VistA(r) News-Aug. 18, 2006-Senate Calls for DoD to Adopt VistA(r)

The latest VistA News is out: ‘We report on several major developments in this issue of VistA(r) News. These range from a public call by the Senate for the Department of Defense (DoD) to adopt the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs VistA(r) EHR software to a major breakthrough in recognition for VistA(r) in the open source community’s LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco…’

Bioknoppix and Medical Live CDs

While researching a review article on free/libre and open source in healthcare, I came across some examples of attempts to integrate/bundle GNU/Linux with other health-related applications. I think we have previously mentioned the Care2x/Knoppix tie-up here, but there seem to be several others:
Bioknoppix (http://bioknoppix.hpcf.upr.edu/) is one interesting looking collection from Puerto Rico, and CDMEDICPACS another. All are summarised on http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/Medical_Live_CD
I would be interested in hearing from anyone who has used any of them or knows more about them.

Eclipse Open Healthcare Framework & OpenEHR at Stuttgart

The Eclipse Open Healthcare Framework (OHF) Project is an open source project whose aim is to build an e-health computing platform (tools, run-times and community) on which developers can more effectively build useful and interoperable applications. We believe that the openEHR community could leverage the Eclipse platform – the tooling, run-time and governance support, to improve the coherence of the the tools, implementations and uptake of openEHR. OHF will propose an openEHR component at the European EclipseCon meeting.
Eclipse is widely known as a tools IDE, or even just a Java development environment. But Eclipse is more than this.

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eChannel: Open Source Spreading Fast

eChannel line reports: ‘According to a newly released IDC study, open source software has spread far beyond Linux and is gaining enormous momentum. The study, which analyzed IDC surveys from over 5,000 developers in 116 countries, finds that developers worldwide are increasing their use of open source. The study declares that open source software represents the most significant all-encompassing and long-term trend that the software industry has seen since the early 1980s. IDC believes that open source will eventually play a role in the lifecycle of every major software category, and will fundamentally change the value proposition of packaged software for customers…’

New GNUmed Release

We are happy to announce the release of GNUmed 0.2 “Librarian”. This version adds several important features:

– server can be installed on MS/Windows, too
– client runs on MS/Windows, too
– remote control client from legacy applications
– patient demographics import interface
– managing staff members from within the user interface
– searching the medical record
– a complete document management system

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LinuxWorld Healthcare Day Presentations

There is a wiki page of all the presentations at the recent Linux World Healthcare Day presentations: ‘On August 15th, 2006 OSDL hosted the first ever Healthcare Day at LinuxWorld Expo. Below is a recap of the event as well as links to the presentations from Medsphere CEO Dr. Kennth Kizer, Joe Alexander – Bull’s Director of Strategy and Planning as well as panel discussions moderated by Bernard Golden and Fred Trotter…’

IBM ‘brings electronic medical records one step closer’

An IBM press release reports a software donation to the Open Healthcare Framework which is an electronic medical record interoperability platform. However, the announcement is non-specific about what was actually open-sourced: ‘…The software, contributed to the Eclipse Foundation’s Open Healthcare Framework (OHF) project, provides a mechanism to connect isolated “islands” of information that today reside throughout the healthcare system to any Health Information Exchange (HIE). Software developers will also be able to build applications that can aggregate and sift through this information to improve healthcare delivery and research while protecting individual privacy…’ SynSeer was mentioned as one of the participants.

SCALE 5x Calls For Papers

Preparing for its 5th annual event, SCALE 5x, the Southern California Linux Expo has issued a call for papers. SCALE 5x will be held on Feb 10-11, 2007 at the Los Angeles Airport Westin. Past speakers have included Chris Dibona, Jon “maddog” Hall, and Andrew Morton. If you are working on an interesting open-source / Linux related project, or just want to address the community SCALE welcomes you to submit a presentation proposal.