Monthly Archives: February 2004

Another One Bites the Dust

The latest in the decades old and continuing saga of multi-million dollar Health IT bombs: ‘Scottish health bosses have pulled the plug on the launch of a �30 million computer system from McKessonHBOC after staff at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary complained that they couldn�t access vital information on it…’ Read the rest of the article here. Thanks to A. Midgley for this link.

OpenEMR with new Practice Management and Reporting Features

OpenEMR with many new features for patient scheduling and reporting. OpenEMR now incorporates PostCalendar from PostNuke, and phpMyAdmin for reporting. Create a report with phpMyAdmin, save it and create a web link for the report. A new resource site for OpenEMR users is OpenEMR.net which includes mailing lists, forums, screen shots, a live demonstration, a 39 page comparison sheet to compare OpenEMR to Medical Manager, MegaWest or Health Pro….

OpenEMR’s new enhancements include:

1. Find the first available appointment by medical provider;

2. When creating a new patient appointment, OpenEMR searches the patient’s demographic information to identify that patient’s medical provider, and automatically populates the patient’s provider for scheduling a new appointment;

3. Office staff default calendar view is for all providers for the week;

4. Medical provider default view is current day, defaulting to the provider’s appointments;

5. Drop-down list of providers to select from other providers for an appointment;

6. Calendar is PostNuke’s PostCalendar, providing for integration with PostNuke as a content management system;

7. Double booking of appointments flags the second appointment, noting a conflict;

8. Categories to identify patient failed to show;

9. Patient appointments contain three direct links. Those links are to encounter forms for the patient, patient demographic information, and to the appointment for editing; and

10. phpMyAdmin is packaged with OpenEMR allowing for users to create unlimited reports on data within OpenEMR.

OpenEMR has a new resource site for developers and users at OpenEMR.net with forums, email lists, screen shots and a 39 page resource to compare OpenEMR to other EMR and PMS systems.

Australian Dept. of Health – Back Office OSS ?

Action Course on Open Source, James Riley writes “NSW commerce and IT minister John Della Bosca will use a policy and administrative bulldozer, rather than legislation, to create a “level playing field” for adopting open source software within his government.” Pilot programs are underway to determine total cost of ownership. One such pilot maybe in the Australian Dept. of Health.

Medical Informaticists To Benefit From FOSS

A group that stands to benefit greatly from Free and Open Source Medical Software is Medical Informaticists. Medical Informaticist Scot Silverstein, MD has used the phrase ‘Director of Nothing’ to describe jobs for Informaticists that promise everything, but deliver little in terms of authority to achieve organizational IT goals. Examples are all the responsibility for IT, but no budget the Informaticist controls, no staff and little standing in the heirarchy. I would add that in my opinion, many medical organization decision makers do not know what an Informaticist can do, but they think they know what a vendor can do. This can lead to an inequity of power which Free and Open Source Medical software can greatly equalize. Therefore, a not so subtle message to Medical Informaticists is: advocate and use FOS Medical software and the profession is likely to benefit greatly. Continue using proprietary medical software and you may suffer the consequences of a balance of power against you.