Fred Trotter (me) has just won the bidding for the Histalk sponsored Beers with Bush at HIMSS07. As a result I get to talk to Jonathan Bush the CEO of athenahealth.

As you can imagine, I will be talking to him about FreeB and FOSS medical software generally, but what else should I ask him?

Slashdot style, if you will post a question for Jonathan Bush as a comment on this Linux Medical News story, and I arbitrarily decide that I like the question (since there is no meta-moderation here) I will ask him your question over drinks.

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Following up on the recent news release regarding Uversa’s position as the new project maintainer of FreeBilling (FreeB) we are now releasing a draft API specification of version 2.0 for public comment and review. Read on for details and how to comment.

The new specification accomplishes much of what the original release of FreeB intended, simplicity, extensibility and low barrier to entry. The phpDoc API documentation can be reveiwed on this page, Draft FreeB 2.0 API Specification.

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FreeB the only medical billing system available under the GPL, has just passed a major milestone thanks to the OpenEMR Project. A X12 file generated by FreeB has passed the tests to be accepted by Medical. This is a pretty huge step since the Medical process is pretty difficult to navigate, and Medical is a very important payer in California. My thanks go out to the OpenEMR guys!! Maybe I can convice Igancio to give me my own topic now…

The Free Medical Billing Project (FreeB) has announced a bounty program for building interface bridges between FreeB and popular free as well as proprietary medical applications: ‘…In order to encourage developers to takle this challenge I am allowing users to donate to a bounty fund for various practice management systems. The first developer to submit working implementation of FreeB for a particular Practice Management System gets all the money. Further, I am also setting bounties for work on different formats and features. If you are a developer and would like to work on a bounty, or if you would like a bounty placed on a feature that is not here, please subscribe to the freeb mailing list and drop a line…’

The FreeB project is the only known Free and Open Source medical billing package in existence. Its importance to FOSS in medicine cannot be over-stated. Project leader Fred Trotter announces: ‘FreeB was released today. FreeB is the only Free and Open Source Medical Billing Project that is designed to integrate with any Practice or Hospital Management System.’ FreeB is a sub-project of the FreeMED project.

‘The current version supports HCFA printing and X12 837p (HIPPA version).

More signifigant than the release of the code is the release of the API. While the code will be changing, the API is intended to remain stable, allowing for projects to begin supporting the API.

Everyone, I am proud to announce the availablility at http://www.freemed.org/FreeB/FreeBv.06.tgz of FreeB .06 Alpha medical billing software. There are two big improvements to the code.

1. The XML-RPC interface is working. This is what the API will be based on. In order to test the code you need to run the Practice Management Simulator that is included in the tar. This is essentially a beta reference implementation of the FreeB API. So I am curious to see what everone thinks!!

2. The X12 support now generates code that passes the X12 certification tests. Once I have tested with a broader spectrum of data, I will apply to have FreeB certified as HIPAA X12 compliant. That will be a major milestone for FreeB.

Complete text of the announcement follows.

Everyone, I am proud to announce the availablility at http://www.freemed.org/FreeB/FreeBv.06.tgz of FreeB .06 Alpha medical billing software. There are two big improvements to the code.

1. The XML-RPC interface is working. This is what the API will be based on. In order to test the code you need to run the Practice Management Simulator that is included in the tar. This is essentially a beta reference implementation of the FreeB API. So I am curious to see what everone thinks!!

2. The X12 support now generates code that passes the X12 certification tests. Once I have tested with a broader spectrum of data, I will apply to have FreeB certified as HIPAA X12 compliant. That will be a major milestone for FreeB.

This version is the first version that other projects could actually use to bill. You can begin the development effort to support this system using this code! All you have to do is replicate the calls that the Practice Management Simulator does, and you can have your data generate X12 and hcfa files. There are some things that are still broken about the API. But the general calls are there. In the next couple of weeks the API will be finalized and there will be some billing targets
available. I think we will try for “Web Printing” for the HCFA files and support for at least one of the clearing houses autoload functions.

This will be the last release until the API is finalized, which will be the last release before the .1 release which will be the first fully functional release. That version will support logging, etc etc.

If you have not already contacted me about using FreeB in your project, please let me know. I will be soon compiling a list of projects that intend to use FreeB!

Thanks,

—
Fred Trotter
SynSeer