Ignacio invited me to represent LinuxMedNews at this years HIMSS conference. There is a lot of FOSS activity here, we have already been to the first important Open Source focused talk from Janice Honeyman-Buck

The FOSS healthcare community is very small, and we all know tend to know each other. We go to many of the same conferences, we track the same mailing lists (mostly openhealth) and we track the same blogs (you are reading it…). One of the refreshing things about our movement is that once in a while, someone will have the same ideas, for the same reasons and start working without any contact with the blogs and mailinglists that I follow. For me, meeting Dr. Janice Honeyman-Buck was one of those moments. I meet Janice about 30 minutes before her talk and
we immediately hit it off.

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Many news sources are reporting the Google PHR Pilot announcement such as the NY Times: ‘…on Thursday, Google’s technology for personal health records, which is still in development, is getting a big endorsement from the Cleveland Clinic. The big medical center is beginning a pilot project to link the health information for some of its patients with Google personal health records…’

OpenMedSpel, a free and open source medical spelling word list, is now available as add-ons for Firefox, Thunderbird, and SeaMonkey.

The availability of a free and open source browser based medical spelling application is of great value for those who use or develop browser based medical applications such as electronic medical records.

Learn more about OpenMedSpel here.

ZDNet’s Dana Blankenhorn opines about ‘open source values’ in this op-ed piece: ‘The Committee for Economic Development, a 65-year old advocacy group which claims to represent “the best in business thinking,” has issued a clarion call for open source values in medicine…’

Tim O’Reilly blogs that open source licenses are obsolete because of software as a service and that open services licenses are needed: ‘…And that, after all, was my message: not that open source licenses are unnecessary, but that because their conditions are all triggered by the act of software distribution, they fail to apply to many of the most important types of software today, namely Web 2.0 applications and other forms of software as a service…’ This echoes my January 11, 2007 article ‘Browser Based EMR’s Threaten Software Freedoms’ here: ‘…Proprietary, browser based EMR/EHR’s have the possibility for the provider to control the customer in ways that previous generation LAN based EMR/EHR’s can only dream about. Privacy abuse, security holes, the ultimate in vendor lock-in and EMR/EHR monopolies is more possible than ever before…’

Dear LinuxMedNews,

Recently it has come to my attention that the PatientOS project has been representing itself here, and in other public forums, as a legitimate FOSS EHR project. In fact, Patient OS is attempting to fracture the FOSS EHR developer community. I have written an article on why I believe this is the case, including what I mean by a “legitimate project” entitled, FOSS Sin: Pointless Duplication of Effort.

Enjoy.

Time Magazine has an amusing story from the doctor’s perspective of patients that Google for information about them: ‘…Susan had chosen me because she had researched my education, read a paper I had written, determined my university affiliation and knew where I lived. It was a little too much � as if she knew how stinky and snorey I was last Sunday morning. Yes, she was simply researching important aspects of her own health care. Yes, who your surgeon is certainly affects what your surgeon does. But I was unnerved by how she brandished her information, too personal and just too rude on our first meeting…’

Misys might be open source now according to this press release only it seems that they forgot to actually release the source according to Matt Asay: ‘…What he failed to mention was the license, the location (to download the source), and to give any details on how to get involved.

You won’t find the project on Sourceforge. Codehaus doesn’t have it, either. Nor does Misys on its own website, apparently.

What benefits will Misys derive from open source if it doesn’t engage an external development community?…’

Fred Trotter has a in depth analysis
of public statements by Dr. Deborah Peel of the Privacy Rights Foundation and a comparison and contrast of what is being said publicly but what is actually committed to by the HealthVault Privacy Policy: “Has Microsoft committed to keeping the promises that it has already made? No, just the opposite. Their privacy policy concludes:�We may occasionally update this privacy statement�

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Fred Trotter has a critique of HealthVault: ‘…Microsoft is famous for incorrectly implementing standards and creating new incompatible dialects. Microsoft has done this even when it goes in the face of a previously strong standard. Then they use their monopoly position to push adoption of their own dialect of a standard. Adoption of the Microsoft dialect then increases the reach and influence of the Microsoft monopoly, which increases Microsoft�s ability to enforce their own dialects, etc etc. If you have no idea what I am talking about then Google for the history of Microsoft�s implementations of Java, Kerberos and Javascript.

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