The Personal Health Record (PHR) Functional Model from HL7 will be released soon. Watch out ….
The working group of HL7 on electronic information sharing between doctors and patients is going to release a Personal Health Record Functional Model soon. It is done by the volunteer group.
You should soon be able to get a copy of the model from:
www.hl7.org/ehr
Check it out…
This article is out on the Houston Psychiatric Society website: “Three major healthcare groups: Harris (Houston) and Tarrant (Dallas) County Mental Health Mental Retardation Authority (MHMRA) and Gateway to Care are either near Request for Proposal (RFP) or already have proposals for Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems. A decision will be made in the next two months. Linking the MHRMRA’s and Gateway to Care via the same EMR system would be a historic, rare, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. For the success of these initiatives and the future of our patients, it is of critical importance that the systems chosen 1) be non-proprietary, Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) licensed products and 2) use the same software base. Advocacy for such a system by Houston Psychiatric Society and its members is crucial.”
The personal health record (PHR) is different from an EHR. The PHR is an electronic, lifelong record of health information that is maintained by individual citizens. These individuals own and manage the information in the PHR, which comes from both their healthcare providers and the individuals themselves. This article recently published in Virtual Medical Worlds describes the current state of affairs with regards to the development and implementation of PHR systems in some detail. Here are just a few of the many collaborative projects, activities, and organizations involving the development and implementation of personal health record (PHR) systems that are described in the article. Many of these are open source solutions, e.g. AHIMA and myPHR; MyHealtheVet ; Eastern Maine Healthcare; and MyOnlineHealth; and iHealth Record.
Think your CCHIT certified, proprietary EMR from a ‘big’ corporation is a safe bet? Think again. Remember Enron? From GPLmedicine.org comes news that a recently #1 ranked, CCHIT certified EMR company, AcerMed, is either severely crippled or has bit the dust. Why is this significant?
It is significant because Electronic Medical Record software isn’t like a restaurant chain. People’s lives depend upon it. Many EMR software acquisition decision makers think that a proprietary EMR from a ‘big’ company that is CCHIT certified is ‘safe’ and ‘isn’t going to go away soon’. Many in the Free and Open Source Software licensed EMR crowd know that this is an utterly false sense of security and that the only safe bet is a non-proprietary FOSS licensed EMR. Further that it is un-ethical to do it any other way.
Government Technology News has a wide-ranging article on Free and Open Source Software in Medicine: “Doctors are fed up with the we-own-you, vendor lock-in, phone-home-to-the-mother-ship-to-do-anything status quo,” he said.
In addition, open source health IT applications are hitting their late teens, with more growth coming. What will be available in the next year, he said, will likely challenge anything in the proprietary world.
IBM’s Eishay Smith, Enfold Systems Alan Runyan and a few others will be speaking at a one day symposium in Houston entitled ‘Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) for Healthcare: Progress and Promise’ This will be held at:
School of Health Information Sciences, UT-Houston
University Center Tower
7000 Fannin, 14th Floor
Tuesday, April 24th
Read on for the full agenda and registration info.
Scott Shreeve, MD
weighs -in on the recent Practice Fusion announcement: ‘All this “paradigm shifting” and “revolutionary” talk is good – way good – and part of the fulfillment of the vision that so many within healthcare IT have had. However, the means by which they are able to deliver it FREELY raise the inevitable red flags. I have several major issues with the enabling mechanism of this “free”dom (or more appropriately Free Dumb).
While I have never been a huge privacy guy, and not being an information conspiracy theorist, I am still pretty concerned about how personal health information can be utilized…’
Updated 12/16/07: one reader (below) says that this is a ‘bait and switch’. You knew it had to happen. According to this article, Practice Fusion, Inc. has announced a partnership with Google to provide no-cost electronic medical record software to physicians supported by advertising. ‘Practice Fusion is not the only company offering Internet-based medical-record systems. “We just happened to find a way to subsidize the cost of it,” said Ryan Howard, the company’s chief executive officer…’
Signs that things are changing: The California Healthcare Foundation report ‘Open Source Software: A Primer for Health Care Leaders was its 3rd most popular report for 2006. Linux Medical News readers where alerted to this report at its inception. The complete top ten list is:
Alert reader Yeb Havinga wrote in with news that HL7 JavaSIG code is now available with a possibly open source license it is calling the “Health Level-7 Public License For JAVA” Will it make a difference?