At the recent Seattle, Washington VistA Community Meeting, the need for basic Linux training, including base installation and general end user usage was discussed. The Linux ETC Company will be hosting our Linux Fundamentals (LNX-100) and a General Linux 1, LPI-101 prep (LPI-101) courses before and after the upcoming VistA Community Meeting in the Baltimore, MD area (final training site will be announced upon confirmation of enrollment). The dates are as follows:
Monthly Archives: August 2004
InfoWorld: U.K.’s National Health Service Licenses JDS
PR: VistA ‘Soon’ Available to Private Offices
Thanks to Nancy Anthracite for this information: Use of VA’s Electronic Health Records Expanding July 23, 2004
WASHINGTON – One of the world’s most sophisticated systems for keeping
electronic health records will soon be easily available to doctors,
hospitals and clinics around the country, courtesy of the Department of
Veterans Affairs (VA) and the federal Center for Medicare and Medicaid
Services. “VA is proud to lead the health care industry in the use of
information technology. The expertise we have gained, however, belongs to
the American public,” said Dr. Jonathan Perlin, VA’s Acting Under Secretary
for Health. “With our federal partners, we’re making it easier for the
private-sector health care industry to make use of this electronic system
for health care records.” The system, called VistA-Office Electronic Health
Record, was developed by VA. A version of VistA is used at more than 1,300
VA facilities throughout the United States to maintain records on 5 million
veterans who receive their health care from VA. Under the plan announced
today, private-sector health care providers can obtain a version of VistA at
nominal cost. Distribution of the software is expected to begin in late
2005. VistA offers health care providers a complete electronic record
covering all aspects of patient care, including reminders for preventive
health care, electronic entry of pharmaceutical orders, display of
laboratory results, consultation requests, x-rays and pathology slides.
Besides the VA system, VistA is currently used by the Department of Health
for the District of Columbia, plus health care systems in Finland, Germany,
Egypt and Nigeria. People wishing to receive e-mail from VA with the
latest news releases and updated fact sheets can subscribe at the following
Internet address: http://www.va.gov/opa/pressrel/opalist_listserv.cfm
Italian Olympic Committee uses open-source based HIS
CONI, as the committee is popularly known in Italy, has approved its sports medicine department locally called L’Instituto Nazionale di Medicina dello Sport (INMS) to use a custom version of Care2x, an open-source integrated hospital information system.
According to Umberto Rampa, the department’s IT director responsible for the project, it took the INMS around 17 months to make the important customizations up to using the modules in real productive environment. The institute has more “outpatient” character. Their “patient”, mostly athletes, isn’t sick but rather a kind of superman.
Fed up hospitals defy patching rules
This is my paraphrase to an interesting security-related article here. Hospital IT Departments are impatient in applying the latest security patches not screened by device manufacturers and risk being in noncompliance with HIPPA requirements. Device vendors not releasing latest patches risk losing FDA certification. While this article deals primarily with M$ software in medical devices, the situation theoretically could involve FOSS.
VistA Vendors Meeting Results In Mailing List
Past recipient of the Linux Medical News Achievement Award KS Bhaskar wrote on the hardhats list: ‘On Tuesday, July 20, Oleen Healthcare in Silver Spring, MD, hosted a meeting of a number of VistA related vendors (see organization list below) and WorldVistA to discuss how WorldVistA and VistA vendors could collaborate better, whether and how WorldVistA (a non-profit 501(c)(3) corporation could accommodate vendor participation, etc.)…One of my action items from the meeting was to create a Yahoogroups list for the vendors to carry out discussions, and I have created a group called vista-vendors. So e-mail to vista-vendors@yahoogroups.com will go to all registered there, and will be archived for the future…’ The list of vendors and groups attending was impressive and included: Document Storage Systems, Fidelity Information Services, Global Technologies, Hewlett-Packard, InterSystems, Medical Alliances, Medsphere, Oleen Healthcare, Perot Systems, Sea Island Systems, WorldVistA
2004 Linux Medical News Achievement Award Nominees
Once again, the field of nominees for this year’s award is stellar and choosing the winner will be difficult. The award will be given at this year’s Medinfo 2004 conference in San Francisco, California on September 10th at some time between 11:30am – 1:00pm. Exact location to be announced. Tim Cook of OpenParadigms will be presenting the award this year as I will be taking an oral board exam at precisely the same time. The complete text of the nominations are within, but the nominees are:
OsiriX: Open Source Medical Imaging software for Mac OSX
Looks like version 1.3 was just released (July 30th)
From the OsiriX site:
“OsiriX is an image processing software dedicated to DICOM images produced by medical equipment (MRI, CT, PET, PET-CT, …) and confocal microscopy (LSM and BioRAD-PIC format). It can also read many other file formats: TIFF (8,16, 32 bits), JPEG, PDF, AVI, MPEG and Quicktime. It is fully compliant with the DICOM standard for image comunication and image file formats. OsiriX is able to receive images transferred by DICOM communication protocol from any PACS or medical imaging modality (STORE SCP – Service Class Provider, STORE SCU – Service Class User, and Query/Retrieve) .