Monthly Archives: December 2003

Care2x Year in Review and ‘Karneval’

Thank you for the support by Linuxmednews readers of the Care2x project. The articles on care2x this year have yielded good ideas on improving it. This was a big year for us so we say “Happy new year 2004”. I am sure it will be bigger than 2003 for care2x. In Germany at 11.11. every year 11.11. a.m. the fith season begins named “Karneval”. In Cologne where I did my degree or “Fastnacht” in Mainz the town where I was born. Is it the time to be as crazy as we are? So I looked on the Internet to give you some impressession what happened at Karneval.

http://www.truephotos.de/index.html

At that time i was in Geneva at OSHCA and met the WorldVista people. We spoke about an idea, to make a module together for Worldvista and Care2x. Crazy, isn’t it?

Etienne Saliez, M.D., Crisnet vice-president,
Belgian Medical Informatics Association (MIM) vice-president likes the idea to share code.

After some mails with the WorldVista people we checked that it is possible to connect from Care2x to the Sanchez Computer Associates, Inc.. GT.M database that is used by Worldvista.

I was asked by Professor Trill, University Flensburg Chair of the FFIT, to present the Care2x project at the FFIT in February next year. There are more than 60 companies specialized in Hospital Information Systems. The same time and place there is a subcongress of German Government for telemedicine.

Future
I wish u all a Happy New Year and starting fireworks for the new year.

We are allowed at the FFIT to make the first non virtual developer meeting that take place at february 11, 2004. The vista people told me thats realistic to expect 10 – 15 developers at such a first meeting.

For the meeting I have set up a tentative list. Klaus Kopper – Knoppix would like to help us to produce a Care2x demo CD with a complete Debian Linux on it. I think it’s good to know for other projects how to make such a Demo. He is in the organisation of Europes biggest Linux event (20000 vistors) and i think we sort out in Flensburg the possibility of a special Linux health day at this event.

Another tentative is Prof. Frank van Harmelen. I give you the link to the W3C Resource and an easy reading article to
push your phantasy.

What happened now in Flensburg?
Today I set up a little homepage and you can click in the right upper corner to register for reading in English about the care2x developer meeting.

Care2x 1st Developer meeting Feb 11, 2004

For foreign readers some more links about Karneval. The event starts 1 week after the meeting at Feb 23, 2004

Berkeley private reasearch about Karneval 🙂
http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~lpark/karneval/karneval.html

Embassy Ottawa
http://www.germanembassyottawa.org/carneval.php

History of Karneval
http://www.serve.com/shea/germusa/karneval.htm

Crazy, isn’t it?

Wilfried

FreeMED packaging problem

The FreeMED Project is about to release some signifigant improvements to FreeMED. The recent split of Fedora and Redhat Enterprise Linux has resulted in quite a conundrum for us. What platform should we target support for? We are already commited to supporting Debian (and that is a lot more important now) and we have considered supporting Windows with MySQL and Apache installed. What platforms/distributions would the LMN community suggest that we support?
Fred Trotter

FreeMED is a php based application and relies on a broad spectrum of the functionality of the language. This means that we need to have a healthy version of the code, which Redhat Linux 9.0 does not offer as an rpm. Both Fedora 1.0 and RHEL 3.0 support the correct versions of php, as well as Apache 2. Apache 2 allows us to use the modular configuration file option. Between the two improvments we now have the option to build packages for each system. But we are wondering if it is worth the effort.
What platforms would you prefer?

SQLClinic Releases Version 2.1

‘We are pleased to announce that SQL Clinic Version 2.1 – Stable is available for download. Unix and Win32 versions can be downloaded at “www.sqlclinic.net/pub/”:http://www.sqlclinic.net/pub/ Bug Fixes and Enhancements are listed…’ Full announcement is within.

———————————————————————–
Season’s Greetings From Your SQL Clinic Development Team!
www.sqlclinic.net/team.html
———————————————————————–

We are pleased to announce that SQL Clinic Version 2.1 – Stable is
available for download. Unix and Win32 versions can be downloaded
at www.sqlclinic.net/pub/

Bug Fixes and Enhancements are listed below. From the Change Log:

– 2.1.0 Beta Released (18 December 2003)

* Numerous Broken Links in Menuing System Fixed (Thomas and Patrick)

* Support for JavaScript ondblClick() added to menu items (Eric)

* Agency scripts reworked to eliminate personnel_email table bug
(fixed duplicate display of email addresses in staff directory) (Thomas)

* clinic.lib replaced with SQLClinic.pm and fully qualified subroutine
calls in all scripts, allowing programmers easier access to SQL Clinic
API (requiring namespace in all sub calls prevents variables and
local subroutines being clobbered by main library) (Thomas)

* ISO Date Style now mandatory (for HIPAA compliance and to eliminate
errors for users of MySQL which inputs a dash delimited string of zeroes
if non-ISO dates are entered — as a side effect this also simplifies
coding Oracle queries) (Thomas and Eric)

* sexual_identity fields added to patient demographics/face sheet (Thomas)

* Chart Deficiency Report (Thomas and John)

* Family Based (Children and Adolescents) Module (Eric)

* Functional Assessment linked to Treatment Plans and Progress Notes
(iframe now appears, displaying any areas tagged Needs Immediate Assistance)
(Thomas and Ben)

* Medicaid Skills resequenced (i.e. AT = 1000, DLS = 4000, etc.) to facilitate
eventual move to a flexible architecture for all scripts using these data.
(Eric)

* Keyword regular expression search function rewritten to respect word boundaries,
to eliminate false positives. (Thomas)

– 2.1.0 Stable Released (24 December 2003)

* Error in user guide (chapter2i.html) corrected (John)

– 2.2.0 Proposed Changes (24 December 2003)

* Link to active patient caseload on main menu (idea by David Pool)
revamp all related scripts…add links to all scripts (so clinicians
can access their caseload from any screen).

* Roll out favicon.ico (add to html and SQLClinic.pm)

* Additional reports on patient demographics (idea by Ben Geboe)

* revamp ls3 and statistical worksheets to remove Date::Calc dependency

* Spell Checker HOWTO for Firebird users (embed xpi scripts in /spellcheck
and/or make available at sqlclinic.net)

– 2.3.0 Proposed Changes (24 December 2003)

* Integrate SQL Ledger 2.2 accounting package

* Integrate SQL HIPAA 1.0 billing module

* Begin planning SQL Clinic 3.0 changes…

Enjoy the Holidays and Thank You For Supporting SQL Clinic!

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BBC: Free software to aid poor doctors

The BBC has an article about VistA and WorldVistA with quotes from FOSS in medicine advocate Joseph Dalmolin: ‘…The appeal of having a unified computer system that can provide quick and easy access to patient records is obvious.

But for developing countries, the cost of such a system can place a huge drain on already stretched healthcare resources.

Mr Molin said this was one of the main attractions of using an open source program like Vista, as there are no upfront costs for the software or license fees to pay.

“It doesn’t cost you $10m for something as complex as this. It wouldn’t cost a lot of money to do an entire country,” he said…’

Linux Medical News Now Official Publication of IMIA OSWG

The Open Source Working Group of the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA OSWG) is pleased to announce that Linux Medical News has been endorsed as an Official Online Publication of the working group. The arrangement between IMIA OSWG and Linux Medical news is to have effect immediately. The full press release is within. Not bad for a small-town newspaper 🙂 Cindy is pretty pleased.

Linux Medical News Named as an Official Online Publication of IMIA Open Source Working Group

The Open Source Working Group of the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA OSWG) is pleased to announce that Linux Medical News has been endorsed as an Official Online Publication of the working group. The arrangement between IMIA OSWG and Linux Medical news is to have effect immediately.

“Linux Medical News has, in a short time, established itself as a first class website with a reputation for providing an authoritative source of news on open source, free software and GNU/Linux matters in the health and medical domains,” said Peter Murray, one of the co-chairs of the IMIA OSWG; ” We are pleased to be associated with Linux Medical News, and believe that the linkage will be of benefit to the IMIA Working Group and the wider open source community.”

Ignacio Valdes, founder and editor of Linux Medical News stated “We are honored that a group of this international stature has made this endorsement of Linux Medical News. We hope to continue to build the trust of IMIA and the medical profession as an accurate, yet interesting, news publication for Free and Open Source Software in medicine.”

Prof. Graham Wright, also co-chair of the IMIA OSWG said that “Open source is philosophically about inclusion and organic growth; there should be no surprise that we have turned to Linux Medical News to be the working groups news outlet as it is the de facto news source for the OS community. We are proud to have been accepted by Ignacio and his colleagues.”

This arrangement does not compromise the editorial independence of Ignacio and the Linux Medical News team, and all concerned look forward to a long and beneficial relationship.

Jointly released by Peter Murray, Ignacio Valdes and Graham Wright
19 December 2003.

Knowledge Management Aplication Released as Open Source

“3rd Millenium,Inc.”:http://www.3rdmill.com a life sciences informatics consulting company, has released it’s Knowledge Management System for licensing under the GPL. More of the announcement is within.

The company designs custom informatics solutions for customers during consulting engagements.

The company is founded and run by experienced life science and computer science professionals. Our technical staff of Ph.D. level scientists with expertise in biology, bioinformatics or related fields, and high level software engineers with domain experience work on tightly integrated teams to create informatics systems that meet the scientific needs of our customers.

3rd Millennium has decided to make much of the software we have developed available for free download and as open source under the GNU General Public License (GPL). The first such system we have released is our Data Centric Knowledge Management System for Biotech and Pharmaceutical R&D. “Click here”:http://www.3rdmill.com/initiatives/downloadsKMS.htm to download or find out more about this system.

Other categories of software the company plans to release include laboratory information management systems (LIMS), workflow systems, and analysis pipelines.

Healthcare Desktop Project Announced

Hello,
I would like to notify everyone interested in Open Source healthcare software about a new Open Source project – Healthcare Desktop.
In short our project goal is to create an open source (snip.) software package that covers all aspects of work in modern hospital.

Due to our developement strategy we are currently looking for help from healthcare field professionals who could assist us in initial requirements and specifications phase, so, if you have a good experience in field and would be willing to assist our developement, please visit our site and consider joining our project.

Linux tablet PC breaks $1,000 barrier

This “article”:http://news.com.com/2100-1005_3-5112309.html?tag=st_lh
describes a 1Ghz, 30GB HD, tablet / laptop running Linux. “The Helium 2100, from Staten Island, N.Y.-based manufacturer Element Computer, is a convertible PC with a sliding screen that can be positioned for use as a traditional notebook PC or folded down for use as a touch-screen tablet device.”

This looks like a great breakthrough in convertible prices. The “hardware description”:http://www.elementcomputer.com/store/product_info.php?products_id=33
reveals all the standard features you would expect.

Open Source Solutions Sought for Medical Manager Difficulties

Glenn Kuczer is actively soliciting open source solutions after having enough difficulties with Medical Manager to begin a website called “www.medicalmanagersucks.com”: ‘…Thinking about buying anything from Medical Manager a WebMD company? Think Twice! Can you say Class action? webmd is a hastily assembled juggernaut which emerged from 1990s dot-com venture capital cash. it grew by acquisition of very different business units, which remain poorly integrated today. The division I deal with is medical manager. this is a proprietary software vendor with high staff turnover and a poor record on timely project delivery. their software runs on all the systems that i manage. we are currently looking for a appointment and billing system because the product and the company are both flaky and we’re looking at open source software as a solution to both problems. Any Practice that would like to discuss the problems with Medical Manager and their software System feel free to email me, I am the Information Systems Administrator for a large medical facility. The intention of this website is to gather information from other medical practices that also use the Medical Manager software systems. There will be articles that pertain to specific situations that will be discussed, so Thank you for visiting this buyer beware information on Medical Manager. ***All those who wish to shutdown this site need only to read the first amendment in the US Constitution…’