VistA Community Meetings are *the* place to connect with others working with VistA. The 16th VistA Community Meeting will take place at Midland Center, Midland, Texas, January 10-13, 2008. Details of the event including registration and hotel information are here.
Monthly Archives: December 2007
Veterans Affairs Healthcare System No. 1
ABC news has a video and transcript : “Socialized medicine may sound un-American, but in fact, it’s exactly what we provide to our American heroes — the more than 5 million armed forces veterans and their families.
They get health care that the government both pays for and delivers. It’s the Veterans Affairs Healthcare System, and according to health care experts such as Phil Longman — it’s become one of the best health care systems in the country.
Health Information Trust Alliance
The Health Information Trust Alliance (HITRUST) aims to develop, in coordination with organizations that represent the full spectrum of the healthcare industry, a common security framework for use by all parties that create, access, store, or exchange personal health information. Recognizing that the issues surrounding security of sensitive health information are complex and diverse, but critical to the continued adoption, effective utilization and consumer confidence in health and biomedical information technology, HITRUST has assembled a broad array of participants to develop a framework that provides a higher level of security that ultimately creates trust in the electronic flow of information through the healthcare system.
SOA in Health Care Conference — A Call for Abstracts
The HSSP effort is pulling together an industry conference entitled “SOA for Health Care”. Note that the event is focused on case-studies around SOA in health care, and is not about the standards themselves. We have a preliminary conference site up here.
We are currently soliciting the community for abstracts in the hope of extending the program to include additional valuable contributors whom may not be actively involved with our work already. Abstracts will be accepted through 31 December. Those interested in contributing may do so by submitting abstracts here.
McKesson: Open Source Safe, Supported, 60% Savings
This article highlights McKesson’s continued move of its Health IT software to Linux: ‘…Today, San Francisco-based McKesson offers about 50 of its 70 most popular health care applications — dealing with everything from billing to pharmacy records, staffing, admissions, physician order entry systems and surgery scheduling — on Linux, reducing costs for hospitals and medical offices. The move was solidified in February, when McKesson partnered with Linux vendor Red Hat Inc. to unveil the Red Hat Enterprise Healthcare Platform, which was customized to meet the needs of the health care industry.
Freemed-YiRC V1.00 Released
It’s been a long road, but Freemed-YiRC V1.00 has finally been released! Freemed-YiRC is an open source software project intended for use as a complete information system by child caring agencies. Freemed-YiRC originally started out as an intention to add child care functions into FreeMED, however it was quickly realized that the needs of child caring agencies were different and the project was forked. Hence, the Freemed-YiRC software project was born. YiRC = Youth in Residential Care. For many years this software was developed for use at one agency (where the author is employed). However, over the past two years word has spread, mostly throughout Ohio – thanks to the authors work on the OACCA Outcomes Data Project, and Freemed-YiRC has been installed at several other agencies, which provided a great deal of feedback.
For more information, please visit the Freemed-YiRC website.
Open Source Medications Database Followup
Following up on this previous LMN story link we have now completed a comprehensive open source medications/drug database and have a simple technology demonstration of it online. It includes all drugs considered by the FDA as well as interaction data from the VA National Drug File. There is still plenty of tweaking to do particularly with the interactions and it is not ready to be used for clinical or medical purposes just yet, but feedback is welcome. ClearHealth will also be completing integrated SureScripts support in our Q1/2008 version (2.2).
Instructions about how to access the demo are available in our forums here
Medsphere seeks CTO
Medsphere has posted the position for CTO on LinkedIn. From the post:
Chief Technology Officer
The CTO will drive the company’s technology vision, strategy and execution for all product lines. This encompasses setting strategic direction, vision, standards and product architecture; identification of new technology solutions and partnerships, including strategy for Open Source in Healthcare.
Synapse EMR
Synapse EMR is being ported to Linux. Alpha builds are now available to play with (Libc6). Synapse EMR is a GUI rich free EMR on Win32.
See here
Lots of things not working yet, but the basic GUI comes up. Still to work on printing, print preview etc. Only 50% thru reading Linux for Dummies so once I finish that I’ll have more ideas on how to complete this project!
Harvard Study Confirms LMN Conjecture
A Harvard study appearing in Health Affairs confirms what this Linux Medical News editorial entitled “RHIO’s and the Illusion of Health IT Success” predicted in 2005: “…Electronic clinical data exchange promises substantial financial and societal benefits, but it is unclear whether and when it will become widespread. In early 2007 we surveyed 145 regional health information organizations (RHIOs), the U.S. entities working to establish data exchange. Nearly one in four was likely defunct. Only twenty efforts were of at least modest size and exchanging clinical data…” The 2005 Linux Medical News editorial gives hints as to why this might be. Kudos to the Harvard researchers for doing the heavy lifting.