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What Do You Think?

Shaun Grannis, MD writes:

1) I’m giving strong consideration to a fellowship in Medical Informatics to strengthen and refine my skills — currently looking in Boston and Minneapolis. What are your thoughts on this?

2) With all of the various open-source software projects going on, where do you see programming/design efforts best being spent at this time? I appreciate all of the hard work everyone is putting into the various projects, but I’ve not been too impressed with them to date (of course, they are alpha software!)

3) Do you see a viable career in open source medical software design/implementation/etc? I don’t need to be rich, but I do need to feed my
family. I haven’t reached a good answer to how I can devote my livelihood to doing open source work.

How about it LMN readers?

‘Microsoft Porting Apps to Linux’

WinInfo is reporting that Microsoft is porting its applications to Linux. ‘Microsoft will leverage Linux as an entry point to Windows, “in the same way it does with the Macintosh version of Office.” Microsoft’s plans notwithstanding, the consensus is that still have a ways to go before they realize the dream of running Windows applications on Linux. But make no mistake: This work is happening, and it’s happening now.’ We live in interesting times.

LinuxMedNews Featured on Newsforge

NewsForge has an article about LinuxMedNews (and me). It quotes Tim Cook of Freepm.org: ‘Cook, formerly a hospital information systems professional, says Valdes is providing an important service to the medical industry. “The open source medical informatics community is small but growing rapidly,” Cook adds.”Ignacio saves me time mining the Net for relevant articles.”‘ I also get busted as to the origin of my nickname ‘Saint’. Additionally we must not forget Jim ‘Captain Fantastic’ Intriglia. Jim always comes through with topics when I’m running dry.

Open Source World by 2004

Wired is reporting that ‘Open-source standards will completely reshape the software industry by 2004, according to a recent report by Forrester Research. IBM and Dell will eventually triumph, while Oracle and Microsoft will struggle to cope with a changing marketplace. Forrester forecasts that within four years, all traditional software vendors will need to change their proprietary business models to open-source ones, or drastically lower the price of enterprise application licenses.’ Interesting, but Microsoft will probably fight to the last man or woman to prevent this.

LABinfo: Open Source Veterinary Lab

LABinfo ‘…is an information system to support the workflow in veterinary laboratories. It is being developed by the International Atomic Energy Agency, Vienna. LABinfo is
designed to complement its sister package TADinfo, an information system for veterinary epidemiology.’ Looks interesting, I wonder if it could be adapted for humans? One of the best electronic medical records I’ve ever seen was at my Chihuahua Cindys’ Veterinary office. Sigh.

LABinfo: Open Source Veterinary Lab

LABinfo ‘…is an information system to support the workflow in veterinary laboratories. It is being developed by the International Atomic Energy Agency, Vienna. LABinfo is
designed to complement its sister package TADinfo, an information system for veterinary epidemiology.’ Looks interesting, I wonder if it could be adapted for humans? One of the best electronic medical records I’ve ever seen was at my Chihuahua Cindys’ Veterinary office. Sigh.

FreePM Project Leader Featured on LinuxNews.com

Updated: 1/12/2003 FreePM is now TORCH. Tim Cook of the FreePM project was recently interviewed on www.linuxnews.com. The article by Michelle head quotes Cook as saying: ‘while working in the health care IT field, I saw the abuses that hospitals and
physicians’ offices were taking from closed source vendors of health care software. I don’t just mean the outrageous
pricing of licenses and per-incident tech support. Too often a sales person is the first person sent to a site to address
problems that everyone knows are really tech support issues…’

$12 Million System Takes 59% Longer to Collect Payments

www.jimintriglia.com provided this link to a Computerworld article discussing the greater than $12 million failure of San Mateo Health Services to perform. The agency ‘is left with new software that takes 59% longer to collect bill payments and whose implementation has hit numerous snags.’ While not blaming the software provider, the article notes that the provider project manager changed 5 times in 18 months. The sad thing is that $12 million spent on open source medical software projects would yield amazing fruit.

Massively Expensive IT Failures in the 90’s

Lest the previous article on San Mateo’s $12 million+ failure be seen as an aberration www.jimintriglia.com again provides this link to a Health Informatics article detailing the massively expensive IT failures of the 90’s. ‘Nearly every healthcare delivery system in the country invested between $5 million and $50 million in CPR [Computer-based Patient Record] efforts between 1993 and 2000. Despite serious criticisms from some experts that almost all investment plans to implement the vision of a CPR were flawed at inception, the majority prevailed, creating tremendous industry momentum.’ With numbers like these, open source medical software CAN’T be any worse. At the risk of a big ‘I told you so!’ read the original LinuxMedNews article: Medicine’s Dirty Software Secret.