This is a report on an excellent talk that I am hearing on the factors of success with VistA. The subject is the seven critical success with Medical Software. Essentially these are the lessons that VistA has learned via hard knocks. This list is partly compiled from those who have suceeded but mostly is the result of those who have failed with VistA.
Medical Informatics does not fit the standard software development cycle.
According to this slashdot story: ‘”Remember how the VA was pinning the theft of 26.5 million veterans’ personal records on a hard working-but-renegade employee whose laptop was stolen? Surprise! It turns out that the employee had written permission to bring the sensitive data home. Fortunately, the laptop has been recovered. It is still unclear how the laptop was recovered, or if any of the veterans’ personal data was leaked.”‘ The best quote I heard is that databases like this one are becoming like plutonium, very concentrated and potentially very destructive in the wrong hands.
Nominations are officially open for the 6th annual Linux Medical News Freedom Award to be presented at the November 11th-15th AMIA Fall conference in Washington, D.C. Deadline for entries is July 30th, 2006. This is NOT a officially sponsored event of AMIA. Free and open source software isn’t ‘magic pixie dust’ and there are people making significant personal sacrifices as well as doing difficult work to make medicine’s free software future a reality. This award is intended to honor the individul or project who has accomplished the most towards the goal of improving medical education and practice through free/open source medical software. The award winner is chosen by a panel of judges. Past recipients have been Tim Cook, K.S. Bhaskar — Fidelity Information Services, Inc., Thomas Beale — Ocean Informatics, Fred Trotter — Synseer, MirrorMed and the FreeB project, Joseph Dalmolin of WorldVistA and e-cology.
The MirrorMed project and SynSeer is proud to announce the mm2mm project. mm2mm stands for Medical Manager to MirrorMed. mm2mm is a set of scripts and services designed to allow Medical Manager users to switch to MirrorMed.
SynSeer is currently alpha testing with our current clients. We are looking for beta testers who would be interested in helping us test mm2mm (in exchange for a 50% discount). If you are interested please contact Fred Trotter
Read on for specific mm2mm goals…
I am very happy to announce to mm2mm project. mm2mm stands for Medical Manager 2 MirrorMed.
eHealth News Portal is presenting a new Project named eHealth Directory EU. The goal of the eHealth Directory EU is to be most comprehensive directory of the eHealth (in special European) quality web sites.
For more information and in special for submitting your eHealth related web links please visit www.ehealthdirectory.eu
Please note that eHealth Directory EU has a top level Category dedicated to the Free Open Source Software!
Best regards,
eHealth News Portal
Dilbert looks like he has meet a proprietary medical software vendor.
The Board of Trustees of the FreeMED Software Foundation, INC is pleased to announce that Sanjay Udoshi, MD of Wilkes-Barre, PA has accepted the position of Secretary to the Foundation Board.
Dr. Udoshi has been active with the development of FreeMED and promotion of Open Source for use in medicine and medical practice.
“Can open source save your life?” by Dana Blankenhorn at ZDnet. Nice overview, with pictures, and comments by Medsphere’s Scott and Steve Shreeve. Good to see in this in the mainstream media (ZDnet anyway!)
According to this Evans Data Corporation survey, the number of Linux developers and Windows developers will be equal by the end of the year 2006. This development was noted by LinuxToday editor’s: ‘…With its dominant adoption rate, Apache may be doing more for the cause of open source development than Linux itself. Some survey numbers support Handy’s theory: 68% of the respondents are planning to code for Web applications. Since Apache is the most prolific Web server, it stands to reason that the openness of the Apache server is rubbing off on the development community. They’ve gotten a taste of open source development and they want more.
According to Molly Cheah on the openhealth list Dr. Joan Dzenowagis has a presentation (pdf’ed ppt) entitled Bridging the Digital
Divide in Health The Role of Free and
Open Source Software: “Dr. Joan Dzenowagis, is based at the World Health Organization, where she is Project Manager of the United Nations Health InterNetwork, led by WHO. This initiative is one of the four initiatives of the UN Millennium Action Plan launched by Secretary General Kofi Annan in September 2000. The Health InterNetwork is a public-private partnership which aims to improve the flow of health information for scientists, health professionals and policy makers in developing countries, using the Internet.”