Dr. Matthew King has testified before congress regarding the Clinica Adelante deployment of WorldVistA EHR. From the testimony:

VistA is the aspirin of EHRs and if it was a drug, every provider would prescribe it. But just like generic aspirin, there are no “drug representatives” or lobbyists to sell it. Its effectiveness is clearly supported in the literature, but administrators don’t have time to read the literature. So they listen to the sales pitch and the lobbyists. In the healthcare industry, that could cost lives. In healthcare, when lives are at stake, I believe we should hold ourselves to the same standard we hold our physicians and use the evidence whenever possible to evaluate and select technology solutions…not advertising or marketing hype. And that is why Clinica Adelante chose VistA EHR.

OpenEMR HQ announced the official launch of their OpenEMR Live fully hosted EMR solution earlier today in a conference call with developers, employees, and clients. The service, according to their website, removes the headache associated with running an in-house application server and the cost of keeping a full-time IT person on staff. It also reduces compliance issues, eases administrative burden, and provides data monitoring, faster response times, and full disaster recovery service should something go wrong.

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The EFMI (European Federation for Medical Informatics – www.efmi.org ) Special Topic Conference (STC) for 2008 will take place in London, UK on 9-11 September 2008.
This EFMI Special Topic Conference (STC) will be organised by members of the IMIA and EFMI Open Source Working Groups with a focus on Open Source in European Health Care.

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The Debian project has been accepted as a mentor organization for the Google Summer of Code 2008, and two of the proposed projects are relevant to the field of bioinformatics.

• In the Biological databases manager project, it is proposed to students to build an application to automate the downloading, upgrading and indexing of databases such as GenBank, miRbase, Jaspar, REbase,… The database manager will take advantage of the bioinformatics programs packaged in Debian.
• In the cran2deb project, it is proposed to students to generate Debian packages for GNU R from package sources. This project would allow the Bioconductor R packages to be distributed in the Debian format.

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The whole Microsoft thing is about to go non-linear.
Late to the ‘net, late to the cloud . . . but deeper pockets than anyone in our galaxy. Monkey boy about to go whole hog open source . . . is it

http://www.patientos.org open source and free EMR adds laboratory results inbound, a result viewer, and a demonstration of how a Patient Portal can be integrated.

Version 0.40 also adds basic communication orders, automated emails, and batch job scheduling.

Screenshots and video is available.

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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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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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The Health Information Trust Alliance (HITRUST) aims to develop, in coordination with organizations that represent the full spectrum of the healthcare industry, a common security framework for use by all parties that create, access, store, or exchange personal health information. Recognizing that the issues surrounding security of sensitive health information are complex and diverse, but critical to the continued adoption, effective utilization and consumer confidence in health and biomedical information technology, HITRUST has assembled a broad array of participants to develop a framework that provides a higher level of security that ultimately creates trust in the electronic flow of information through the healthcare system.

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Synapse EMR is being ported to Linux. Alpha builds are now available to play with (Libc6). Synapse EMR is a GUI rich free EMR on Win32.

See here

Lots of things not working yet, but the basic GUI comes up. Still to work on printing, print preview etc. Only 50% thru reading Linux for Dummies so once I finish that I’ll have more ideas on how to complete this project!