There is a project underway at Creighton University that may interest a few LinuxMedNews readers. LARA (Live Anywhere Record Access) is a system I have developed with the support of the Department of Pathology. LARA essentially builds a bridge between the hospital’s information systems and Creighton doctors’ wireless enabled handhelds, allowing them to access lab results, radiology reports, vital signs, medications, etc. from anywhere in the hospital. It is written entirely in PHP, is running at Creighton on a duel 2Ghz Xserve G5, and connects to Oracle and MySQL databases for data retrieval and logging, respectively. All that is required on the handheld device is a web browser that supports 128-bit SSL and network connectivity. Screenshots are available here.

Although the code is not yet available (pending a security audit), it will be made available under an open license eventually and I welcome thoughts or input from others who have done, are doing, or hope to do something similar.