Editor’s Note: the author has a short summary of waht this in the comments. Click Read More… to see it: OpenVistA VivA FOIA Gold 20050507 is now available here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/worldvista It combines the FOIA release from the VA’s FTP site with GT.M V5.0-000.
To use it, download the file to a temporary directory, e.g., /Distrib/VistA/OpenVIstASemiVivAFOIAGold20050507.tgz. Then, as root:
cd /usr/local
tar zxvf /Distrib/VistA/OpenVIstASemiVivAFOIAGold20050507.tgz
Thanks to J. Antas for this link. According to this Tatle article Norway plans to drop proprietary file formats completely in government: ‘…The plan clearly favors Open Source communities and solutions, and Linux, but will also favors Apple computer where increasingly open source technologies and open standards are finding their way into the historically proprietary Mac OS. It remains to be seen what response the plan will prompt from Microsoft, who has been very reluctant to open up its word processing, spreadsheet and media formats. Without support for open standard formats, Microsoft will rapidly make itself irrelevant as supplier to both public sector, businesses and private persons, as they all have the need to communicate electronically with the government in the future…’
Thanks to J. Antas for this link. According to this e-Health Insider article, the UK ‘Choose and Book’ patient scheduling system is a bomb: ‘…Johnson said: �The BMA has been saying for a long time that patients are not so interested in a choice of five hospitals but they want a good service in a clean local hospital�.
Health IT News has a short piece on the passage of a bill in the House of Representatives authorizing more spending on Health IT: ‘…The bill (H.R. 3010) includes $58.1 million for �grants, contracts and cooperative agreements for the development and advancement of an interoperable national health information technology infrastructure.� In addition, it makes $16.9 million available under the Public Health Service Act �to carry out health information technology network development.� The White House requested $75 million for the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology in fiscal year 2006 budget…’ There are now major federal RFP dollars being floated around so if you aren’t on a RFP team, find one and join up fast.
The LinuxMed 2005 Congress will be held over the Internet from September 1st to November 30th. More information including information for lecturers can be found here. Tambien el anuncio en espanol aqui. ‘…LinuxMed 2005 is the First Virtual Meeting over Internet of Free and Libre Opensource Software , and its applications in Health Care and related disciplines…The exprience begun with LinuxMed 2002, developed by BioLinux Group, from July 1st to 3rd, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. We invite you to participate in LinuxMed 2005 sharing your experience in the opensource development and implementation. Please, see the instructions for lectures here. Death line is June 30th, 2005. For more information contact us infobiolinux-linuxmed@yahoo.com.ar…’
From this Government Computer News article: ‘State and local governments are giving more consideration to use of open-source code to help relieve budget pressures, according to market research firm Input Inc.
The Reston, Va.-based firm reported this month that state and local government agencies are leading the public sector market in adopting open-source software because of IT budget restraints, increasing hardware and software licensing costs, and the need to manage operations more aggressively than the federal government…’
Earlier, the ClearHealth Project released a consolidation proposal with the other PHP based EHR systems. The results in short: FreeMED said no, and OpenEMR said “lets see”. The openEMR community has decided to use the integration of the new FreeB codebase into openEMR as a test case to see if Uversa and the openEMR community can work together. As a result Uversa has put the standalone release of FreeB on the fasttrack, and we will be making an annoucement regarding its release soon.
At the request of several physicians involved in the adoption of VistA in their clinical settings, a mailing list to discuss topics pertaining to the discussion of VistA in a clinical setting has been created. Go to http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/worldvista-adoption to join.
According to an article in Government Health IT: ‘…Veterans in Hawaii will no longer have to follow the paper prescription trail thanks to a new VA/DOD bidirectional pharmacy system deployed this week by the Pacific Telehealth & Technology Hui, a health research and application and development center back by the DOD Pacific Regional Medical Command and the VA Pacific Islands Health Care System…’ One could envision that all health systems work this way, but one would be wrong.
Australian IT has a story about an implementation of the OpenEHR project (formerly GEHR), which is not the same as the OpenEMR project. Confusing? OpenEHR is sponsored by Ocean Informatics based in Australia, OpenEMR is sponsored by Pennington Firm and is United States based. “…Brisbane-based DSTC hopes its data management technology will become the backbone of the nationwide HealthConnect e-health record sharing network.