Category Archives: Linux Medical News

Nominations Open for 2007 Linux Medical News Freedom Award

Nominations are officially open for the 7th annual Linux Medical News Freedom Award to be presented at the November 10th-14th AMIA Fall conference at the Sheraton Chicago Hotel and Towers, Chicago, Illinois, USA. Deadline for entries is August 24th, 2007. This is NOT a officially sponsored award or event of AMIA. This award is co-sponsored by the IMIA Open Source Working Group. Free and open source software isn’t ‘magic pixie dust’. There are people making significant personal sacrifices as well as doing difficult work to make medicine’s free software future a reality. This award is intended to honor the individual or project who has accomplished the most towards the goal of improving medical education and practice through free/open source medical software. The award winner is chosen by a panel of judges. Past recipients have been Tim Cook, K.S. Bhaskar — Fidelity Information Services, Inc., Thomas Beale — Ocean Informatics, Fred Trotter — Synseer, MirrorMed and the FreeB project, Joseph Dalmolin of WorldVistA/e-cology and Will Ross of Mendocino Informatics.

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To Cut Code and Other Pet Peeves

It finally happened. Someone finally said it. I was attending a recent talk by a nameless major speaker in charge of a large Health IT organization. I had to get up and walk out on the speaker. I’m not normally one to get up and walk out on people in a huff, but long ago I made a contract with myself that if anyone uttered 2 fateful words again I was going to get up and walk out. Those two words are:

Cut code.

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Ace Reporter Shirley Joins Linux Medical News Staff

Cindy was Linux Medical News ace reporter for four years before she passed on. Despite some quirks, such as thinking everyone was a Chihuahua, she had a true talent for getting the inside track for important meetings and being around powerful people in the Free and Open Source Software in medicine scene. She has received much fan-mail over the years and a recent, temporary, omission of the link to her page was noted by many. Cindy has been missed since her departure to that great reporters heaven in the sky. However, this past week, while perusing an O’Reilly PHP and MySQL book, the staff of Linux Medical News received a cryptic message posted to the site…

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Dal Molin Receives 2005 Linux Medical News Freedom Award

Joseph Dal Molin is the recipient of the 2005 Linux Medical News Freedom Award. The award is given each year to recognize the person, group or project which has in the opinion of Linux Medical News contributed the most to furthering Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in medicine. Dal Molin was the driving force behind a summer of 2005 proposal that ultimately resulted in CMS awarding nearly $1 million dollars to WorldVistA to train vendors for supporting the VistaA Office EHR (VOE) project in the private sector.

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Logical Absurdities of Proprietary Medical Record Software

Here is a list of what I see as logical absurdities to proprietary software in medical records that Free/Open Source Software in medicine may have an answer for:

  • Sunsetting, corporate buy-outs, bankruptcy, patient outliving their software.
  • Mobile workforce: 1 doctor 5 practice settings 5 different EMR GUI’s in 1 week. Training, re-training, re-re-training.
  • Disaster preparedness (see item 2 above).
  • Vendor lock-in.
  • Duplication of engineering costs.
  • Meta-applications built on substrate without asking permission: simulators, bio-surveillance, yet-to-be-conceived apps.
  • Ensuring confidentiality.
  • Software forensics in the case of malfeasance.
  • Error reduction studies and engineering in a proprietary software mosaic.
  • No one vendor with enough engineering resources.
  • Corporate agenda not in harmony with customer needs.Please feel free to add to this list or refute it.

Nominations Open for 2005 Linux Medical News Freedom Award

Nominations are officially open for the 5th annual Linux Medical News Freedom (formerly Achievement) Award to be presented at the October 22nd-26th AMIA Fall conference in Washington, D.C. Deadline for entries is July 30th, 2005. Currently this is NOT a officially sponsored event of AMIA. Free and open source software isn’t ‘magic pixie dust’ and there are real people making significant personal sacrifices as well as doing difficult work to make medicine’s free software future a reality. This award is intended to honor the individul or project who has accomplished the most towards the goal of improving medical education and practice through free/open source medical software. The award winner is chosen by a panel of judges. Past recipients have been Tim Cook, K.S. Bhaskar — Fidelity Information Services, Inc., Thomas Beale — Ocean Informatics and Fred Trotter — Uversa and FreeB project.

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On Entrepreneurial Seizures in Health Care IT

Michael Gerber in his book the E-Myth subtitled “Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It.” describes a phenomena that he calls an ‘entrepreneurial seizure’. This occurs when people working at a regular job suddenly drop everything and go into business for themselves, doing something they like, but frequently ending up working far harder than they did before and ultimately loathing (and failing at) the thing they used to enjoy.

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Migration of Linux Medical News To Interlix is Complete

Dear readers, if you noticed that Linux Medical News has been un-available or not updated much in the last two weeks, it was because we did what turned out to be a difficult migration with one hosting provider, and then smoothly when we changed again to Interlix. Please welcome and support Linux Medical News new hosting provider Interlix. Also, please don’t forget to support Linux Medical News and our ad sponsors by clicking through on ads that interest you.