MDNG has an extremely frank article that is noteworthy by who its author is: a medical doctor who is president of an Electronic Health Record (EHR) company. The article states in number 1-4 that: the award an EHR received, the ‘non-biased expert’, the referred EHR using physician, and the respected physician leader of your local society may have been paid off by the EHR company to say favorable things about a product! Others are that they will nickel and dime you to death, they’ll use your data as a bargaining chip to prevent you from leaving, they emphasize Return On Investment (ROI) to distract you from how overpriced the product is, ‘EHRs don’t improve quality of care and often make you less efficient. And since you won’t figure this out until you are actually using the product, EHR vendors won’t let you try-before-you-buy, and there is no return policy!…A Center for Certification of Health Information Technology (CCHIT) CCHIT-certified product, by definition, is often more expensive and less usable than non-certified products.’ No mention of Free/Open Source Software licensed EHR’s as an alternative. Sigh.
Monthly Archives: October 2007
Medsphere Wins 120-bed Los Angeles Hospital Business
Press Release: Medsphere Systems Corporation, the leading commercial provider of open source-based electronic health record (EHR) systems and services, today announced an agreement to implement its OpenVista(R) EHR platform at Century
City Doctors Hospital (CCDH) in Los Angeles. The 120-bed acute care facility, located in the west side business district adjacent to Beverly Hills, is implementing the OpenVista platform as part of an integrated information systems initiative established by the physician group that acquired, renovated, and opened the hospital in 2005.
Importance of Community in FOSS
The GPL says that you must provide source code to the recepients of any application you distribute under that license. This is really meeting the legal requirements of that license. However, is that “all” that is needed? If you say that you have an open source application (especially in healthcare) but you do not attempt to engage the wider community to get feedback on your application or allow other developers to review the data structures and application code. Is it really an open source application? As I stated above. It is clear that all you “have” to do (legally) is give the source code to the recipients of the application.
How To Effectively Address the Free Software Communities
Here’s a great little article
on how to work with the Free Software Community: “…With that intent in mind, let’s explore seven principles that will make your life easier when engaging free software types. In summary:
1. Know your audience
2. Your argument must rely on facts and reason
3. Respect community members’ time, rules and terms
4. Develop a thick skin
5. Contribute
6. Be humble
7. Make it interesting, make it fun…We’re not amateurs, so get rid of those misconceptions. Each and every one of us is highly likely to be much more proficient and professional in our field of expertise than you…” Each point is explained further in the article.
PatientOS v0.14 HL7 Interfaces released
PatientOS is an open source healthcare information system for physicians, nursing, pharmacy, laboratory and ultimately all departments in a hospital, physician or practice, or any other healthcare facility.
Version 0.14 of PatientOS integrates the Open Source Mirth HL7 Engine with PatientOS. Registering or updating patient information in the demo demonstrates the creation of an outbound HL7 ADT message.
Serious Privacy Questions Raised About HealthVault
Dr. Annie Ant�n of
ThePrivacyPlace.org an organization devoted to online privacy has posted an article that raises serious privacy questions about Microsoft’s HealthVault Personal Health Record software: “…Unfortunately, what people don�t realize is that HealthVault and similar PHR systems are not subject to or governed by law. When the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was enacted, we did not envision that private software firms would eventually want to create databases for our health records. As a result, HealthVault and other PHR systems are not subject to the same privacy and security laws to which traditional medical records are subject to in the United States because they are not �covered entities� as specified in the HIPAA…Microsoft appears to have sought the counsel of physicians who believe that patient consent is the best indicator of privacy protections. Unfortunately, most physicians do not understand the subtleties buried within healthcare privacy statements within the context of the software that implements those statements. For this reason, I now list three primary questions that one should ask before entrusting their health records to HealthVault or any other PHR system:” Paraphrased, the questions are:
PP: Negative EMR ROI, Open Systems Needed
Physician Practice has reader survey data (site asks for zip code and some demographics to view the whole article) on Health IT adoption. While the data is not particularly rigorous scientifically, it has some interesting results and comments by respondents: �There are no standard leaders in medical software as in many other industries,� says another. �There are too many variations and vendors. The interfaces are proprietary rather than open. It is difficult to spend that much money, knowing that the support in the future may be limited and that there may eventually be a standardized software out there.�
Fred Trotter and eMDs Dr. Winn
Last week I spent the day at eMDs talking with Dr. Winn and the excellent eMDs team.
Sadly, I cannot talk about eMDs Open Source plans yet, but I can say that they will soon be making a big splash. I had some pretty cool pictures from my visit, including one with Robby the Robot, so post also servers to announce that I have migrated FredTrotter.com to wordpress, in order to be able to post pictures with my blog posts.
Eight Hour Sacramento VistA Failure Last August
Modern Healthcare’s Joseph Conn has an article on a large 8 hour VistA outage at the Sacramento VA facility that occurred on August 31st, 2007. Some believe that a VA security reorganization centralizing control at the expense of reliability has gone too far: “Davoren said there has been a welcome consciousness-raising within the VA about privacy and security issues, but heightened security measures also have had drawbacks, including difficulty scheduling teleconferences and other snafus. �For example, to fully comply with security requirements on our examination-room PCs, we must log out of both a clinical application such as our Computerized Patient Record System and the Microsoft Windows operating system each time we leave the room even for a moment, yet it may take as long as 12 minutes to log back on when we return. Given a 20- or 30-minute visit with their veteran patient, the clinician is thus forced to choose to �do the right thing� for either the patient or the system, but cannot do both, �the bad news is that centralization of physical IT resources to the (regional approach) has directly led to more system downtime for individual medical centers than they have ever had before, resulting in hundreds of simultaneous threats to the safety of our veteran patients.�
2007 Linux Medical News Freedom Award Nominees
This years class of nominees for the 2007 Linux Medical Freedom Award are a prestigious group indeed. The panel of judges has a difficult task ahead of it. The nominees are as follows:
. Herman Tolentino, MD Community Health Information Tracking System (CHITS)
. Web Reach, Inc. Mirth Project.
. Gerry Douglas, MD Malawi RHIO.
. Paul G. Biondich, MD, MS Regenstreif Institute for OpenMRS project.
. WorldVistA for WorldVistA EHR CCHIT Certification.