Monthly Archives: December 2005

Cooperative Funding for OpenEMR

A continuing challenge for Free Software is that everyone wants it to be… free. However there is always a cost for initial development, in terms of someone’s time or money.

As a consultant and OpenEMR developer I have several clients who have generously sponsored important OpenEMR improvements. But I’ve also found that some desirable features remain unaddressed because no one is willing to fund the entire cost of development.

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EHR Standardization conference

* Putting EHR standards to work – implementing the e-health society
* ICMCC Conference on EHR Standardization and Interoperability
* The Hague. NL
* February 6-7, 2006
* www.icmccstandards.org

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* Putting EHR standards to work – implementing the e-health society
* ICMCC Conference on EHR Standardization and Interoperability
* The Hague. NL
* February 6-7, 2006
* www.icmccstandards.org
*************************************************

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Increased Mortality after CPOE Implementation

The December 2005 issue of the journal Pediatrics has a report that found a coincident increase in mortality after implementing a ‘Commercially Sold’ Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE) system. The increased mortality may have been due to delays in medication and IV administration in the ICU caused by the new system: ‘…Although CPOE technology holds great promise as a tool to reduce human error during health care delivery our unanticipated finding suggests that when implementing CPOE systems, institutions should continue to evaluate mortality effects, in addition to medication error rates, for children who are dependent on time-sensitive therapies.’ The study notes that mortality rate studies on CPOE as opposed to adverse drug events(ADEs) studies has not been done before. The CPOE in the study DID reduce ADE’s as expected.

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FOSS Oncology Information System?

Is there any activity looking specifically at the use of Open Source software in the management of disease related data in Oncology patients?

I am a radiation oncologist interested in pursuing some Open Source development in the area of managing data associated with the management of cancer patients, specifically with a view to permitting QA of practice and acquisition of data that can be aggregated and compared.

I feel alone in this desire and would like to find some colleagues in the Oncology realm or some IT-savvy dudes who re prepared to work with a doctor to achieve something useful.

Notes from the HIMMS “Enabling e-Health for RHIOs” Webinar

I wrote this wrapup of the HIMMS “Enabling e-Health for RHIOs” Webinar held yesterday. ‘…If you start a [Regional Health Information Organization] RHIO, try not to call it that since RHIOs are seen as pie in sky dreams that may have unattainable goals. In the San Diego example he said they called theirs an HIE (health information exchange). I�m not sure what changing the name does, but apparently he thought that calling it an HIE and not a RHIO at least got it off the ground…’

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UK NHS deal with Novell

The NHS Connecting for Health website has a press release about their new £21.8m agreement with infrastructure and software services supplier Novell. It says that ‘the new agreement will save the NHS up to £75 million over three years compared to previous arrangements’ and that it ‘reduces the barriers for the NHS in using Open Source, as it secures access to an enterprise class Open Source platform along with, more importantly, affordable support, maintenance and training to help our NHS staff make the transition’.

Further details on the agreement and comments from Richard Granger can be found in the press release

What this will actually mean in practice remains to be seen; the release has little real detail and seems to be pure marketing-speak.

Notes from the AMIA Symposium

Julia Weatherby wrote this wrap-up of the recent AMIA 2005 Fall conference. ‘…the conference was definitely not lacking for compelling sessions, especially those on planning for and managing disasters with health IT, and lessons learned implementing Computerized Provider Order Entry (CPOE). I caught a great demonstration of the VistA open source EHR stack and was impressed by the sophistication of the software, which appeared to do a good job of integrating patient data with medical images and lab reports. The graphical interface seemed to be user friendly and easy to navigate. I would like to learn more about its technology and the open source community supporting it…’