Irv Buchbinder of the “FreeMed”:http://www.freemedsoftware.org Project states: *”FreeMED Software Foundation realizes in the wake of a tragedy like Katrina, that much has been lost. One of the stunning and yet to be measured losses is medical records of patients. Even with backups, much of the records which may have been electronic were destroyed. For the many whose physicians kept paper records, the losses are most likely catastrophic.”* Read More for the rest of his comments.
In the wake of Katrina and the mess that has become of medical records, not to mention the bleating in the media about the lack of security in medical records, we, the FreeMED Software Foundation offer this to the medical public:

FreeMED Software Foundation realizes in the wake of a tragedy like Katrina, that much has been lost. One of the stunning and yet to be measured losses is medical records of patients. Even with backups, much of the records which may have been electronic were destroyed. For the many whose physicians kept paper records, the losses are most likely catastrophic.

One of our beta sites in New Hampshire (5 doctors, 40K patients) is completely paperless. What does this mean. It means that small practices CAN be paperless without huge investments. It means that the ravage of Katrina does not have to mean catastrophic loss. Ahh, you say, but there were machines and backups all washed away by Katrina.

We have a method for backup which uses warehousing servers in remote locations. Those back ups (my work server backs up hourly to three other servers in remote locations using RSYNC) may be far distant from the original. The backups can be made secure with PGP.

If this is of interest, please feel free to visit our web portal at http://www.freemedsoftware.com. We do have commercial support for our product including help desk, training and installation for the product as well as this backup system.

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Irving J. Buchbinder, DPM, DABPS
Director, FreeMED Software Foundation, INC
-=Technology advances. People stay the same=-