Monthly Archives: January 2001

OIO-0.9.6 is BizTalk?

Open Infrastructure for Outcomes celebrates its (slightly delayed) scheduled release of version 0.9.6 today. OIO now supports fully portable patient records just like what Microsoft offers for business data through BizTalk. Patient records custom-created by any OIO server can now be exported as an XML file for viewing *and* charting in any other OIO server. Should Microsoft be worried?

OIO-0.9.6 release: (January 12, 2001)

  • New Features:
      Site Admin Tool

    1. Add-user admin tool for users with Manager role

      Patient Data Interchange

    2. forms-level Patient record export and import through XML
    3. validation of form used by Patient record during import through item-by-item comparison to existing forms
    4. import of the necessary form if the system does not have the form needed by a particular patient record being imported

      Online Data Analysis

    5. Not (1 or 2 or 3 …) added to AND(1 and 2 and 3 …) in drill down analysis.
    6. Or (1 or 2 or 3 …) added to AND(1 and 2 and 3 …) and Not (1 or 2 or 3 …) in drill down analysis.
    7. Ability to drill down to individual patient’s records for viewing and editing from data mining module (Reports).
    8. Ability to generate lists of patients with missing data at item-level

      Dataset Export

    9. Choice of comma-delimited or XML-formated export of merged dataset (for import into SAS, SPSS, Excel, etc)
  • Bugs fixed:
    1. Zope error when items with itemtype=blank are left blank on the form
    2. 0.9.5b and 0.9.5c bug fixes incoporated

    Grab a copy from the OIO
    Files Library. It’s still only a 355KB download!

    • Ballmer: Linux Threatens MS ‘Core’

    MaximumLinux is reporting on Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s recent remarks at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter’s Internet, Software and Networking Conference ‘…I think you have to rate competitors that threaten your core higher than you rate competitors where you’re
    trying to take from them,” he said. “So in some senses it puts the Linux phenomenon and the Unix
    phenomenon at the top of the list. That really is job one for us, because that’s the threat to the Windows
    business…’

    NYTimes: Digital Doctoring

    The NY Times has a piece on PDA’s in medicine as well as their likely convergence with devices that MD’s are already carrying: ‘…Doctors are often
    festooned with beepers, cell phones mini-tape recorders and hand-
    held computers, said Dr. Lloyd A. Hey.

    “All those devices will eventually be consolidated into a single hand-held
    device,” predicted Dr. Hey, a Duke University surgeon and a founder of
    MDeverywhere, a start-up that offers software to help doctors keep
    track of billable hours…’

    SPIRIT Receives European Commission Support

    Updated 1/5/2001 Enterprise Linux Today has another report about this. PARIS, FRANCE Minoru Development SARL, CONECTA srl, and Sistema announced today that they have signed a contract with the European Commission’s Fifth Framework Programme to implement an open source approach to accelerate the uptake and improvement of software for regional health care networks. Read the press release here. Read Minoru Development Corp president Brian Bray’s comments below for more details.

    The SPIRIT goals are based on four properties of successful open source
    projects and seek to build “critical mass” for a sustainable open source
    health care software industry.

    The four properties of successful projects considered were:

    1. A community of dedicated, knowledgable, and interested persons with
      similar goals.

    2. A base of software to build upon.
    3. A meeting place.
    4. Commercial exploitation of the results.

    The goals are:

    1. To increase the size and activity of the open source health care
      community, particularly European participation.

    2. To increase the available base of open source software for health
      care by canvasing European health care informatics research projects,
      research organizations, government organizations with in-house publicly
      funded software, and private companies to find new software and
      information resources that can be released in open source form.

    3. The “meeting place” will be a specialized server offering services to
      open source health care projects. The services include open source
      dissemination of research results, site hosting, developer tools such as
      CVS, communication tools, mailing lists, groupware applications, and
      audio/video conferencing.

      A key resource is a multilingual (English, French, German, Italian, and
      Spanish) index of available open source software with links to
      evaluations in the health care setting.

      We also expect to provide a lot of background material to help ourselves
      and others convince government policy makers, informatics research
      organizations and health care delivery organizations of the value of the
      open source approach.

    4. Open source resources will be disseminated via the Internet and CD
      distribution. Business plans will be created for deploying selected
      resources in European markets on a commercial basis. This means plans
      and consortia for making selected open source products comply with
      national and regional regulations and effectively compete against
      existing market participants and/or create new markets.

    We thank everyone on the Openhealth list for their enthusiasm and support, without which, this initiative would not be possible. We hope that this project will generate some new tools, opportunities, support, users, and code base that will help all of you reach your goals more quickly and easily.

    We need your continued guidance and support to make SPIRIT a success.

    We expect to have the web portal fully operational by next summer. We will start with a simple web site within the next few weeks, and then add services based on your requirements.

    At the moment, you can help us by pointing us at European groups that we should approach to find additional software and information resources. We are also looking for specific ideas and help to get your projects well presented on the CD.

    Both OSHCA[tm] and the Openhealth[tm] list were referenced in our proposal to the Commission. Although the project does not imply European Commission support for the OSHCA principles or for this list, we feel that the results of this project will directly contribute to advancing OSHCA goals and the goals of Openhealth list members.

    I invite you to ask questions about the project on the openhealth list.

    -Brian

    NY Times: Alternative Browsers

    NY Times on the web (free login required) writes about alternative browsers to the ‘big two’ Netscape and Internet Explorer. It references BrowserWatch.com a site dedicated to web browsing software which knows of at least 30 browsers. Opera (which is available for Linux) is mentioned as a speedy alternative. ‘…Opera offers the usual assortment of features (e-mail, address book, newsgroup reading, Internet chat) and Web standards (Java, JavaScript, 128-bit encryption for secure online banking, cascading style sheets, and so on). But what makes it special is a vast array of unusual and original features that make the Web more useful and less annoying…’ Netscape 6’s recent less than stellar debut makes experimentation with alternatives more attractive.

    PDAMD: Why PDA?

    PDAMD‘s Greg Jeansonne, MS IV has an opinion piece about why a lot more medical students and Doctors who should be carrying PDA’s are not. LinuxMedNews hasn’t made any 2001 predictions yet, so here’s the first one: that Linux based PDA’s will be a viable product this year and that it will hopefully fill the current void in open source PDA medical software. LMN’s own Captain Fantastic recently formed the OpenPMToolWorks project which may help at filling that void if it generalizes to PDA’s.