OpenEHR Forms Architectural Review Board

The OpenEHR Foundation recently announced the formation of an Architectural Review Board (ARB). The OpenEHR group is particularly well connected so this is an announcement of import: ‘…We expect that there will be a lot more on show along this pathway over the coming year. From where we sit, we can see openEHR integrating straightforwardly and, in principle, uncontentiously, with current CEN and HL7 developments, offering distinctive discipline and simplicity into the emerging EHR domain. Our greatest hope is to see the openEHR community of users now progressively making the pace in pulling and pushing implementation. There are many signs of that, throughout the world, including on the openEHR discussion lists. Only two weeks ago, at a meeting of EU Accession States in Krakow, which I co- chaired, I joined a session in the middle of a presentation by a young and enthusiastic system developer from Hungary, who was speaking about his experience of using openEHR! That’s the kind of surprise one really enjoys! In the ARB, we hope we have a good way of supporting these next stages of endeavour…’

OpenEMR Subversion Development – OpenEMR Developers

The Pennington Firm edition of OpenEMR’s development tree is now available with daily updates. We have created the daily version updates as a result of requests by several clinics customizing OpenEMR for their clinic’s use. As part of creating public development access, we have removed the majority of CPT codes, which we use for testing with OpenEMR. Read More for the complete announcement.

The copyright to all CPT codes is owned by the AMA. Even though OpenEMR is a GPL, open source application, we are prevented from including CPT codes as a result of the copyright ownership by the AMA. For development purposes and to respect the AMA’s copyright we have removed all but 12 CPT codes in the development version of OpenEMR. The stable download version of OpenEMR does not contain any CPT codes.

Pennington Firm uses Subversion for its development versioning control. Subversion is similar to CVS, but includes a few features absent from CVS.

Open source software development for medical organizations?

I have worked for a company to develop commercial, closed source, medical software. It was a surgical tray tracker/management software. I suggested that we invest in OSS technology to cut down on development costs, and to port the program to other platforms. Needless to say I am no longer working there.

I’ve been out of work since 2002, but I have ideas for medical programs that may be of use. I’d like to make them OSS, but I am new at this.

I am currently going back to college to earn a business degree, as the computer industry takes a nose-dive. I am doing research on OSS development and trying to find out what medical organizations need. I need to know what kind of resurces exist for OSS development in the medical area.

I am getting ready to form a company, I graduate near the end of 2005. I hope to get the company up and running by 2006.

I recently found out about this site, and it looks very interesting.

Possible software programs I might develop are:

Surgical tray tracking and management.

Nursing home patient tracking and records.

911 CAD (Computer Automated Dispatch) software and Linux drivers. Possible CAD box design at an inexpensive price to keep it affordable. Using double throw relays to control things. VOIP (Voice Over IP), and more advanced features.

I would like to turn my ideas/vision into reality. I am not sure what type of a market there is, or if any health/medical organizations are interested in open source development.

So my question is, what kind of resources are there out there for people like me trying to get into open source software development for health/medical use? Thanks.

Tkfp Live ISO! Uploaded to Sourceforge

As posted on the tkfp@topica.com mailing list.

I posted a Tkfp Live! .iso image file to http://tkfp.sourceforge.net today. It’s a bootable CD image file containing a configured and working copy of Tkfp running on Slackware 9.0 using WindowMaker as the window manager. It requires no installation of either Linux or Tkfp to run. It creates a “virtual file system” entirely in RAM. It doesn’t install anything on your hard drive. You can try out Tkfp and Linux on any Intel computer with enough RAM that can boot off a CDROM. Just burn the .iso image onto a CD and set your BIOS to allow booting off the CDROM.

REQUIREMENTS

A fast internet connection to download the file – it’s about 345MB. At least 384MB of RAM seem to be needed to get enough virtual file space for Tkfp. It has been tested on a Dell with a Pentium 4 2Ghz with 512MB RAM and Intel 810 on board video and seems to run well. It also has been run on an older AMD K6-2 450 machine with 384MB RAM. The start up scripts attempt to configure your Xserver. If auto configuration
doesn’t work, there are some instructions on how to configure it yourself. I removed KDE and Gnome but there are a full suite of networking and other
utilities including SSH, CUPS, LPRNG and many others available.

There is an .md5 file which allows verifying the
integrity of the .iso file after you download it. On Linux, if you save the .iso and .md5 files in the same directory, you can run:

md5sum -c Tkfp_Live.xxx.md5

It will output a message about the file integrity.

I certainly am just learning about creating these Live CD thingies. This is my first attempt, so please be patient if it doesn’t work! Would appreciate any feedback as to success or failure.

Alexander Caldwell

Electronic Medical Records: Lessons from Small Physician Practices

Full article here:http://www.chcf.org/topics/view.cfm?itemID=21521
University of California, San Francisco
This project provides solo and small group physicians with practical information on electronic medical records (EMRs) implementation and use. This group was the focus for two reasons. Although estimates of actual EMR use rates are relatively low�likely substantially less than 13 percent�estimates of physician interest in EMRs are substantially higher, ranging from 31 percent to more than 65 percent of all physicians nationwide. In addition, approximately 70 percent of active, practicing physicians in California work independently or in small groups of ten physicians or fewer; yet, little has been published on their experience using EMRs.

This report will be of interest to employers and employer coalitions that provide health care benefits, policymakers in government that craft legislation, managers at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and research and demonstration funding agencies. These stakeholders increasingly recognize that the use of information technology and electronic medical records are critical to improving quality of care. Understanding EMR use in solo/small groups can help policymakers craft policies that can hasten electronic medical records adoption.