Category Archives: Interesting Developments

GPLMedicine sparks debates

“The GPL is the only license that is moral for medical or health-related software.” That sentence sparked a long and intense debate on the use of the GPL in health IT at emrupdate.com.
The emrupdate.com GPL debate, is now linked to from GPLMedicine.org
An earlier unpublished email debate with the author of X-Med has now been posted to the site. Both of these are part of an effort to publish more of my health GPL activism on the web.

Increased Mortality after CPOE Implementation

The December 2005 issue of the journal Pediatrics has a report that found a coincident increase in mortality after implementing a ‘Commercially Sold’ Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE) system. The increased mortality may have been due to delays in medication and IV administration in the ICU caused by the new system: ‘…Although CPOE technology holds great promise as a tool to reduce human error during health care delivery our unanticipated finding suggests that when implementing CPOE systems, institutions should continue to evaluate mortality effects, in addition to medication error rates, for children who are dependent on time-sensitive therapies.’ The study notes that mortality rate studies on CPOE as opposed to adverse drug events(ADEs) studies has not been done before. The CPOE in the study DID reduce ADE’s as expected.

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Notes from the HIMMS “Enabling e-Health for RHIOs” Webinar

I wrote this wrapup of the HIMMS “Enabling e-Health for RHIOs” Webinar held yesterday. ‘…If you start a [Regional Health Information Organization] RHIO, try not to call it that since RHIOs are seen as pie in sky dreams that may have unattainable goals. In the San Diego example he said they called theirs an HIE (health information exchange). I�m not sure what changing the name does, but apparently he thought that calling it an HIE and not a RHIO at least got it off the ground…’

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Physician Self-Referral Exceptions Bad for FOSS?

Exceptions to anti Physician-self-referral laws are being proposed by CMS. The laws ban physicians from referring patients to entities in which they have a financial stake like laboratories. Originally designed to prevent abuses, “They were never intended to stand in the way of bringing effective electronic health care to patients…These new proposals would allow hospitals and certain health care organizations to furnish hardware, software, and related training services to physicians for e-prescribing and electronic health records, particularly when the support involves systems that are �interoperable� and thus can exchange information effectively and securely among health care providers…” Could this be good or bad for Free and Open Source Electronic Medical Records? Is there potential for abuse by creating monocultures of proprietary hardware and software through hospitals dictating proprietary solutions? Could this make the problem of fragmentation even worse?

Bootable Live CD for Natural Disaster Response

Slashdot had a link to this ArsTechnica article about experiences with live bootable CD distribution’s (both Linux and Windows) custom built for use in disaster response situations like shelters. Highlights are that there are a number of advantages to this approach such as not molesting what is already on donated PC’s that must be returned. The most used applications were: e-mail, web browsing, and accessing FEMA databases which unfortunately still can only be done through Microsoft Internet Explorer and not FireFox. One of the most-needed applications was VOIP. Interesting read.