The FreeMed project has released the latest version of its GPL’d Electronic Medical Record and Practice Management system onto Sourceforge.net. This release is described as: ‘…A near-complete UI rewrite, database changes, and a new requirement of phpwebtools and PHP 4.’ They have more coders now and project leader Jeff Buchbinder sends his assurance that they are alive and well despite not releasing in several months.
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Netscape 6.0: Finally
Updated 11/15/00: The comments of most people on other sites and articles has not been positive for this release. Most indicate waiting for 6.1 CNet has a story about todays long awaited release of Netscape 6.0. The article reviews the reasons Netscape originally went for an open source version of its browser and how the gamble has finally paid off. “If you look at how long it takes to write a software product from start to finish, it wasn’t such a long time,”
said Sol Goldfarb, director of the browser product marketing team at Netscape. “We’re proud of how quickly
the product came out the doors.” This is an important development for Linux in general and open source medical software in particular as a robust, stable browser is key to the success of both. We outlined why in an April, 2000 LinuxMedNews article. You can find some early reviews: ZDnet’s here and LinuxToday.com’s review here.
HCFA Offers ‘Free’ Electronic Medical Claim Software
Reading the fine print on the HCFA site reveals a link to individual state phone numbers offering free Electronic Medical Claim software to Medicare. Its advantages to EMC page claims faster payment and lower costs. How about open sourcing it? Thanks to Alex Caldwell of Tk_FamilyPractice for the link.
Barriers to Open Source Use in Medicine Persist
While a number of groups are leading the open source charge into the highly specialized battlegrounds of medical informatics, barriers to the adoption of open source software persist, delaying what may be an ideal solution to the burgeoning problems of the health care IT arena.
FreePM Forges into a Wide Open Frontier
Tim Cook speaks softly, but carries a big stick.
With the public debut of his project at the Los Angeles conference of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), the soft-spoken, ex-Marine and ex-hospital IT tech is swinging a stick that could crack open an area where the open source force could really make its mark.
Possible VistA Licensing Controversy?
Free and open source medical sofware advocates on the openhealth-list discussed a possible licensing difficulty between the VistA project and the recently announced Gnu Public Licensing (GPL’ing) of Sanchez Computer Associates GT.M database. The debate centers on the fact that VistA, a large collection of Veterans Administration medical software programs, is public domain. The source code for the programs are available by the Freedom of Information Act and has no license at all. However, VistA requires a database like GT.M to run.
Under the terms of the GPL: ‘…A related issue concerns combining a free program with non-free code. Such a combination would inevitably be non-free;
whichever freedoms are lacking for the non-free part would be lacking for the whole as well. To permit such combinations would
open a hole big enough to sink a ship. Therefore, a crucial requirement for copyleft is to plug this hole: anything added to or combined
with a copylefted program must be such that the larger combined version is also free and copylefted…’
The question appears to come down to whether code obtainable under the Freedom of Information Act is already considered ‘Free’ by the GPL and/or if VistA is modified to run with a GPL’ed program whether it automatically becomes GPL’ed.
The GPL, or ‘copyleft’ was developed by the Free Software Foundation in order to keep software that is released under the license and its derivative works ‘free’. Free software according to the GPL and the Free Software Foundation is frequently defined as ‘Free as in speech, not as in beer.’ to denote that the software is not free of charge, just freely available for end users to view, modify and improve.
It has at times been compared to and critized for its virus like nature in that all derivative works and any software combined with GPL’ed software, must become GPL’ed.
There are other licenses that have different restrictions, particularly with regard to commercial use of software such as the FreeBSD License. The Free Software Foundation does not consider these licenses to be ‘Free’ licenses.
Help in Dissuading CFO on EMR Purchase
‘…Any links to useful articles reviewing non open source EMR products in full light of day? I need to convince my CFO to go slow: she loves the HealthPRO product…’
BMJ Article on Open Source
‘…I assume this was already posted but wanted to make sure as a leading publication pushing open source here is a very helpful article…’ Yes, David, a short synopsis with a link to the article was fortunately posted by the author, Douglas Carnall on October 19th. Thanks for asking! By the way, I may not be able to get to the site much in the next few days. I owe my wife some time and it is conference season. But fear not, I’ll be back by Sunday at the latest! Meanwhile I’ll try to get Captain Fantastic to fill in for me.
GT.M Open Sourced
The openhealth-list was abuzz today with news that Sanchez Computer Associates has open sourced its M database technology (GT.M). The binaries are available on Sourceforge, and the source will be available soon. This makes an open source version of the Veteran’s Administration large medical software codebase (project VistA) a distinct possibility. This development is considered by some to be one of the most significant events in open source medical software history. ‘…
By making our database technology and programming language available on the GNU/Linux platform, we inherit a worldwide group of programming and testing resources that will cooperate with us, while working on their own behalf to enhance the software. Potentially, this opens a new revenue stream for Sanchez, said K.S. Bhaskar, vice president of Sanchez Greystone Group…’ Thanks to Kate Schell for this link.
Live from the AMIA Conference in Los Angeles
Update: 11/07/00 A full conference wrap-up post appears below: ‘…The most lasting impression I had of the conference was in the midst of papering a conference room with LinuxMedNews.com flyers. I stayed for the first 10 minutes of a panel discussion on the experience of implementing several electronic medical records systems. I was heartened and at the same time saddened to listen to virtually the same issues: physician resistance, inability to wean from paper, legacy record conversion that I had read in a journal article: 10 years ago…’ We are live from the American Medical Informatics Association conference in Los Angeles. I’m sitting at a pretty cool ‘cybercafe’ that the conference has set up with expensive flat-screens, the kind you’d like to have yourself. Plenty of suits in sight and some big players sponsoring the conference: 3M, Medicalogic and lots of others. How will Linuxmednews.com fare against all this, armed with nothing but flyers and open source ideas? Stay tuned, the commando raid begins.