Monthly Archives: October 2005

Petition Demands Privacy for Electronic Health Records

This “eWeek article”:http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1879716,00.asp
announces a petition that putportedly will help protect patient privacy.
The petition being circulated by the Patient Privacy Rights Foundation and the Electronic Privacy Information Center states that patients should be able to choose who can view medical records, explicitly bars employers from viewing employees’ medical records and states that sharing private information should not be a precondition of receiving care.

As an example of what *could happen* with proposals like this; “Also this week, the Commission for Systemic Operability released 14 recommendations to ease the creation of systems that could instantly supply a patient’s health information when necessary.”. See this URL “http://www.aclu.org/pizza/”:http://www.aclu.org/pizza/

Review: Quicken Medical Expense Manager 1.1

In these days where one increasingly has to take personal responsibility for appropriate medical coverage, Intuit’s Quicken Medical Expense Manager fills the bill. While not an Open Source product by any means, it does take a different perspective…the patient’s. Many of the projects covered on Linux Medical News concentrate on the needs of the provider. It is worth a moment to take a look at a solution, even a proprietary one, that takes a different approach.

What sort of deductable should I have? How much should I put into a FSA Medical Reimbursement Account for next year? How much dental coverage do I need? Are there any outstanding medical bills to be paid? These questions may be easy for some people to answer, but for other folks, with more complex medical histories or payees, Quicken Medical Expense Manager would help.

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VistA and MUMPS: Big, Ugly and Proud

The Veterans Affairs (VA) VistA Electronic Medical Record is based on MUMPS, a programming language designed specifically for healthcare in the 1960’s. People and organizations are rarely neutral on both public domain VistA-the-software, and MUMPS the language. VistA the software is almost universally liked by the doctors and nurses of the VA doing clinical work. VistA and MUMPS is also loathed by programmers, competitors and outsiders to the VA. VistA is big, the language it is written in is ugly, they say. Yet there is a jarring contradiction. By most accounts and measures the software, works and works well. The MUMPS language also seems to work for private sector EMR companies such as Epic. In a field that is littered with the corpses of companies that have tried and failed to create useful, commercially viable EMR software, this success counts for a lot. Why is it so successful?

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Dal Molin Receives 2005 Linux Medical News Freedom Award

Joseph Dal Molin is the recipient of the 2005 Linux Medical News Freedom Award. The award is given each year to recognize the person, group or project which has in the opinion of Linux Medical News contributed the most to furthering Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in medicine. Dal Molin was the driving force behind a summer of 2005 proposal that ultimately resulted in CMS awarding nearly $1 million dollars to WorldVistA to train vendors for supporting the VistaA Office EHR (VOE) project in the private sector.

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Live from the 2005 Fall AMIA Conference in Washington, D.C.

Greetings Linux Medical News readers, we are reporting live from the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) 2005 Fall conference. We previously did advance reporting on the goings-on here.

One of the most noteworthy presentations was a demonstration of an ASP version of VistA by Sequence Managers President Brian Lord. There was a great deal of interest in the software judging by the audience response.

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ClearHealth RC2 Released

After a long testing and packaging cycle RC2 is finally available. This release is has numerous fixes, enhancements and entirerly new features. Things to highlight are the comprehensive billing support (CA Medicare and CA Medicaid tested/certified), graphical installer and performance improvements. You can download RC2 from the main page on http://www.op-en.org or read more release details in the body of this post.

After a long testing and packaging cycle RC2 is finally available. This release is has numerous fixes, enhancements and entirerly new features. Below is a brief list of these as well as a link to the complete revision log.

*100’s of bug and issue fixes
* FreeB2 CA Medicare Testing Certification
* HCFA Improvements
* Reporting System Improvements
* Graphical Installer
* Multi-language support including initial translations in portugese, finnish, and german
* Document storage fixes and enhancements
* Many performance improvements, especially on the calendar and auto-complete boxes
*Much more…

The complete log is available from: 1.0 RC2 Changelog

You can download RC2 from the main page on http://www.op-en.org or read main release notes by clicking more below.

OpenEMR adds UB-92 support

OpenEMR uses FreeB for electronic billing and SQL-Ledger for practice accounting. Recently Rod Roark of Sunset Systems has added UB-92 support to OpenEMR.

OpenEMR is a full featured electronic health record using the classic LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) architecture. OpenEMR performs well as an electronic health record across multiple platforms including Microdoft Windows 2003 Enterprise Server, Windows Windows XP, multiple distributions of Linux, and some installations of FreeBSD – OpenBSD.

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FreeMED alliance with CORAID for Catastrophic events

Recently CORAID, a Linux Devices company announced their offering of AoE, ATA over Ethernet drives. FreeMED and B-MAS will recommend the use of these drives as part of a warehousing strategy for data recovery.

FreeMED now allows the secure remote storage of its data using PGP 2048 keys to encrypt the data stored remotely. Because data can be stored regularly, securely and off site, there is never a time when records, even during catastrophic events cannot be quickly reassembled and the program run. Using this type of data storage locally as well as remotely allows for quick uptime even after local disaster such as loss of a server. Because all the FreeMED data, including patient EMR, CMR and billing are stored, there is no lag time in resuming full system operation.

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OpenVistA VivitA FOIA Gold 20050825 available

At 322MB, OpenVistA VivitA FOIA Gold (available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/worldvista) is the smallest, lightest, live CD ever made of VistA.

It a remastered version of Damn Small Linux (DSL – http://damnsmalllinux.org) version 2.0RC1 upgraded to current versions of packages, Debian package management enabled, and wine (http://winehq.org) – & Xdialog (http://xdialog.dyns.net) installed. DSL is the most compact Linux live CD, with with the VistA release dated August 25, 2005 as released by the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA – http://www.va.gov) ) under the Freedom of Information Act on GT.M (V5.0-000, as released under the terms of the GNU General Public License – http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl.txt – at Source Forge – http://sourceforge.net/projects/sanchez-gtm).

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