MHC: VistA Big in Mexico

Modern healthcare has an article (registration required) about deploying the Veterans Affairs VistA electronic medical record in Mexico: ‘Mexico has installed in 21 government-owned hospitals the core VistA information system developed by the U.S. Veterans Affairs Department, along with several key applications, and the technology could be in place at up to 100 Mexico-owned hospitals by year-end, according to a health service official there….Mexico is likely to be the largest VistA implementation in the world within three years, with several hundred hospitals running at least the basic system…’ What does Mexico know that the United States does not?

Amanda (Open Source Backup) 2.5 Released

As we all know backing up of our medical data is important – for continuity of operations and compliance.

Now there is a great alternative in open source to take care of this process.

The Amanda project has released a major new
version (2.5)
of the popular open source backup and recovery software.
Overall the focus of the release is on security of the backup process
& backed up data, scalability of the backup process and ease of
installation & configuration of Amanda.

MirthProject.org

The goal of the Mirth Project is to develop Mirth, an open source cross-platform HL7 interface engine that enables bi-directional sending of HL7 messages between systems and applications over multiple transports.

By utilizing an enterprise service bus framework and a channel-based architecture, Mirth allows messages to be filtered, transformed, and routed based on user-defined rules.

Mirth Project is based on another piece of open source software: HAPI

Midland VistA Deployment Details

Here are some details of the Midland, Texas 7 hospital deployment of VistA by Medsphere: ‘…The cost of fully implementing OpenVista will be US$7.1 million (NZ$10.1 million), half of what it would have been if the hospital had gone with commercial software, he says.

Implementing OpenVista required six months of initial development work starting in March 2005 before the first hospital application, a pharmacy application, went live in October. The laboratory application went live in early December.

Over the past two weeks, the hospital has taken other applications live, including its first clinical unit EHR software as well as EHR capabilities for a nursing unit and its same-day surgery unit…’

ClearHealth Case Study: Operation Samahan

Operation Samahan recently allowed Uversa to document and analyze their ClearHealth implementation process and successful results. They have now been live for almost year and with an additional 6 months of use on the early version of ClearHealth. You can view the case study online at our website or you can download a glossy PDF.

Look for a lot more successful clearhealth installations and stories as we have more than 20 multi-facility organizations committed for 2006. The complete text of the case study has been posted in the body for easy viewing.

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OSS Primer for Heath Care Leaders

iHealth and Technology brings you a Forrester Whitepaper: Open Source Software Primer for Health Care Leaders. “While not heralding the end of commercial software vendors, the report concludes that conditions are ripe for open source solutions to take root in health care, and that it will likely become the standard for capturing, sharing, and managing patient information to support quality care. It also notes that health care businesses have the opportunity to take the lead and drive the shift to this new model.” iHealth and Technology

Thanks to The Healthcare IT Guy. Interesting comment there too.

Thoughts on a Medical Multi Player Game

Ralph Koster, and Commenters, have fun and delve into some interesting ideas about a possible online game based on healing. Issues a game might address include such real world concerns such as telemedicine, EHR, emergency simulations, collaboration…

“Picture an MMORPG just like the ones today, but everywhere you see combat, replace it with healing. A six-man encounter would be a surgical operation that required teamwork. Soloing would be a brilliant doctor doing drive-by diagnostics. Raids would be massive experimental treatments.” The Healing Game