VA’s Electronic Health Records System Pushing National Standards

VistA continues to be promoted as a foundation element in the National Healthcare Information Infrastructure. A recent public announcement from the Veterans Administration regarding the potential utilization of VistA as a means to establish a ubiquitous electronic health record will be of interest to the OpenVista Community. In addition, OpenVista 2.5 will soon be available to the community. Editor’s Note: OpenVistA is VistA with no proprietary elements needed to run it.

Linux Medical News Is 3 Years Old

Linux Medical News is 3 years old now. In its first week, 300 visitors came. It now averages 7000 per week and has 594 posted articles to date. Its original mission: ‘…to facilitate, amplify and begin the process of fundamentally changing medical education and practice into a more effective, fair and humane enterprise using modern technologies…’ is as necessary, vital and relevant today as it was 3 years ago. Perhaps more so since medical computing as a whole has changed little in 3 years. However, medical open source has progressed greatly since then, with its first shipping products in the last 6 months as well as major medical organizations beginning to study it. Medicine takes at least 10 years to change so 7 years are left, by Linux Medical News’ clock, until free and open source software in medicine is ubiquitous. My deepest thanks to all Linux Medical News supporters over the years.

Open Source Making Headway in Texas

Here’s a Linuxworld article about developments in my own backyard of Texas regarding Texas Senate Bill 1579: ‘In the war between proprietary and free/open-source software in state and local government over the past two years, Texas has established itself as ground zero. Texas Senate Bill 1579, for example, which seeks to ensure that free/open-source software is given a level playing field when competing with proprietary products in state agencies…’

Open Paradigms, LLC announces availability of TORCH version 1.1.0.

Trusted Open source Records for Care & Health (TORCH) Version 1.1.0 is now available. TORCH is an electronic health record application that is GPL licensed and and built upon a completely open source stack. All required components are included in the available download. You can find it on the Open Paradigms, LLC website in the Open Source section. Read on for the full text of the announcement.

TORCH is an electronic health record application that is GPL licensed and and built upon a complete open source stack. The available download includes all required components for installation on a linux, x86 based server. The various components are available for other operating systems but packaging for other OS’s and platforms will be left for the community to produce.

This is a maintenance release that includes better integration with CMFPlone and several bug fixes. The template system and scheduling module remain the same. The decision to retain these modules as is is based on the current functionality in Zope as compared to the vision for Zope3.

With the expected Zope3 (see: http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/ComponentArchitecture/FrontPage ) capabilities along with the pending release of the openEHR specification we have been working towards an application that will be leading edge. It will accomplish this through both foundational application blocks as well as future proofing by the versioned archetype reference model. This is described in detail by the openEHR Foundation (http://www.openehr.org) We expect to release a tested application no later than Q4 – 2003.

We are very excited about the near future. Several years of effort have gone into fulfilling the dream of a true “lego block” approach to open source health care application development, built around a standardized reference model, and using XML-Schema representations. We sincerely thank the openEHR Foundation and Zope Corporation for their comittment to open source and knowledge sharing.

For questions concerning TORCH specifically please contact Tim Cook tim@openparadigms.com.

Open Source: A New Management Paradigm

The functional significance of “Source Libre” is slowly emerging. This talk makes clear some of its undercurrents and implications, which are not always obvious. Open developers are sometimes so deep in the forest they see mostly the trees; oppenents of Free and Open Source do not understand because it presents a paradigm outside of their (successful) experience, feel threatened, and sometimes deliberately obfuscate or distort its character.

Hitachi Announces Strategic Partnership with Codehost Inc.

SANTA CLARA, CA and CULVER CITY, CA February, 2003 � The Hitachi Internet
Platform Business Unit, a part of Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE: HIT) and Linux software
developer Codehost, Inc. today announced a software development agreement for
wireless tablets running the Linux operating system. Codehost has developed a
handwriting recognition interface for the Linux version of the Hitachi
VisionPlate� Wireless Tablet, providing industries that require mobile computing
a low-cost alternative.

�We are very pleased to be Hitachi Internet Platform Business Unit�s software
development partner�, said Codehost CEO Sam Bizri. �With our experience in Linux
software development, we feel Codehost can be an instrumental partner in
developing applications for a number of vertical markets that improve efficiency
of data collection and processing without affecting the human interaction, in
this case the doctor-patient relationship.�

"We are pleased to be working with Codehost," stated Shigemi Adachi, general
manager of the Hitachi Internet Platform Business Unit. "Codehost�s software
expertise in combination with Hitachi�s experience in wireless products and
solutions will provide exciting out-of-the box solutions for our customers."

This initiative will be focused on industries such as healthcare, allowing
physicians to capture, store and document clinical data at the point of care.
The graphical interface will include a handwriting recognition engine, and will
be integrated with solutions developed by ReCare, the leader in wireless
physician-centric charting systems. The Linux-based VisionPlate� Wireless Tablet
gives IT departments in healthcare facilities and hospitals a low cost,
full-featured solution allowing healthcare providers to capture notation in the
form of digital ink. The handwriting recognition interface provides physicians
the flexibility and intuitiveness of a memo pad in an electronic medical record,
and offers time savings through real-time transcription and transcription
approval.

About Hitachi
Hitachi’s Internet Platform Business Unit provides state of the art wireless
solutions in many of today’s vertical markets, such as: healthcare, hospitality,
education, insurance, real estate, heavy manufacturing, retail, transportation,
and government. The flagship solution, the VisionPlate�, is a powerful,
practical, expandable, flexible and intrinsically safe wireless tablet PC that
enables companies to perform critical business practices such as Data Entry and
Processing, Inventory and Receiving, Monitoring and Tracking, Internet, E-Mail
and a host of other functions, all with the unbridled freedom necessary for
today’s fast moving business environment.

Hitachi, Ltd. (NYSE: HIT), headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, is a leading global
electronics company, with approximately 320,000 employees worldwide. Fiscal 2001
(ended March 31, 2002) consolidated sales totaled 7,994 billion yen ($60.1
billion). The company offers a wide range of systems, products and services in
market sectors, including information systems, electronic devices, power and
industrial systems, consumer products, materials and financial services. For
more information on Hitachi, please visit the company’s Web site at
http://global.hitachi.com.

About Codehost, Inc.
Codehost is focused on developing custom applications and turnkey solutions for
a variety of hardware manufacturers and Fortune 500 companies. With their
expertise in a number of operating system platforms, hardware architectures,
embedded technologies and peripheral devices, Codehost strives to establish
long-term relationships with OEM’s to support and grow their market share, while
helping them enter emerging market segments.

Codehost has emerged as a leader in key areas of Linux development. Codehost�s
BrightQ� has been adopted as the standard printing solution for UNIX and Linux
by top printing manufacturers such as Ricoh Corporation and Samsung Electronics.
Through their embedded Linux initiatives, Codehost offers its clients a suite of
development services including application and driver development, and OS
tuning.

More information is available at
www.codehost.com.
 

Medical Innovation and the GNU GPL

It had never occured to me that Medical Clinicians and Practitioners might see the need to make their own innovations freely available to their colleagues. However, that is the case I am here to discuss today. It does seem that there is still a spirit of community alive within the Medical field. That community desire to share is not so different, nor should it be strange to the hacker community.

Why should it be strange that a sense of the necessity for sharing should be prevalent in other communities beyond the computing and online fields? Sharing, after all, is a human trait.The desire to help a fellow human being, involved in a similar quest, whether for knowledge or simple self-discovery, is natural. However, in the medical field, the quest for knowledge can affect the masses, and can reap beneficial rewards for us all.

I have come across one such example in the Medical community, a person whose name I shall not divulge, simply out of an abundance of caution for their personal privacy. We were chatting by phone, when he asked me a rather interesting question. The question was simple, yet well put, for it is something that I discuss quite often – the spirit of sharing information.

It seems that my friend has designed a rather ingenious method of establshing a display of data which can be shared for the management of research. He has run into a problem, for he would like to see that his team can retain credit for their work (a copyright would seem to do take care of that part), but would also desire to ensure that this work never be made proprietary. It is their desire to ensure that this innovation be able to be shared among the Medical community without being taken by some organization and removed from the public domain where no one can benefit from this innovation.

Needless to say, the suggestion warms my heart, for it makes me understand that there are many who are willing to share information, and are seeking ways to do the greater good for society. I would be remiss in my duty here if I did not say “Bravo!” to my friend, for his bold effort to seek ways to enable the oublic good to be served. After all, can you imagine a world in which research is actually a crime because someone has deemed that they own all rights to a certain organ and or its genetic structure? What would be illegal next? The study of Mathematics or perhaps English? There is a deep injustice done when men are prevented from sharing knowledge to help their fellow man. I applaud he and his team’s efforts to make a difference in society.

My question then to the community (and I am not a lawyer – sorry, no geekspeak here, for I want my friend to know and understand the depth of my gratitude for his
efforts), is this: can the GNU GPL cover such things as Medical innovations in software? Would something of this nature developed in Open Office be able to be copyrighted and protected under the GNU GPL and kept within the public domain?

Perhaps the greatest problem my friend faces is the likelihood that someone would come
along and try to make the innovation a part of a proprietary program and remove all benefit from other researchers. That act would destroy the goals of research, and make a mockery of their effort to share information.

If you can advise, please share your comments. You would be helping not only me, but all of us as well. I would deeply appreciate a well-reasoned response that I can convey. Thank you.

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