ZDnet in an article entitled ‘Customers Shun Microsoft Licensing’ reports: ‘…Financially, the low number of customers signing up for the plan shouldn’t hurt Microsoft…But dissatisfaction with Microsoft’s licensing terms could lead customers to consider options such as Linux and rivals to Microsoft’s Office business software.
Monthly Archives: July 2002
PR: Large Hospitals, Small Practitioners Benefit from Free Service
Medical practitioners and facilities are finding a valuable time-saving tool in Transcription Match, a free database found at MedicalTranscription.com. The service uses MySQL a popular free/open source database software. Launched in May, Transcription Match has sent 175 company reports to physicians and facilities to date. Transcription companies must meet pre-qualifying experience goals in order to participate in Transcription Match. CEO Melinda Decker explains: “Our listings vary tremendously. We’ve got individual transcriptionists, which some physicians prefer, listed alongside large corporations such as Medquist.”
The online database of transcription providers levels the playing field for the small service or independent medical transcriptionist. “We’re finding our inquiries are coming from medical practitioners of all shapes and sizes,” says Decker “They’re coming from large hospital corporations as well as from sole practitioners. Some of our inquirers are very tech savvy, some are still using analog tapes that require pickup and delivery. All of them are seeking HIPAA compliance.”
When a large university medical center in Texas was recently seeking an additional outsourcer for their medical transcription, they went to MedicalTranscription.com and initiated a “Transcription Match” search. A regional cancer center in Ohio used the same search to securely replace their existing in-house set-up which they felt was no longer efficient. A hospital in coastal Massachusetts used “Transcription Match” to locate a medical transcription service that could integrate their product directly into the existing electronic medical records systems on site. A North Carolina internist wanted to find a transcription service that would assist him in moving toward an EMR system in the future, while providing HIPAA compliant services for him in the present.
Informatics-type strategies are also utilized. VP of Information Technology John Nistad states, “The inquiries we receive are beneficial in determining the trends of our industry. Statistical (but not identifying) inquiry data is shared with all services listed on MedicalTranscription.com, to enable them to adjust their offering as the market dictates. In addition to being out there, our listing companies are learning more about the needs of their clients and as a result, can provide better service.”
Utilizing the free Transcription Match enables the medical facility to locate the service that can meet their needs based on specialty, volume, dictation technology, MIS integration, EMR capabilities and much more. Physicians and medical practices can also find information about electronic medical records, ASP services and more.
For more information:
MedicalTranscription.com Inc.
P.O. Box 6
Layton, NJ 07851
973-948-5151
www.MedicalTranscription.com
Infoworld: genome is open source, too
Infoworld,reports in this article about two genome researchers views of open source expoused at the O’Reilly convention: ‘…two leading researchers involved with the sequencing of the human genome delivered presentations citing the benefits of open source both in the development of computer systems and in science.
Ewan Birney, team leader for genomic annotation at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), and Jim Kent, a research scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, spoke Thursday at the O’Reilly Open Source Conference here.
“I don’t think you can have science without open source,”…
Debian Med Featured in Brave GNU World
Debian-Med is featured in Brave Gnu World issue 41. Headed by Andreas Tille, this project attempts to make an entire GNU/Linux distribution with pre-configured medical software already included. This effort should simplify the task of obtaining and using all the various free and open source medical software’s available today.
www.care2x.com – Opensource Healthcare Software
I came across this site www.care2x.com which describes itself as follows (uses MySQL,PHP and Apache): ‘CARE 2002 is a smart software for hospitals and health care organizations. It is designed to integrate the different information systems existing in these organizations into one single efficient system.
CARE 2002 solves the problems inherent in a network of multiple programs that are noncompatible with each other. It can integrate almost any type of services, systems, departments, clinic,processes, data, communication, etc. that exist in a hospital. Editor: It also is hosted on Sourceforge.net with license listed as GPL. Anyone care to post a brief history of the project?
Potpourri
A little potpourri with no direct Free/Open Source relevance: according to the Tennessean, it seems that HCA is linking all its hospital supply purchasing by a Internet based ordering system which is supposed to reduce costs. Read all about it here.
The Boston Globe has a piece about why doctors resist a computerized diagnostic assistant, while the Orlando Sentinel writes about a non-free system that some doctors are using and others resist. I’m leaving out the usual bumper crop of info-mercial type articles of medical software companies that never seem to materialize as a standard, national system. Hey! what would happen if free and open source software is used?
A Linux-Based X-Ray Dosimeter
An Austrian company developed a device to collect data on medical X-ray examinations.
The device runs Linux on an embedded processor. Some
more information
can be found on All Linux Devices.
Thesis on OSS
Hi, I am a newcomer to this site. I am thinking to do a thesis on OSS for my Master degree. I am from the background of Computer Science / Business Administration. So my topic will be more inclined towards these perspectives. But now I haven’t got a clue about the specific topic, nor what kind of research to do (survey, case study, etc). So any hint or suggestion from the community will be highly appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Tim Cook Leaves Free Practice Management, Inc.
Citing irreconcilable differences in philosophy the developer of FreePM resigned his positions as President and CTO, in mid June, from the company he co-founded in 2000 to market services and support for the software.
It is expected that the company will be issuing a news release on it’s website at http://www.freepm.com in the near future.
Tim Cook
twcook@iswt.com
731.884.4126
LinuxPlanet: Heart of the Penguin
Thanks to Karsten Hilbert for this link. LinuxPlanet has an article on the use of a Beowulf cluster for defibrillator research: In a small server room on the campus of UAB sits a kitchen supply rack, with four big shelves, each of which holds four dual-processor Dell computers. These sixteen boxes are hooked together in a standard Beowulf cluster, so that all 32 CPUs are working on the same computations in concert, providing a level of computation, their administrator believes, that rivals the performance he could get out of a supercomputer and at a fraction of the cost.
Dr. Andy Pollard is a Biomedical Engineer who is very familiar with using supercomputers and mainframes. Throughout much of the last 15 years, he has used them to perform the billions of calculations needed to simulate the effects of electrical fields on human heart tissue in a deep effort to understand exactly what are the triggers for a fibrillation event…