The FreeMed project has released the latest version of its GPL’d Electronic Medical Record and Practice Management system onto Sourceforge.net. This release is described as: ‘…A near-complete UI rewrite, database changes, and a new requirement of phpwebtools and PHP 4.’ They have more coders now and project leader Jeff Buchbinder sends his assurance that they are alive and well despite not releasing in several months.

Updated: 1/12/2003 FreePM is now TORCH Tim Cook, project leader of FreePM recently wrote on the openhealth-list about the current status of the project. A demo is available online at the FreePM site with login ‘guest’ password ‘abc123’. Excerpts: ‘…Dr. Chason Hayes has been doing some documentation for us…I have been speaking to Dr. Andrew Ho about integration of OIO
into FreePM or at least supporting the same XML formats for
sharing forms…Dr. Alex Caldwell continues to provide us with valuable input
about XML experiences and we are working to maintain
compatibility between FreePM & TkFP in the formulary and
prescription modules. I expect that we will be pursuing the same
compatibility in progress notes. Here we have a crossing with OIO
as well due to the forms generation…Ron Chichester is working on the default formulary using the
National Drug Code Directory. After that he will be giving the
Scheduling module a much needed facelift…Alexander Chelnokov is working on a new set of ICD codes…I have been reorganizing my notes into something I can call
project management since the tempo is picking up…’

There have been 22 downloads of 0.5.0b…this is a beta version of the patient registration and prescription modules. This includes the employee (user) creation and the formulary due to the dependencies.

There are four documents that are key to using these functions:

Getting Started

Configuration

Patient Registration

Patient Medications

They are available on the SourceForge site. If anyone needs them
downloaded and emailed to them then please contact myself or one
of the project admins listed on the site.

Remember, that if you do not want to download and install all of
the required software. You can use the online “demo” at
http://www.freepm.org. It really isn’t a demo in the true sense.
You can’t add employees that can actually login but otherwise you
have the same privileges as if you were a physician logging in to
an installed system. You can add drugs to the formulary and add
patients and prescriptions.
Please feel free to try it out. Then let us know here your
experience.

There has been one reported problem installing Zope/other
products/FreePM. No resolution has been gained there yet as far
as I know. I did send a message to the list with some pointers to
installing Zope on various platforms.

The beta version of the upcoming O’Reilly Zope Book is available
at zope.org. It looks pretty good. Some of the best Zope
documentation to date.

Dr. Chason Hayes has been doing some documentation for us and is
also going to be adding some javascript in key places to make
validations smoother. He has also been doing some work on the
user interface in various places. I especially want to say thanks
for the very boring job that he did for me cleaning up some code
that was left over from when I first started using Zope for
FreePM.

I have been speaking to Dr. Andrew Ho about integration of OIO
into FreePM or at least supporting the same XML formats for
sharing forms. More news about this after meeting with him at
AMIA.

Dr. Alex Caldwell continues to provide us with valuable input
about XML experiences and we are working to maintain
compatibility between FreePM & TkFP in the formulary and
prescription modules. I expect that we will be pursuing the same
compatibility in progress notes. Here we have a crossing with OIO
as well due to the forms generation.

Ron Chichester is working on the default formulary using the
National Drug Code Directory. After that he will be giving the
Scheduling module a much needed facelift. As it is now, it works
for employee and resource scheduling. The terminology is geared
as an event manager vs. a real scheduling module. The patient
appt. schedule will be dynamically generated from the combined
physicians personal schedules.

Alexander Chelnokov is working on a new set of ICD codes. The one
I currently have in place for testing only has a brief text
field. Since they use ICD-10 in the Federation of Russia I assume
he will be working primarily with that version. I’m not certain
if he is also producing an ICD-9 set.

I have been reorganizing my notes into something I can call
project management since the tempo is picking up. If there is
something that you want to work on let me know. If you want to do
‘something’ but aren’t really picky let me know that too (I have
a long TODO list ).