Open eHealth Foundation to Provide Solid Basis for Interoperability

Open eHealth Foundation announced that Agfa HealthCare, eHealth specialist InterComponentWare (ICW), and Sun Microsystems, Inc. have joined as foundation members of the new Open eHealth Foundation, an Open Source initiative that is unique in the healthcare IT arena. The Open eHealth Foundation will provide software components under an Open Source license that will boost the open standards-based exchange of medical information.

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FOSS at HIMSS: Medsphere’s HIMSS talk

Medsphere, an open-source VistA vendor and their customers, gave a talk on their system and their strategy at HIMSS yesterday.

Relative to the number of vendors present at HIMSS, very few held a session at the “University” section of the tradeshow. Medsphere did and highlighted several of their key successes. Overall, I was impressed. Read on after the gap for my review of the session.
Medsphere started the talk with CEO Mike Doyle discussing the product and the strategy. Sadly, I missed most of this; who knew that the exhibit hall takes 20 minutes to cross…

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FOSS at HIMSS: Meeting Dr. Peel

Today, among other talks, I was able to hear Dr. Deborah Peels “Views from the top” session entitled “The Privacy Imperative in Healthcare IT”.

Technically, she did not say anything specifically about open source software (she did mention VA VistA)

It was an excellent talk, and it has addressed several of the concerns that I have raised in the past over at FredTrotter.com. Since I have criticized here there, I thought I should discuss Meeting Dr. Peel over at my other blogging home…

-FT

Medsphere and Tolven to ‘Surround, Supplement, and Renew’ VistA

Medsphere and Tolven announced (article here) at the annual HIMSS show that they will form a new partnership to “Surround, Supplement, and Renew” VistA as a viable platform for forward thinking health care organizations. The announcement is loaded with buzz-words, but a close read implies that Medsphere is attempting to reach out to other providers to include them in their currently non-existent ecosystem.

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FOSS at HIMSS, Dr. Janice Honeyman-Buck

Ignacio invited me to represent LinuxMedNews at this years HIMSS conference. There is a lot of FOSS activity here, we have already been to the first important Open Source focused talk from Janice Honeyman-Buck

The FOSS healthcare community is very small, and we all know tend to know each other. We go to many of the same conferences, we track the same mailing lists (mostly openhealth) and we track the same blogs (you are reading it…). One of the refreshing things about our movement is that once in a while, someone will have the same ideas, for the same reasons and start working without any contact with the blogs and mailinglists that I follow. For me, meeting Dr. Janice Honeyman-Buck was one of those moments. I meet Janice about 30 minutes before her talk and
we immediately hit it off.

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Google PHR Pilot Begins at the Cleveland Clinic

Many news sources are reporting the Google PHR Pilot announcement such as the NY Times: ‘…on Thursday, Google’s technology for personal health records, which is still in development, is getting a big endorsement from the Cleveland Clinic. The big medical center is beginning a pilot project to link the health information for some of its patients with Google personal health records…’

Misys Health Connect Now on Sourceforge as ‘Braid’ Project

Misys has released Misys Health Connect on Sourceforge as the ‘Braid’ project. Ryan Bloom comments ‘…There are a couple of caveats. First, we know that not all of the unit tests pass, that is one of our first projects now that the code is out. Second, most of the development team is about to head to HIMSS, so we aren’t going to be quick to respond to questions until after we get back…’

Osirix To Give First Public Demo Of New 64-Bit Viewer On Mac Pro 8-Core Workstation At ECR 2008

GENEVA — Feb 19, 2008 ‘ The creators of OsiriX, the advanced open-source PACS workstation DICOM viewer for the Mac OS, will for the first time show the new version of their 64-bit viewer on the new Mac Pro 8-Core workstation at the European Congress of Radiology (ECR) 2008. (Full text of the announcement after the break.)

GENEVA — Feb 19, 2008 ‘ The creators of OsiriX, the advanced open-source PACS workstation DICOM viewer for the Mac OS, will for the first time show the new version of their 64-bit viewer on the new Mac Pro 8-Core workstation at the European Congress of Radiology (ECR) 2008.

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