Its not often that I have to admit to being completley wrong about whats coming in FOSS medical software. I pride myself somewhat on being in-the-loop. However, I was wrong about what kind of release Medpshere would be doing. If simple confessions are not an interesting read for you, then you might be interested in my analysis of Medsphere’s new badgeware license, as well as discussion on the implications of the release.

Fred Trotter

The Possibility Forge and Mandriva successfully completed the testing requirements for openEMR at the 2007 IHE Connectathon in North America. To connect and share information openEMR uses IBM’s Open Healthcare Framework (�OHF�). The Possibility Forge and Mandriva, using OHF, represent openEMR, the first open source electronic medical record system to participate, and successfully complete the interoperability standards at the IHE Connectathon.
The IHE Connectathon is a health care industry collaboration event, where the IHE constructs independent testing to validate and verify vendors claims of interoperability. The IHE Connectathon consists of pre-tests for participation eligibility and four days of rigorous testing. openEMR successfully completed the Connectathon testing with the second highest number of successfully completed tests among all 140 participants, and the highest for an open source electronic medical record. Participants at the 2007 IHE Connectathon include: Cerner Corporation, Epic Systems Corporation, GE Healthcare, IBM, McKesson Information Solutions, and Toshiba Medical Systems, among others.

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Apparently PossiblityForge has decided to borrow the OpenEMR name. PossiblityForge now owns OpenEMR.net. At the recent SCALE Open Source HealthCare Summit Matthew Excell, CEO of PossibilityForge announced that, amoung other things, OpenEMR was moving to Java. This surprised me as uncharacteristic of the OpenEMR community and the previous OpenEMR direction.

Everything became clear when I contacted the OpenEMR community through OEMR.org here is part of the response I got back.

The PossibilityForge has created a new product that they want to market using the the OpenEMR name. The current OpenEMR project at SourceForge has no intention of moving to Java….What PossibilityForge plans to release is not �the next version� of OpenEMR but a separate product that is being developed behind closed doors with no attempt at openess.

You heard it here first.
–Trotter

Despite the ongoing legal drama, Medsphere has won business from Brooklyn’s Lutheran Medical Center.

The release quotes Dr. Ken Kizer; ” With the power of VistA behind it, OpenVista substantially lowers costs, reduces implementation risk, and shortens the learning curve because so many physicians train at VA hospitals. These and other factors offer clear advantages over other commercial EHR systems.”

No mention of the term “open source” until the end of the release where the now famous phrase appears again “Medsphere is the leading commercial provider of open source technology for the healthcare industry.”

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has written a very comprehensive article on the Medsphere drama called A medical open-source legal hell-hole over at Linux Watch.

-FT

Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz published Scrooge and intellectual property rights in the British Medical Journal. In it he attacks the fundamental justification for drug patents, the supposed encouragement of private investment in high risk drugs. It is enough to say that his arguments go double for medical software patents which have all of the drawbacks of drug patents, except that they do not require a significant investment at all, so there is no justification whatsoever. The next time you hear a medical software company talk about an “innovation” they have patented you should cringe at the theft of a simple idea from the FOSS world.

-FT

Synapse EMR port to Linux has now gone beta. Download from http://www.compkarori.com/emr/linux/

Almost all of the non-Windows specific functionality is now available for the Linux client.

A new blog, All Scrubbed Up is discussing using Ubuntu GNU/Linux as the base for a FOSS EHR network in South Africa. They are tentatively calling the project Medical Ubuntu. Its a good idea, and I hope they follow through.

–FT

Phillips has released a Linux SDK system for it’s popular dictation software. Although the platform it not Open Source, it’s exciting to see vendors supporting Linux.

Recently Ken Kizer wrote an “open letter to Medsphere employees“. It appears that this is the only public response that the company has given in response to my critisms that Medsphere has betrayed the community

I have written an open reply to Medsphere regarding this issue. From the my letter:

..releasing such a (open source) policy now is equivalent to saying “This is what we wish we had said when you first asked us what our position was. Please ignore what we actually said and accept this as our position retro-actively.”

Fred Trotter