SPT: VA Could Squander IT Billions

A St. Petersburg Times story states: ‘… A $3.5-billion computer overhaul at veterans hospitals across the country is poised to fail unless the Department of Veterans Affairs makes drastic changes, according to a closely guarded government study obtained by the St. Petersburg Times .

The multiyear project is designed to modernize almost all phases of hospital computing at the VA, including appointment schedules, lab reports, drug prescriptions and a clinical record system already widely admired as one of the best in the world…’ Perhaps they should have read Things You Should Never Do by Joel Spolsky.

Interview: Fred Trotter on Medical Billing

Some may consider medical billing to be a dull topic, until one realizes that an estimated 14% of the 11 trillion dollar US economy is devoted to healthcare. That represents a lot of billing. Before 2004, there was a huge void in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) for medical billing. Fred Trotter moved to fill that void by creating the FreeB project in 2004. FreeB was considered important enough by the FOSS medical software community, that community members bestowed upon him the 2004 Linux Medical News Achievement Award. Linux Medical News caught up with Fred to find out about FreeB and the current state of Free and Open Source medical billing.

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AMA News: Open Source a ‘New’ Pitch for EMRs, New Granting Foundations

AMA-News has an article on Free/Open Source EMR’s. This article has good information and overview, but is condescending in tone and contains inaccuracies such as: ‘There’s a new pitch for selling electronic medical records software’ The article mentions VistA, Medsphere, OpenEMR and TORCH as well as quotes from physicians using the software. There is also this: ‘…The ranks of open-source EMRs could soon grow by at least one as two foundations created by the settlements of physician class-action lawsuits against Aetna and CIGNA Corp. — Physicians’ Foundation for Health Systems Excellence and Physicians’ Foundation for Health Systems Innovations — are planning to develop and market an open-source EMR to physicians around the country…’ which is news to me. These new organizations are distributing grants, but the first round for submissions was March 1, 2005.

Codeweavers, VistA Institute, Medsphere at the 12th VistA Community Meeting

The 12th Vista community meeting was held in Boston Massachutsetts April 7th-10th, 2005. The event was organized by WorldVistA and hosted by Intersystems. There were many, many goings on at the event, including installation workshops, histories of VistA and MUMPS as well as major announcements by the Pacific Telehealth and Technology Hui of the formation of the VistA Institute and Medsphere‘s enhancements to the VA fileman. Aric Stewart from Codeweavers was there working on problems of using CPRS on Wine (recently reported by Linux Medical News). Read More for details. Many thanks to Nancy Anthracite for all of these details.

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FreeMED National, Inc. opened in NYC

It is my pleasure to announce an imitative by the FreeMED Software Foundation, Inc. to continue to expand the supply of support and service for the FreeMED community software end-users. The new offices of FreeMED National, Inc. will be opened for business on April 17th. This office is strategically placed to provide nation wide 800 Help Desk service. Beginning June 1st this office will deploy the first national ASP service using FreeMED Foundation Software. New York City was chosen because of its vast population and number of doctors using FreeMED Software for their practices. The Foundation has been successful in obtaining donations and grants to promote the use of open source software in medicine. Additional 800 Help Desk service centers and ASP service are being opened in other major metropolitan areas as well. The Foundation wishes to express it thanks to the contributors and grants that have made this possible.

OpenEMR Deployment in Laurel, MD

Went live on 04/04/2005! My wife, who is the physician, and one staff person are using it now. I’m making changes as required by her. All in all it has been a good experience. Thank you to all who have worked on this and are continuing to work on it. I look forward to it getting better and more features being added. We’re using FreeB for billing through ProxyMed and SQL-Ledger for accounting, running everything on Slackware Linux.

Advent OpenEMR Deployment

For those who are considering the Free and Open Source OpenEMR solution, we have just completed an open source project with Advent
Consulting. The Advent team has provided insurance companies, HMOs, doctors and hospitals with implementations of sophisticated open source electronic medical record (EMR) system solutions. They also provided custom integration and support for voice over IP (using Asterisk) and SQL-ledger a FOSS accounting backend system. This provided us with a very efficient solution.

Psychiatric Services: SQLClinic

The March 2005 issue of Psychiatric Services has a column by Thomas Good the author of SQLClinic an electronic medical record geared toward Psychiatry which, has been used with other types of practices. This is a mainstream Psychiatry journal so it is good to see a FOSS project getting some press there. From the introduction by the column editors: ‘Open-source software addresses three crucial needs of users: it is easy to customize, it is inexpensive, and the user�s future is not tied to that of a vendor company. Although the software the authors describe in this month�s column is still too formidable for an individual practitioner, moderate- sized organizations should consider it near the top of the list. Let us hope that programmers develop a version tailored for solo and small group practices soon. We will report on it in this column when it occurs…’ There is a factual error in the article in that it states that the Open Source movement began in the early 80’s. Actually, the Free Software movement began in the early 80’s. The Open Source movement began in approximately 1998 and shares many of the goals, but is distinct from the Free Software movement. A short history of both of these movements can be found here.

PR: FreeMED “Help Desk” Support Available Now

Daily “Help Desk” service is now available for those sites using the FreeMED EMR & PM system. All installed sites can now receive daily HELP DESK support through email message support imbedded in the system without using commercial email or by direct communication with a HELP DESK representative via the telephone. This service is intended to provide users with increased productivity by making support services more readily available for any problems, concerns and or operation questions about the systems. Installations who are interested in subscribing to this service can obtain more information from the entity providing this service: FreeMED National, Inc. 783 Williams St. PMB 200, Longmeadow, MA 01106 or by email at f.valier@freemedma.com or by telephone (413) 734-9985.

ClearHealth initial release

ClearHealth has been released by Uversa. You can download it at op-en.org, but we also have a sourceforge project and download ClearHealth is a next generation practice management system and EMR. This php based system takes DNA from the FreeMED and OpenEMR projects. It is based on the smarty templating engine. ClearHealth uses the FreeB2 medical billing engine. — Fred Trotter, ClearHealth Project Manager