MH: Underground developers group to reunite

Modern Healthcare has an an article (registration required) on the Underground Railroad reunion: ‘Members of the Underground Railroad, pioneer developers and defenders of the clinical computing system now in use at more than 800 healthcare sites within the Veterans Affairs Department, will reunite next month, coinciding with a meeting of federal health executives at the Institute of Medicine in Bethesda, Md…The reunion banquet is scheduled for 6 p.m. Feb. 8 at the Positano Ristorante Italiano in Bethesda, Md.. The banquet is open to activists in the Underground Railroad as well as others who might be interested in its history. To RSVP by Friday, Feb. 1, contact Munnecke at tom@munnecke.com.’

GNUmed server package available

Yesterday I had a nice surprise in my email inbox. Paul Grinberg from PCLinuxOS contacted us with a the announcement that he had built a server rpm which provides a painless setup of the GNUmed server backend. Imagine my surprise when a few tweaks to the spec file were enough to make this work on openSUSE.

Wow. We now have the full end to end solution available for users. All it takes is:

‘zypper install gnumed-client gnumed-server’

California HealthCare: Open Source Market Assessment

An in-depth article on F/OSS EHR’s including comparisons and contrasts of the front-runners has been published by California Healthcare Foundation: Open-source electronic health record (EHR) systems, have proliferated in recent years. This executive summary presents the findings from an evaluation designed to determine whether these systems, commonly referred to as free and open-source software (FOSS), are suitable as ambulatory EHRs.

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DOHCS ’08 Conference – ZDNet Interview

Dana Blankenhorn over at ZDNet interviewed David Uhlman CEO of ClearHealth on the upcoming DOHCS ’08 (Demonstrating Opensource Health Care Solutions) Conference February 8th, 2008 at the Los Angeles Westin LAX. You can find details about the event at www.dohcs.org.
“In medicine, open standards have never been open. The entrenched interests and lobbies have motives to co-opt so-called ‘open standards’ for themselves. Without open source you can’t get people sharing data.”. Read more of the interview with ZDNet on the event here. Linux Med News readers can pre-register (select purchase tickets) and attend the event for free using the coupon code (not promo code) “OPENHEALTH”. Hope to see you there.

Open Source Developer Open House This Weekend in Seattle

YOU’RE INVITED TO COGNITION GROUP’S FIRST EVER OPEN SOURCE DEVELOPMENT OPEN HOUSE

Sign up at
http://www.evite.com/app/publicUrl/TRKCGFPOJFOIMDYFFLIH/openhousejan2008

If you are reading this message and you are in the Seattle area, you are welcome to attend Cognition Group’s first ever Open Source Development Open House. The open house is being held for open source developers and companies that use open source to gather and collaborate on projects, discuss work opportunities, and strategize about open source. While most open source groups focus on making a statement about the evils of proprietary software, this open house will focus on how developers can band together and work on projects and how to involve companies of any size in the work.

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Overview of open source software for the health care sector

At freemedsw.apfelkraut.org an overview is available that lists most (hopefully somewhen all) open source projects for the health care sector. It contains only projects whose usage is not limited and that have recently been active (last news or releases not older than a year).
For each project the name, homepage, license type, supported platform(s) and client type (web-based vs. native) is specified. There is also the possibility to submit new projects via a form.

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CCHIT’s Testing Framework Laika On SourceForge

CCHIT’s Open Source interoperability testing framework ‘Laika’ project has a site on sourceforge with some interesting upcoming events such as: ’14 Jan Laika v0.1 demo to CCHIT leaders’. This project is noteworthy because it is open source and that it is from CCHIT and was previously mentioned on LMN here. From the website: ‘Laika is named after the dog and first living animal to enter earth orbit, paving the way for human space flight. This effort will likewise demonstrate that the grand challenge of interoperable EHRs is attainable and will inspire others to follow.’ Thanks to Fred Trotter for the link.