OpenVistA VivA FOIA Gold 20050212 available

OpenVistA VivA FOIA Gold 20050212 is available as is OpenVistA SemiVivA FOIA Gold 20050212. Effective this release, release numbers will reflect the date of the VistA release on the US Department of Veterans Affairs FTP site; in this case, Feb 12, 2005. For further details on using these releases, please refer to the announcement of OpenVistA SemiVivA and VivA FOIA Gold 0.2. Both can be downloaded from the WorldVistA project page at Source Forge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/worldvista).

SCALE 3x Wrap Ups, Articles, and Presentations Now Online.

Wrap up reports and reviews are in and SCALE 3x, the third annual Southern California Linux Expo appears to have been a huge success, with over 900 attendees, 30 seminars and 42 booths on their exhibit floor. Linux Journal and FedoraNews (1, 2, 3) have their articles online. In addition LinuxQuestions.org’s LQRadio has a series of interviews available as mp3. They include interviews with Flight Gear booth,LinuxChix LA and Brion Vibber of Wikipedia. They plan to release more interviews with Linux Astronomy, LAMPSIG, and SCALE’s PR Director Orv Beach in the near future. Pictures and presentation slides are also available on the SCALE website.

David Brailer at HIMSS

Here is the text of the speech by David Brailer, MD PhD National Coordinator for Health Information Technology given February 17th, 2005 at the HIMSS conference in Dallas, Texas: ‘…This year, we will release a complete Strategic Plan, as called for in the President�s Executive Order. This will build upon the Framework for Strategic Action by providing detailed plans and critical steps for who, how, and what will be required to implement the President�s vision. This Strategic Plan will be a guide for key stakeholders in the private and public sectors. In the short term, we are focusing our efforts on the building blocks of EHR adoption, interoperability and streamlined Federal health information systems. We have prioritized these building blocks because they enable the private sector institutions and public organizations that foster a market-based solution, and because they are foundational for downstream efforts like personal health records and state-of-the-art biosurveillance…

Semantic Cache for Java

University Health Network has released a beta version of “chisel”, an open-source semantic cache for Java. It was developed to cache HL7 query results in a semi-virtual EHR, but will run against any Java method that encapsulates a conjunctive query. It uses Deshpande et al.’s approach (“Caching multidimensional queries using chunks”, SIGMOD ’98). Site: http://chisel-cache.sourceforge.net/

New HCFA Edit and Print Capabilities for OpenEMR

The latest development effort of Pennington Firm, LLC for OpenEMR is a new open source medical billing component able to produce and edit HCFA 1500 forms. The latest development is an object oriented application developed using Java. The new billing feature includes several enhancements over the existing HCFA entry and printing capabilities. The new software includes both the tools to create the forms, and a web interface to edit and override the system generated information. Edits to the HCFA information can be accomplished in either the HCFA Proof screen or by editing the information at its source in OpenEMR. For more information on open source HCFA and EDI billing, please see the OpenEMR web site.

ICMCC Event 2005

The International Council on Medical and Care Compunetics (ICMCC) www.icmcc2005.com has its 2005 conference schedule out. There will be a couple of workshops related to open standards. Editor’s note: open standards and Free/Open Source Software are not the same thing.