While NHS is going from the top down, the United States is approaching from the bottom up. This is expected and accepted in American politics and public opinion. It’s what works for us and adheres to the capitalist mind.
Things are moving quickly with a survey showing 61% of hospital CFO’S planning to purchase major IT systems wihtin the next 5 years.
Yahoo is reporting on a Canadian teenager who has taken 1st prize at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair for a Linux-using prototype ultrasound system that can be used for Mammography: ‘…Gervais collected $4,128 in prize money for his prototype medical ultrasound system, which uses
Linux software to model a three-dimensional, high-resolution image from existing two-dimensional screening equipment…’ Thanks to Tim Cook for this link.
Paulo Say M.D. has just released a new version 6 Live CD for CDMEDIC [Picture Archive and Communication System] PACS WEB. “New version 6 of CDMEDIC Live CD, based on Knoppix 3.7 and Debian GNU-LINUX, with kernels 2.4 and 2.6, ATI and Nvidia 3d hardware acceleration support, updated AFNI, FSL, Xmedcon, AMIDE,CTsim, KDE, Firefox and Evolution, autoimporter from DICOM to Analyze and AFNI, full multimedia capabilities, last stable Open Office with medical terminology spellchecker, and many things more. I hope you’ll enjoy it!”
Enterprise Linux has an article about UNC Chapel Hill using Linux and IBM’s Websphere (community site here) to discover drugs: ‘… with a staff that fluctuates between 12 and 15 graduate students, technicians and professors, time is almost as valuable as the drugs waiting to be discovered..Until IBM WebSphere and Linux came along 16 months ago, those cumbersome tasks were conducted manually by one of the graduate students attending the school. “We went with grid computing on Linux because a lot of the grid managers are all designed for the Linux system,” said Scott Olosof, a graduate student at the UNC School of Pharmacy…’
J. Antas blog reports: ‘…Healthcare Informatics Online magazine has an article by Peter Groen (director of the Veterans Health Administration’s Health IT Sharing program), were he talks about the Health IT Sharing Program, a four phase program to improve collaboration among healthcare organizations. In that author’s perspective that plan could be an effective means to pool resources to work on Health Information Systems (HIS) and develop mutually beneficial initiatives that, most likely, neither organization could accomplish on its own.’
The PHIELD PROJECT (Public Health Integration & Exchange of Lab Data), an open source project is focused on a cost effective solution to delivering laboratory data of public health significance to the appropriate legal jurisdictions. The PHIELD project implemented a first generation solution by developing an end-to-end model comprised of Open Source software and documentation for filtering and reporting from a local LIS to the National Electronic Disease Surveillance System (NEDSS) implementation in Nebraska utilizing the Public Health Information Network (PHIN) architected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
OpenEMR.net provides a complete download to the development version of SQL-Ledger modified for accounting use with OpenEMR. The download can be found in the Downloads for Linux section. Accounting for OpenEMR will allow clinics to manage accounts receivable, print patient statements, and, with additional customization, upload your patient statements to your medical claims clearing house for processing and mailing. The new accounting features for OpenEMR include:
For those who are interested in getting under the hood of medical imaging applications, we have put together a virtual community of practice. OpenRAD has a repository tracking about 40 projects in the PACS space with an RSS news aggregator engine that automatically captures project updates. We are also compiling a tutorial series to demystify DICOM, the medical imaging standard. We are seeing a great deal of activity in this area and want to help people in finding the right tool to solve their problem.
Open source software, including OpenEMR, is evaluated in the
President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (“PEPFAR”) Software Inventory Report for use with HIV and AIDS. PEPFAR “FY 2005 budget requests $2.8 billion for fighting AIDS globally, which more than triples the investment since 2001.” PEPFAR is a “five-year, $15 billion initiative to turn the tide in the global effort to combat the HIV/AIDS pandemic.” Read On for more details.
Are there any open source or freeware patient sign-out programs out there?
A web based signout system for residents that is open source…there has to be something like this out there.