‘…I assume this was already posted but wanted to make sure as a leading publication pushing open source here is a very helpful article…’ Yes, David, a short synopsis with a link to the article was fortunately posted by the author, Douglas Carnall on October 19th. Thanks for asking! By the way, I may not be able to get to the site much in the next few days. I owe my wife some time and it is conference season. But fear not, I’ll be back by Sunday at the latest! Meanwhile I’ll try to get Captain Fantastic to fill in for me.
Monthly Archives: November 2000
GT.M Open Sourced
The openhealth-list was abuzz today with news that Sanchez Computer Associates has open sourced its M database technology (GT.M). The binaries are available on Sourceforge, and the source will be available soon. This makes an open source version of the Veteran’s Administration large medical software codebase (project VistA) a distinct possibility. This development is considered by some to be one of the most significant events in open source medical software history. ‘…
By making our database technology and programming language available on the GNU/Linux platform, we inherit a worldwide group of programming and testing resources that will cooperate with us, while working on their own behalf to enhance the software. Potentially, this opens a new revenue stream for Sanchez, said K.S. Bhaskar, vice president of Sanchez Greystone Group…’ Thanks to Kate Schell for this link.
Live from the AMIA Conference in Los Angeles
Update: 11/07/00 A full conference wrap-up post appears below: ‘…The most lasting impression I had of the conference was in the midst of papering a conference room with LinuxMedNews.com flyers. I stayed for the first 10 minutes of a panel discussion on the experience of implementing several electronic medical records systems. I was heartened and at the same time saddened to listen to virtually the same issues: physician resistance, inability to wean from paper, legacy record conversion that I had read in a journal article: 10 years ago…’ We are live from the American Medical Informatics Association conference in Los Angeles. I’m sitting at a pretty cool ‘cybercafe’ that the conference has set up with expensive flat-screens, the kind you’d like to have yourself. Plenty of suits in sight and some big players sponsoring the conference: 3M, Medicalogic and lots of others. How will Linuxmednews.com fare against all this, armed with nothing but flyers and open source ideas? Stay tuned, the commando raid begins.
GEHR Project Status
Thomas Beale of the Good Electronic Health Record (GEHR) project writes: ‘The recent silence…does not mean work has stopped
on GEHR! On the contrary, we are hard at it, and are at the stage of
integrating the XML archetype processor (Java; written at the DSTC), the
kernel, the database and the COM interface (developed by ISE in Santa
Barbara). As you can imagine, this represents quite a lot of work…’ Read on for more project status details.
The latest milestone has been to develop object database schemas for the
EHR and ARCHETYPE databases, and successfully store about 15 archetypes,
and a health record (EHR). The EHR contains 3 VERSIONED_TRANSACTIONs, 1
for the patient, 1 for the authorising HCP and one contact transaction.
With a more powerful testing front-end, we can of course make this any
number of patients, transactions etc.
The database being used is the Matisse ODB. We may post some screen
shots of the stored information (it’s always an eye opener to those used
only to relational databases) but the main audience for this would be
developers; the rest of you will want to see sensible output in a
browser. We are accordingly working on XML instance output with an XSLT
translator to HTML and thence to IE or Netscape. Note that this test
browser is separate from the GUIs provided by the participating vendor
companies – they will be using their own GUIs, and communicating to the
kernel via the COM interface.
Probably a lot of you would like to be able to see something more of
what we have done… it’s coming soon! As you can appreciate, with a
back-end development such as this, the last thing that gets done is GUI.
Expect a source update in the next week containing:
– COM interface (alpha release;-)
– Matisse ODB functionality
– the Java archetype initialiser
Please post questions/discussion to gehr-discuss@egroups.com or one of
the more specific GEHR egroups as appropriate.
– thomas beale
(for the GEHR team)
New Leadership for the Littlefish Project
The Littlefish project is announcing a change in project leadership from Chris Fraser to Nicolas Pettiaux
“Eric Raymond states in the Cathedral and the Bazaar: “When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor. Well I haven’t lost interest but due to pressing personal family issues, it is time to pass the project on to a competent successor.”
Details of Pettiaux’s considerable involvement in open source software follows.
It is therefore with great pleasure that I can officially announce that Mr. Nicolas Pettiaux has agreed to take over the leadership of the Littlefish Health Project. His email
is nicolas.pettiaux@linuxbe.org
Nicolas has solid open source credentials including:
Vice-presidency of the French speaking AFUL (www.aful.org), French speaking association of open source and Linux users. Organizer of Open source conferences with Eric Raymond – http://conf.linuxbe.org, A representative of Eurolinux, to lobby politicians, journalists and fellow citizen about the risk of software patents and promote the use of open source in government http://petition.eurolinux.org) Promoter of the use of open source softwares in public schools in
Belgium (not
yet documented in any site)…Actively lobbies the EU to adopt fund open source
projects.
As assitant at the Free University of Brussels Fauclty of
Medecine,
Nicolas
has worked in signal analysis (ECG, ballistocardiography,
breathing
signals),
health image processing and 3D reconstruction.
Nicolas has a PhD in theoretical physics and a complementary
business education.
Finally, Nicolas’s wife is a cardiologist that has much interest
in using a
software like Littlefish. He is also the happy father of 2
children,
Jason (6)
and Lucie (4).
Under Nicolas’s leadership , the links that Littlefish has
between
the Good
Electronic Health Record and members of the Open Source
Health Care Alliance, I am reassured that
the project
will continue to grow and become available for health services
everywhere
to
improve the health of the global community.
The Littlefish Trademark will ensure that the project will always
remain
open source and Pangaea & Microshare will continue to provide the
webserver to
sponsor The Littlefish Health Project.
Chris Fraser
Melbourne
November 2000
Open Source Advocates to Attend AMIA
LinuxMedNews will be reporting live from the American Medical Informatics Association conference which begins this weekend in Los Angeles. There will be a Saturday Morning AMIA tutorial, “How Open Source Really Works” as well as many open source medical software project participants and advocates in attendance. I’ll be the bearded short guy passing out light green LinuxMedNews flyers and lurking around the entrance of David Forslund’s ‘Federation of the Person Identification Service between Enterprises’ talk in the ‘Santa Barbara A/B’ room from 3:30-4:00pm on Monday Nov. 6th. Meet me there if you have any juicy information or just want to meet in person. An informal gathering will take place from 7:00pm-9:00pm Monday, Nov. 6th in the Los Feliz room of the Westin Bonaventure hotel. I will be unable to attend the Monday evening get-together as I have to be back in Houston to tend my vast stable of reporters. They get nervous if I’m away too long.
WHO Applies for .Health
The World Health Organization (WHO) has applied for a .health Top Level Domain (TLD) in an effort to ensure quality of health-related information sites. The application can be viewed on the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) site. ‘…”The creation of a .health TLD will mobilize an international standards
process for health information, and enable major progress towards
harmonization of existing standards and measures. Such a standards
process is likely to require nine to twelve months for completion of the
initial phase. This proposal gives a picture of how the .health TLD
might function, once international standards are established and
operational.’ Thanks to Wayne Wilson for this pointer.
FreePM Project Status
Updated: 1/12/2003 FreePM is now TORCH Tim Cook, project leader of FreePM recently wrote on the openhealth-list about the current status of the project. A demo is available online at the FreePM site with login ‘guest’ password ‘abc123’. Excerpts: ‘…Dr. Chason Hayes has been doing some documentation for us…I have been speaking to Dr. Andrew Ho about integration of OIO
into FreePM or at least supporting the same XML formats for
sharing forms…Dr. Alex Caldwell continues to provide us with valuable input
about XML experiences and we are working to maintain
compatibility between FreePM & TkFP in the formulary and
prescription modules. I expect that we will be pursuing the same
compatibility in progress notes. Here we have a crossing with OIO
as well due to the forms generation…Ron Chichester is working on the default formulary using the
National Drug Code Directory. After that he will be giving the
Scheduling module a much needed facelift…Alexander Chelnokov is working on a new set of ICD codes…I have been reorganizing my notes into something I can call
project management since the tempo is picking up…’
There have been 22 downloads of 0.5.0b…this is a beta version of the patient registration and prescription modules. This includes the employee (user) creation and the formulary due to the dependencies.
There are four documents that are key to using these functions:
Getting Started
Configuration
Patient Registration
Patient Medications
They are available on the SourceForge site. If anyone needs them
downloaded and emailed to them then please contact myself or one
of the project admins listed on the site.
Remember, that if you do not want to download and install all of
the required software. You can use the online “demo” at
http://www.freepm.org. It really isn’t a demo in the true sense.
You can’t add employees that can actually login but otherwise you
have the same privileges as if you were a physician logging in to
an installed system. You can add drugs to the formulary and add
patients and prescriptions.
Please feel free to try it out. Then let us know here your
experience.
There has been one reported problem installing Zope/other
products/FreePM. No resolution has been gained there yet as far
as I know. I did send a message to the list with some pointers to
installing Zope on various platforms.
The beta version of the upcoming O’Reilly Zope Book is available
at zope.org. It looks pretty good. Some of the best Zope
documentation to date.
Dr. Chason Hayes has been doing some documentation for us and is
also going to be adding some javascript in key places to make
validations smoother. He has also been doing some work on the
user interface in various places. I especially want to say thanks
for the very boring job that he did for me cleaning up some code
that was left over from when I first started using Zope for
FreePM.
I have been speaking to Dr. Andrew Ho about integration of OIO
into FreePM or at least supporting the same XML formats for
sharing forms. More news about this after meeting with him at
AMIA.
Dr. Alex Caldwell continues to provide us with valuable input
about XML experiences and we are working to maintain
compatibility between FreePM & TkFP in the formulary and
prescription modules. I expect that we will be pursuing the same
compatibility in progress notes. Here we have a crossing with OIO
as well due to the forms generation.
Ron Chichester is working on the default formulary using the
National Drug Code Directory. After that he will be giving the
Scheduling module a much needed facelift. As it is now, it works
for employee and resource scheduling. The terminology is geared
as an event manager vs. a real scheduling module. The patient
appt. schedule will be dynamically generated from the combined
physicians personal schedules.
Alexander Chelnokov is working on a new set of ICD codes. The one
I currently have in place for testing only has a brief text
field. Since they use ICD-10 in the Federation of Russia I assume
he will be working primarily with that version. I’m not certain
if he is also producing an ICD-9 set.
I have been reorganizing my notes into something I can call
project management since the tempo is picking up. If there is
something that you want to work on let me know. If you want to do
‘something’ but aren’t really picky let me know that too (I have
a long TODO list ).
OIO (0.9.4) Delivers Visual Analog Scale and Data Mining
Need more than radio buttons, click boxes, and drop-down menus for your web-based medical system? The latest release of Open Infrastructure for Outcomes (OIO), (Free account/demo here) shows what is possible by using a tiny Java Applet to implement a visual analog scale (5k). Users of the OIO can now incorporate visual analog scales into their web-forms with a few clicks– all without writing a single line of Java. Want to do data mining? Just point and click.
Following the introduction of XML metadata import and export in 0.9.3, oio-0.9.4 is the newest feature-enhancement release. It now allows the incorporation of Java Applets into web-forms for data input without programming. The new Visual Analog Scale form element is based on this capability.
The second major enhancement is client-side validation through Regular Expression (template). Now, the entire process of using Javascript to validate user input is automated.
The third major added feature is data merging and drill-down querying across Forms (and versions). This is the beginnings of adding data mining and statistical tools to future releases of the OIO.
New Features:
The OIO is built with and uses the open-source Zope application server and Postgresql. The OIO download is only 350k and is available from:
Open-Outcomes.sourceforge.net
Alternatively, you can get a free public access account from
www.TxOutcome.Org to try it first.
We invite other open and closed source projects to incorporate OIO code and technology.
By using the OIO and working together, hopefully we can accelerate the evolution towards more flexible and inter-operable systems.
MLA Top Ten Consumer Medical Sites
The Medical Library Association has released its top ten consumer medical sites list. They evaluated medical sites based on: ‘…credibility, sponsorship/authorship, content, audience, currency, disclosure, purpose, links, design, interactivity, and disclaimers.’ I wonder which one is best based on consumer satisfaction?