Fred Trotters Session at LinuxWorld

I will be moderating the “Who is doing what” session in Free and Open Source Healthcare Software at this years OSDL sponsored Healthcare day at LinuxWorld . If you would like me to mention your project or efforts in FOSS medicine, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Take a good look at the schedule and you will see that this conference could be very important. Besides the important involvement of OSDL itself, the keynote will be given by MedSphere’s Ken Kizer, and other FOSS heavy hitters will hopefully be speaking including Will Ross, Joseph Dal Molin and K.S. Bhaskar. Along with these FOSS revolutionaries important folk from the likes of IBM, Intel, Bull and McKesson will be attending. If you want to get connected in FOSS Health Software this is the place to be.

Fred Trotter
MirrorMed Project Manager
SynSeer Consultant

First CCHIT Certified EMR’s

The first CCHIT certified EMR products have arrived with the announcement here. ‘On July 18, 2006, the Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology (CCHIT) announced the first ambulatory electronic health record (EHR) products to attain CCHIT Certified status.The following CCHIT Certified products have been tested and passed inspection of 100 percent of a comprehensive set of criteria for: Functionality…Interoperability…Security… Despite the triumphant announcement, a close reading of the criteria reveals that many of the criteria are still being defined. This seems like a less than rigorous certification. As well, is certification desirable to begin with?

PR: WebReach, Inc. Unveils Mirth – Healthcare Industry’s First Open Source HL7 Messaging Middleware

New Open Source Interface Engine Speeds Health Information Technology Integration and Dramatically Reduces Cost of Achieving Interoperability. Read On for the full announcement.
NEWPORT BEACH, Calif., July 18 /PRNewswire/ — WebReach, Inc., a leading healthcare IT consultancy and creator of open source Health IT solutions, today announced the open source release of Mirth 1.0. Mirth delivers the industry’s first free, open source HL7 messaging middleware. The standards-based Mirth software is designed to dramatically reduce the time and cost required to achieve health information system interoperability and data exchange, and to speed secure information sharing across communities of healthcare professionals. Mirth delivers robust HL7 interface capabilities in an open source package, providing an alternative to costly proprietary and in-house systems.

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/060718/latu080.html?.v=62

Growth of Open Source Solutions in Healthcare in the 21st Century

Douglas Goldstein and Peter Groen have an informative article with a wide ranging perspective of FOSS in medicine. ‘…It is important to recognize that a wide range of OSS solutions are already in use in health care, generally consisting of technical tools and business applications – Linux, Apache, Open Office, mySQL, FireFox, and other fairly well known products. In addition, there are a large number of health care specific OSS solutions that have also been developed and are being widely deployed, such as OSCAR, FreeMed, MedLine, BLAST, Epi-X, SaTScan, VistA, and many more…’

VistA Video

Very nicely done video on the Veterans Affairs hospital system VistA system can be found here. From the video: “VA is a leader in electronic health records…VHA patients received higher quality care…higher quality of overall, chronic disease and preventive care…”

HOSxP – Open Source Hospital Information System

HOSxP, an open source hospital information system (GNU GPL). Designed and developed by health care practitioners with first-hand experience, the software aims to ease healthcare workflow of health centers, from small sanitariums to big central hospitals. The software is already in production use in over 70 hospitals across Thailand, with many hospitals currently testing/reviewing the software. Source code (on SourceForge). Download. Wiki. Forum.
The server software can be run either on Linux or Windows. A client runs on Windows.