Monthly Archives: November 2005

MirrorMed Announcement

It is time to announce MirrorMed. MirrorMed is a friendly fork of the ClearHealth project. MirrorMed will use essentially the same codebase but will have a totally separate support structure, available from SynSeer. Read on for the reason for the fork, and a list of the changes that you can expect!

Fred Trotter
MirrorMed Project Manager

I recently resigned my position as the project manager for the ClearHealth project. However, I am still interested in working on the codebase, and making a living at it. Since the name “ClearHealth” is trademark Uversa, I cannot use this without Uversa permission. As a result my new company SynSeer will be marketing the codebase as MirrorMed (a name my wife Laura came up with!!).

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HITS: Worth the Effort

WorldVistA president Rick Marshall has an article on page 9 (you may have to search on ‘Marshall’) of Health IT Strategist about VistA: ‘…The secret to its success does not lie in specific features or the technology used. It is a dynamic, hyperactive life cycle that engages the creativity of tens of thousands of users…’

OSCAR Certified by OntarioMD

David Chan, MD writes: ‘…OSCAR has been certified by OntarioMD under the Physician IT Program. The list of certified products will be published at www.ontariomdtsp.ca. From OntarioMD: �Certification means that the product has passed a set of requirements to ensure that the product can support defined standards for clinical and practice management software. Ontario physicians helped define these standards. More information on the standards and the certification process is available on the OntarioMD website at www.ontariomd.com/en/services/cycle3.jsp.�

Augustin Out, Kizer In at Medsphere

VistA provider Medsphere has a press release announcing its new CEO Ken Kizer, MD, MPH replacing Larry Augustin of VA Linux and Sourceforge fame: ‘…Kizer has long been an advocate of information technology as an enabler for improving healthcare safety and quality. He recognized the critical importance of healthcare IT when he was Under Secretary for Health in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and pioneered the system-wide implementation of an electronic health record, bar code medication administration, and other IT innovations years before the healthcare industry embraced the importance of IT.

“In my new role as CEO, I will be able to focus on broadly disseminating a proven healthcare IT solution that has been adapted and improved for commercial healthcare use,” said Kizer. “I believe that Medsphere’s approach to healthcare IT represents a disruptive technology that has the potential to fundamentally change the healthcare IT paradigm and revolutionize the whole industry.”

ganfyd: Medical Reference Wiki

ganfydd is a qualified medical reference wiki established in the UK. It uses the Mediawiki software and has a variant Creative Commons content licence.

www.ganfyd.org/

Wikipedia is a very successful general encyclopedia based on the principle of general edit access. ganfyd aims to offer material which has been edited only by qualified people, but otherwise will operate in a similar fashion.

Several of the early editors are Wikipedia editors and contributors, and the difference between the projects intended contents is that between the encyclopedia, and the shelf of medical textbooks.

The project is in a very early stage, and styles are evolving.

The excellent Open Source MediaWiki software is a considerable element in easily setting up such a system, and is in use in a growing number of UK and Australian Medical Practices already as a general reference system.

Recent FOSS in Medicine Podcast

I recently did a podcast on the Free and Open Source medical software movement, over at Neil Versel’s Healthcare IT blog. This is part of my continued efforts to promote the exclusive use of the GPL in medical software.
I think most of what I say might be old hat to most people reading this list, but still worth a listen. Also I am open, generally, to suggestions about how to bring these arguements to the attention of the broader medical community.

Fred Trotter

HHS Awards $18.6 Million to 4 Consortia

Health and Human Services has announced another round of awards for the ONCHIT National Health Information Network (NHIN): ‘…HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt announced today the award of contracts totaling $18.6 million to four groups of health care and health information technology organizations to develop prototypes for a Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) architecture. The contracts awarded to these four consortia will move the nation toward the President�s goal of personal electronic health records by creating a uniform architecture for health care information that can follow consumers throughout their lives.

�The Nationwide Health Information Network contracts will bring together technology developers with doctors and hospitals to create innovative state-of-the-art ideas for how health information can be securely shared,� Secretary Leavitt said. �This effort will help design an information network that will transform our health care system resulting in higher quality, lower costs, less hassle and better care for American consumers.�

The 4th seminar of Medical Open Source Software Council in Japan

We will have the fourth seminar of Medical Open Source Software council in Japan, 26th November 2005. We are looking forward to having a good disscussion in the seminar. Registration form is here.

The program shows bellow:

  • Date: 26th November, 2005
  • Time: 13:00 – 18:00
  • Sponcerships: Japan Medical Association, Hewlett-Packerd Japan, Medical Open Source Society of Japan Medical Information Association.
  • Fee: Entrance free, Party about 30dollars.
  • Program
  • Opening act, keynote speech(Shinji KOBAYASHI, KYUSHU University Hospital)
  • Debian forever (Kenshi MUTO, Debian Project)
  • Don’t you use PostgreSQL as default configuration?(Hiroo KATAOKA, Japan PostgreSQL Users Group)
  • Introduction for workstation of Hewlett-Pakckerd Japan(Kouichi MATSUMOTO, Hewlett-Packerd Japan)
  • Enhancement of hospital infomation system by OSS.(Kiyoshi SAWADA, Nagoya Daini Red Cross Hospital)
  • XAA framework – programingless GUI application development environment.(Youhei OOSAKI, XAA.jp)
  • Open Dolphin project– an open source EMR system-(Kazushi MINAGAWA, Digital Globe corpotaion)
  • Ground disscussion on standardizing exchange medical records

Ruby on Rails revolution in Web programming

Ruby on Rails is one of the most remarked Web programing framework now. This video(50MB) shows that takes only 15 minutes for starting web application with Ruby on Rails.
Ruby on rails has automated code generation with template, testing framework, O/R mapper and so on with easy configuration. Ruby is an object oriented script language, which is the best open source software from Japan.

I doubted on its productivity because it sounds like bait advertising. But I fall for the hype after twenty minutes! Ruby on Rails has such impact for me and I believe that this is a revolution web programming and Ruby on Rails will change development on medical softwares. Now I am taking on Ruby on Rails for one of my project. If you are interested in, please test to take on it. It is, no doubt, amazing world.