We are reporting live from the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA)fall conference. The conference this year is being held in the Marriott Wardman Park in Washington D.C. I’ll be giving the first annual Linux Medical News Open Source Medical Achievement Award as well as sending updates to this article as they occur.

This is the first time I’ve flown since 9/11 and I was flying into Reagan National airport as well. As you can imagine, security was heavy at Bush International in Houston. My id was checked 3 times, laptop was scanned separately and I didn’t think about taking my Palm V out of my pocket. This set off the scanner and earned me a wand and frisk search. Two soldiers carrying rifles were in evidence which was a first for me to see them in a US airport.

I arrived in Washington late Saturday night and took Washington’s excellent Metro to the hotel and spent the night. Today I received a phone call from Dan Johnson, MD. Many of the open source medical software people will be getting together at 5:00pm in the lobby as well as at 7:30pm for dinner.

Johnson is something of the patriarch of open source software, realizing its potential long before just about anyone else. His son also happens to be kernel manager for RedHat. He is going to be taking over David Pepper, MD’s role as moderator of the open source medical software panel Monday. Dr. Pepper was held up in Arizona and may not be able to make it because of ticket confusion.

That’s it for now.