
Vince Kuraitis, Center for Connected Health, 18 November 2008
Tagged: HL7, interoperability, open source, phr, platform and standards
; posted on Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 at 8:55 am
No Comments »
“Recently ComputerWorld released an otherwise good article entitled: Old code proves key to modern IT at Midland Memorial Hospital.
The first paragraph reads in part:
For Midland Memorial Hospital, this came in the form of 1970s-era code unearthed via the Freedom of Information Act.
This is really frustrating. VistA is old. But it is not older than Unix which is the basis for Linux AND Windows. It is not older than C which is the basis for C++, C#, Mono, .Net and to a lesser extent Java, PHP, Python, Ruby (in terms of syntax and overall structure).”
Article
Tred Trotter, 18 November 2008
Tagged: open source
; posted on Tuesday, November 18th, 2008 at 10:28 pm
No Comments »
“In times of financial crisis, it pays — or, more fittingly, saves — to explore unconventional ways to pull off major technology projects. For Midland Memorial Hospital, this came in the form of 1970s-era code unearthed via the Freedom of Information Act.
A major executive shakeup and financial losses in the millions left Midland Director of IS David Whiles at a loss as to how he and his team could breathe new life into the Texas-based hospital’s aging IT infrastructure. The comprehensive electronic health records (EHR) system Midland needed to modernize its operations typically costs around $22 million. Thanks to 30-year-old code, creative partnerships and a deep commitment to end-user training, Whiles and company found a way to do it for only $7 million.”
Article
Tom Kaneshige, Computerworld, 17 November 2008
Tagged: information technology and open source
; posted on Tuesday, November 18th, 2008 at 10:58 am
No Comments »
“If you have read this blog long enough, there are multiple posts about The Common User Interface, an open source project from Microsoft that would in fact have the capabilities to present the same set of templates, data entry screens, etc. at all hospitals and physician offices. The NHS in the UK has been the pioneering force in bringing the project to light; however there have been thousands of downloads from the site, so there are developers working all over to hopefully bring this to light.”
Article
The Medical Quack, 14 November 2008
Tagged: emr, interface and open source
; posted on Saturday, November 15th, 2008 at 8:14 am
No Comments »
“A new study advocates the development of a common strategy and roadmap for e-health standards development, to support interoperability and the adoption of electronic patient records.”
Article
e-Health Europe, 3 November 2008
Tagged: e health, europe, hospitals, interoperability, open source and standards
; posted on Monday, November 3rd, 2008 at 8:24 am
No Comments »
“Open source software benefits professionals in all industries: government, Internet, business, education, and even health care. Expensive software and subscriptions for anti virus systems, supporting electronic medical records and even phone or e-mail communications can put on a strain on small clinics as well as larger hospitals. Open source tools are free, highly customizable, and secure enough to handle the sensitive data that medical professionals often work with. Read below for our list of the top 100 open source software tools that benefit health care professionals.”
List
ONDD
Tagged: open source
; posted on Thursday, October 30th, 2008 at 9:51 pm
No Comments »
“How should we expand the use of information technology and protect personal privacy to improve health care?
Next week, Americans will elect a new president. This is your chance to send a strong message to the next Administration about what our health IT and privacy policies should look like. Share your ideas, discuss them with others, and vote on the best ones. Make sure your voice is heard!”
Website
Tagged: Health Information Technology, open source and privacy
; posted on Wednesday, October 29th, 2008 at 9:11 pm
No Comments »
“I have enjoyed participating in the National Dialogue about Health IT. One of the challenges put forward to my suggestion that decision makers should insist on FOSS in Health IT, was the following comment:
in terms of privacy, there’s nothing inherent in FOSS that makes it superior to all proprietary products.
I have discussed this issue before, mostly when discussing HealthVault, but my comments have been spread out over several articles.”
Article
Fred Trotter, 28 October 2008
Tagged: Health Information Technology, HealthVault, open source and privacy
; posted on Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 at 9:25 pm
No Comments »
Final Conference Report
Society for Telemedicine and eHealth in Nigeria in collaboration with Federal Ministry of Health
Tagged: e health, open source and telemedicine
; posted on Monday, October 27th, 2008 at 9:23 pm
No Comments »
“The open-source movement worked wonders for software. Can it do the same for diabetes and other illnesses?
As the U.S. presidential debates have shown, Barack Obama and John McCain can’t agree on much. One rare exception: electronic health records. Obama has proposed spending $50 billion to help doctors and hospitals digitize their files and build patient databases. McCain agrees that electronic recordkeeping could lower costs and save lives—say, by helping doctors more easily recognize which patients are on dangerous drug combinations.”
Article
Barrett Sheridan, Newsweek, 16 October 2008
Tagged: diabetes, open source, social network and web 2.0
; posted on Friday, October 17th, 2008 at 8:07 am
No Comments »
“Open source advocates are greeting the idea of using already-existing-in-the-public-domain technology as the framework for a national health information network with open arms, tempered by a “what-took-you-so-long?” attitude.”
Article
George Lauer, iHealthBeat, 1 October 2008
Tagged: Health Information Technology and open source
; posted on Friday, October 3rd, 2008 at 8:30 am
No Comments »
“Tomorrow, I keynote the Medsphere meeting in New York City, where I will discuss the Potential and Caveats of Open Source software for healthcare. To prepare, I asked Fred Trotter, a leading expert on free and open source software for healthcare, to comment.”
Article
John Halamka, Life as a Healthcare CIO, 1 October 2008
Tagged: Health Information Technology and open source
; posted on Wednesday, October 1st, 2008 at 7:51 pm
No Comments »
“Open source advocate Fred Trotter writes today that HIMSS, the representative for the medical IT industry, is just a lobby for proprietary software.
He seems surprised.
Im not. Any organization must represent its members, just as a publication is expected to advocate for its readers interests.”
Article
Dana Blankenhorn, ZDNet Healthcare, 26 September 2008
Tagged: himss and open source
; posted on Monday, September 29th, 2008 at 8:52 am
No Comments »
“HIMSS is anti-Open Source and pro-propretary software. They allow us Open Source guys to give talks and even have working groups because they would be violating their charter if they did not. But they do not like us. They are terrified of us, and they should be. HIMSS lives off of the fat in Healthcare IT. Mature proprietary EHR systems have been around for decades, and they still have 5%-15% penetration. Why? They are too expensive and too risky. The doctors recognized that the vendor lock-in that they painfully experienced with Practice/Hospital Management systems would be much worse with EHRs, and they have no intention of taking out extra mortages to make that happen.”
Article
Fred Trotter, 26 September 2008
Tagged: himss and open source
; posted on Monday, September 29th, 2008 at 8:50 am
No Comments »
“In sessions addressing the general theme of health records, several speakers gave varying perspectives based in their personal experiences of using and/or developing open source health record systems. Firstly, Rolf Englebrecht covered his experience of free and open source electronic health records. He looked first at Mycare2x (http://www.hccgmbh.com/), based on Care2x, which was developed as a supposed open source solution. Designed for hospitals with specialised units, it is adaptable to ambulatory care the requirements are defined by user cases (scenarios). But he and colleagues encountered problems in relation to its use, and did not believe it was fully open source.”
Article
Peter, hi-blogs.info, 25 September 2008
Tagged: open source, openEHR and standards
; posted on Thursday, September 25th, 2008 at 8:30 pm
No Comments »
“The following is a statement and advisory from Medsphere Systems Corporation.”
Article
Marketwire, 22 September 2008
Tagged: adoption and open source
; posted on Monday, September 22nd, 2008 at 8:43 pm
No Comments »
“Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.) expects soon to introduce new health information technology legislation in the U.S. House.”
Article
Health Data Management, 15 September 2008
Tagged: legal and open source
; posted on Monday, September 15th, 2008 at 8:29 pm
No Comments »
“Every healthcare facility in West Virginia’s network of acute, long-term and ambulatory treatment centers now has an open source electronic health records system.”
Article
Richard Pizzi, Healthcare IT News, 19 August 2008
Tagged: open source
; posted on Thursday, August 21st, 2008 at 10:26 am
No Comments »
“The Open eHealth Foundation (OeHF), an open source initiative for improving the exchange of medical information using existing standards, has been incorporated as a non-profit organisation in Delaware enabling it to begin operations.”
Article
e-Health Europe, 29 July 2008
Tagged: e health, open source and standards
; posted on Wednesday, July 30th, 2008 at 8:13 am
No Comments »
“Medsphere Systems, Inc., which has taken the Department of Veterans Affairs’ open source electronic health record system - called VistA - to the private sector, says the Military Health Service would be making a mistake by dropping a proven system.”
Article
Bernie Monegain, Healthcare IT News, 29 July 2008
Tagged: open source
; posted on Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 at 5:07 pm
No Comments »
“We have developed a pattern-matching de-identification system based on dictionary look-ups, regular expressions, and heuristics. Evaluation based on two different sets of nursing notes collected from a U.S. hospital suggests that, in terms of recall, the software out-performs a single human de-identifier (0.81) and performs at least as well as a consensus of two human de-identifiers (0.94). The system is currently tuned to de-identify PHI in nursing notes and discharge summaries but is sufficiently generalized and can be customized to handle text files of any format. Although the accuracy of the algorithm is high, it is probably insufficient to be used to publicly disseminate medical data. The open-source de-identification software and the gold standard re-identified corpus of medical records have therefore been made available to researchers via the PhysioNet website to encourage improvements in the algorithm.”
Article
Ishna Neamatullah, Margaret M. Douglass, Li-wei H. Lehman, Andrew Reisner, Mauricio Villarroel, William J. Long, Peter Szolovits, George B. Moody, Roger G. Mark and Gari D. Clifford, BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making 2008, 8: 32, doi:10.1186/1472-6947-8-32
Tagged: confidentiality, de identification and open source
; posted on Thursday, July 24th, 2008 at 6:56 pm
No Comments »
“The Military Health Service hopes to make a decision next week on an Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system which could sunset the VAs open source VistA system.”
Article
Dana Blankenhorn, ZDNet Healthcare, 22 July 2008
Tagged: open source
; posted on Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008 at 8:34 am
No Comments »
“Last week, I had lunch with the CEO of MedSphere, Mike Doyle, to learn about the company’s plans for OpenVista. The idea is simple - take the the publicly available code from the Veterans Administration clinical information system, add new modules such as revenue cycle interfaces that are needed in practices outside the VA system and include support/implementation services. In effect, you’ll have the “Red Hat Linux” of the electronic health record world.”
Article
John Halamka, Life as a Healthcare CIO, 16 July 2008
Tagged: open source
; posted on Wednesday, July 16th, 2008 at 6:57 pm
No Comments »
“Open Source Software (OSS) is now in use in hospitals across the world and free web-based software applications are developing apace. Companies such as Google and Mozilla are inventing new business models, offering their customers free software and deriving revenue by channelling users into profitable services such as web search. In a virtuous circle, many of these types of businesses use web-based applications and OSS themselves to develop and deliver their products.
In this paper, we examine the rise of free web applications and OSS in health care. We discuss the recent changes in software application delivery and business models and look at how healthcare organisations in both developed and developing countries can take advantage of new business models to ensure financial sustainability of healthcare software projects.”
Article
Chris Paton, Muzaffar A Malik, HealthCare & Informatics Review Online, 30 June 2008
Tagged: open source and web
; posted on Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 at 9:29 am
No Comments »
“The European Federation for Medical Informatics (EFMI) Special Topic Conference 2008 (STC 2008) is focused on Open Source in European Health Care and will take place in London, UK on 9-11 September 2008. This event is organised by members of the IMIA and EFMI Open Source Working Groups and will be hosted by BCS Health Informatics Forum.”
Article
eHealthNews.eu, 15 July 2008
Tagged: open source
; posted on Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 at 9:17 am
No Comments »
“Medsphere Systems Corporation, the leading provider of Open Source healthcare IT solutions, and Midland Memorial Hospital (MMH), the first commercial facility to implement Medspheres OpenVista electronic health record (EHR), today announced a May 29 fact-finding visit to MMH by a delegation from the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The Royal Hashemite Courts e-Health team is currently exploring EHR solutions for implementation throughout the Kingdoms hospital network and visited MMH for a first-hand view of the hospitals OpenVista system, which has been recognized by healthcare information technology analysts as a model for EHR adoption.”
Article
The Earth Times, 2 June 2008
Tagged: open source
; posted on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 at 9:02 am
No Comments »
“Health Atlas Ireland, an Open Source application to analyse health related datasets using geographical information systems (GIS) and statistical software, was one of twenty projects that were given the ‘Prime Minister Public Service Excellence Award’. The awards were handed out last month by Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern.”
Article
eHealthNews.eu, 2 June 2008
Tagged: disease surveillance and open source
; posted on Monday, June 2nd, 2008 at 8:17 am
No Comments »
“While I have nothing to do with the following sites, they contain in a dark-humor sort of way a lot of truths about the current state of the commercial EMR vendor marketplace:
SEEDIE, the Society for Exorbitantly Expensive and Difficult to Implement EHRs.”
Article
S Silverstein, Health Care Renewal, 30 May 2008
Tagged: Health Information Technology and open source
; posted on Saturday, May 31st, 2008 at 7:04 am
No Comments »
MIE2008: This panel session is titled Open source eHealth applications and the Millennium Development goals for Africa.
Article
Peter, hi-blogs.info - the blog, 28 May 2008
Tagged: e health, mobile and open source
; posted on Wednesday, May 28th, 2008 at 6:56 pm
No Comments »
“Medsphere Systems Corporation, the leading provider of Open Source healthcare IT solutions, today announced the Open Source release of OpenVista Clinical Information System (CIS) version 1.0 Beta and OpenVista Server version 1.5.86. Available for immediate download at www.medsphere.org, these applications compose Medsphere’s Open Source electronic health record (EHR) system. OpenVista CIS provides a multi-platform (Linux and Windows), user-friendly and intuitive client interface through which clinicians can enter and view patient information. OpenVista Server is a commercialized version of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs VistA solution, developed over the course of more than 20 years and instrumental in a well-documented organizational turnaround at the agency.”
Article
RedOrbit, 21 May 2008
Tagged: open source
; posted on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 at 7:26 am
No Comments »
All Articles (RSS2)
