Monthly Archives: May 2003

Who can do this? Diet Database and Online Survey

One of us should be able to take care of this. I was just surfing this morning when i came across this plea for help. This guy has two well-defined small projects that look like they would really help both him, and the community of patients that he represents. The first project is a “Diet Database” that gives simple yes/no answers to common foods based on common dietary constraints… such as “low-carb” “low-starch” “low-cholesterol”.

The second problem is an online survey… I think I know of a relatively simple out of the box solution that I can use for the second one, so I will put my money where my mouth is and offer to help with that.
Does anyone know of an out-of-the-box solution to the first (diet database) problem, or if not, would anyone be willing to code one up quickly?

Personally I think this is exactly the sort of thing that the FOSS software community would invest in, but the proprietary world would ignore. There is no money in it but it is clear that this would directly effect quality-of-life.

Fred Trotter
www.FreeMED.org

‘Dismay and Disquiet’ Building

Gary Kantor on the Openhealth list wrote: ‘These two 1, 2, recent editorials from trade journals that demonstrate a level of “dismay and disquiet” is building within the healthcare IT industry following the announcements by US government officials that are supportive of VistA adoption, the AAFP open-source EMR initiative, and of “standards” and “interoperability”. We’ve got them rattled…’

Potpourri

Here is a potpourri of articles recently submitted to the OpenEHR list by Thomas Clark. This one is a US report on healthcare quality. Another one, the National Healthcare Quality Report by the Institute of Medicine, and a report on the ‘lack of in-depth research on the content quality of paper and electronic medical records.’ This one is an ‘Interesting discussion on relevance; interesting comments on expert
opinion; probably due to the close working relationships with the law industry that loves inconsistency in medical records.’ This one from Alexander Caldwell is about “The MEDICI Electronic Data Interchange Library” a hot topic recently which was also reported on here, submitted by Bill Walton to OpenEHR.

FreeMed Billing 1st Alpha

Fred Trotter has announced on the Openhealth list a 1st Alpha for a Free/Open Source medical billing package: ‘This is the first alpha for the FreeMED billing project. It is a first look at the XML Billing language that I will be using. This is a simple language that consists of two statements today and someday will consist of three. Each command is an xml tag pair, with sub-tags that form arguments…’

TORCH 1.2.0 Released

TORCH 1.2.0 now generates XML billing files in compliance with the Open Medical Billing System. In addition to the OMBS capablity, TORCH installation issues have been addressed to allow faster, easier and less problematic installation on Linux x86 boxes.

Installation on other platforms/OS’s is possible though we do not support anything other than x86 machines running Linux.

The TORCH security model is very granular and is role / object based. As of version 1.2.0 Patient Encounters can now be tagged as only being accessible by the creating healthcare provider. This prevents consulting providers from being able to view details of those Encounters that the patient would prefer to keep private to the original provider.

TORCH is an opensource electronic health record application based on the concept that this problem area is a content management problem vs. a structured data problem. TORCH can run on a laptop for a single physician and it can be scaled up to run across multiple servers in geographically separated locations. TORCH is licensed under the GPL and can be downloaded from the Open Paradigms,LLC website.

Ten Comandments of Computerization

Interesting and well written, this article first appeared in The Osler Outlook and discusses the legal liability of NOT using technology: ‘…T.J. Hooper v. Northern Barge was a famous case in its day, holding the tugs liable for their failure to have on board state-of-the-art technology. In 1932, that “state-of-the-art technology” was a radio receiving set, capable of picking up the weather broadcasts of the fledgling National Weather Service, which had taken to broadcasting maritime weather reports twice a day. The Hooper and the Montrose had on board what was customary in the merchant marine of 1932 – a transmitter, to call “Mayday” – but the court said that there are precautions so imperative that no industry or trade may be excused for their lack, even if the disregard be universal, and that the newness of the technology is no defence…’ How liable are physicians if they don’t use computerized ordering or records?

National Academies Press On-Line

The National Academies Press publishes books on-line, including those by the Institue of Medicine. Titles that may interest LinuxMedNews readers include:

Networking Health: Prescriptions for the Internet

Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century”

Toward a Health Statistics System for the 21st Century: Summary of a Workshop

Fostering Rapid Advances in Health Care: Learning from System Demonstrations

…and a whole lot more.

Thanks to Kuro5hin for this link.