Health Leaders has an article about an under-utilized resource that is likely to become more important in the near future: ‘…nearly every healthcare organization already has an expert on staff who possesses the skills needed for this shift toward knowledge- and evidence-based medicine. The core training and mission of a medical librarian is to make sure that decision-makers (scientists, physicians, health consumers, administrators) have accurate and timely information, where and when they need it, and in the format they find most useful.
Nominationees for the 2002 GNU/Linux Medical News Achievement Award
The nominees for the 2002 GNU/Linux Medical News
Software Achievement Award in alphabetic order
are as follows:
A very distinguished group. The full text
of each nomination is within. This award will be
presented at the November 2002
Thomas Beale
I hereby nominate Thomas Beale of the openEHR Foundation to receive
the 2002 LMN Achievement Award.
Over a period of many years Thomas has been steadfast in his pursuit
of the “future-proof” medical record application.
Thomas’ keen ability to always listen and always learn from others,
yet stay focused and not stray from his mission has this year
produced the openEHR Reference Model.
While this work in itself is significant, Thomas has also been very
busy working with other standards bodies to educate himself and them
on the differences and similarities among standards. His world
travels, quiet leadership and proof through publication puts Thomas
in the front of the queue in qualifying for this honor.
K.S. Bhaskar
I want to nominate K.S. Bhaskar of Sanchez Computer Associates, who was directly responsible for convincing Sanchez to open
source G.TM MUMPS which in turn led to the porting of VistA to the full open source stack on Linux and the creation of WorldVistA. This in my
opinion is the most significant thing anyone in open source in health
care has done since we got the ball rolling 5 years ago.
Brian Bray
I hereby nominate Brian Bray of Minoru Development to receive the
2002 LMN Achievement Award.
Brian’s initial contact with a selected group of open source
advocates and subsequent hosting of the Toronto Summit was the spark
that ignited collaboration which eventually gave birth to OSHCA.
His leadership at Minoru helped to secure funding from the European
Union for on going open source research projects such as PICNIC.
Daniel L. Johnson, MD
I nominate Dr. Daniel L. Johnson for the Second Annual Linux Medical
News Award. His steadfast commitment to Open Source in healthcare has been a
shining example of perseverance. His accomplishments include participating at some level in a great
percentage (if not all) of the OS healthcare projects. He has
presented open source at AMIA (in fact was the first to do so). He
has presented open source concepts to major medical institutions.
His quiet and humble demeanor belies his knowledge and leadership
by example.
Wayne Rasband
I would like to propose a name for the 2002 Linux Medical News Achievement Award, which is more related to free software than strictly on Linux.
My proposal is for Wayne Rasband (wayne@codon.nih.gov), Research Services Branch, National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, Maryland, USA, as author of ImageJ (http://rsb.info.nih.gov/ij/).
ImageJ is a medical image processing software developed
and put in the public domain (old-style definition, but
definitely valid) with source code included by Wayne Rasband.
The software is inspired by a previously created and carefully
maintained software named NIH-Image, which was
available for Macintosh and ported to Windows by
a third-party.
What I can personally add is that the software
is feature full and at a really professional level
making it compete with commercially available
software (in the $5000-$10000 range)…
In addition to the software,, Wayne
Rasband is taking care of the user community
through mailing lists and hosting.
LMN Newsletter Vol. 3, Issue 1
The latest Linux Medical Newsletter is out here. You can subscribe to it here. Excerpt: ‘…corporate politics set in and the project began stalling precisely when it was becoming quite viable for the real world. For closed-source software, this would have been deadly. The software would likely have been locked up in the crumbling corporation indefinitely. Its former customers would have been left with several choices of what to do with abandoned medical record software, all of them bad. Contrast this with software covered by a free/open source license…’
Open Letter to UK’s NHS IT Director
Responding to this article at e-health-media.com, Tim Cook has written an open letter to the newly named Director of the United Kingdom’s National Health Service: ‘…Considering your lack of direct exposure to healthcare information systems I assume you will be choosing an experienced team to advise you? Maybe some people from the BCS HIC and of course the people on the PRIMIS project have first hand knowledge of the problems with interfacing healthcare systems and data export/import. I also trust that you have an open mind about open source software as well. Cliches such as “no one has ever been fired for buying Microsoft” may not be true for much longer…
Dear Mr. Granger,
I read with great interest of your appointment as the Director General of NHS IT. For several years I have looked to the UK NHS as the world leader in healthcare IT deployments. The NHS has been a great source of information and inspiration for those of us who desire to learn from history.
Certainly your experience in working with divergent systems will be invaluable in establishing national standards and bringing together the various systems. There is a great need to be able to not only share information between systems. The ability to do something as simple as move a patient record from GP to another, while maintaining the context integrity of the record would be wonderful.
Considering your lack of direct exposure to healthcare information systems I assume you will be choosing an experienced team to advise you? Maybe some people from the BCS HIC and of course the people on the PRIMIS project have first hand knowledge of the problems with interfacing healthcare systems and data export/import.
I also trust that you have an open mind about open source software as well. Cliches such as “no one has ever been fired for buying Microsoft” may not be true for much longer. While many endusers and especially those that are active in the open source healthcare community have known of these security weaknesses. knowingly using software that exposes private patient data to disclosure has to be a violation of the RFA. Isn’t it?
In the hustle and bustle of changing jobs you may have missed this statement by Microsoft Senior VP Windows Development; “I’m not proud,” he told delegates yesterday (5 September). “We really haven’t done everything we could to protect our customers. Our products just aren’t engineered for security,” admitted Valentine, who since 1998 has headed Microsoft’s Windows division. (see Computer Weekly article).
Again, congratulations on your appointment. I am certain I speak for a large portion of the healthcare IT community in saying that we are very interested in hearing about the direction you intend to take.
Also note that the Open Source Healthcare Alliance annual meeting is November 14 – 16 at UCLA in Los Angles CA, USA. We would be honored to have you present your vision of NHS IT at this event.
Sincerely,
Tim Cook
Open Paradigms
Microsoft Products Are Not Engineered for Security!
What many in the open source community have been espousing for years, a Microsoft VP admits in public. The pressure finally squeezed the truth out of at least one Microsoft executive according to this article in Computer Weekly as well as here.
When will we finally see a more proactive movement within the US Government to stop using MS products in mission critical situations? You tax dollars deserve better treatment.
FreePM Apparently Dead, TORCH Lives
The FreePM website now points to casino’s and other websites. The registration has apparently expired which leads to the conclusion that the project is no longer going forward. However, former president and lead developer of FreePM Tim Cook forked the project recently so that it continues as the TORCH project with Open Paradigms, the company he formed. This actually demonstrates how robust free and open source software is, in that the software survives the fall of the sponsoring company.
Netscape 7.0 Released
Last week Netscape
released version 7.0 of their browser. The browser
is heavily based upon the free/open source
Mozilla
browser. This is a significant event because it
proved against formidable odds that open source
software can deliver competitive products without
exorbitant, onerous and restrictive licensing
that can benefit a for-profit company. For medicine
it is a great asset because of its familiar name and
that the browsers functionality can be embedded
into medical software in ways the original
programmers may not have forseen. Unknown, is
whether it will be able to regain some of its
former market share.
Bizjournals: ‘simpler path to medical records’
This Bizjournals.com (free registration) story about a closed source EMR is interesting for its approach: The doctor continues using pen and paper notes which get scanned in. The reason: “A requirement for the programmers was that a doctor had to be able to figure out how to use it in 15 minutes or less,” Seems pretty limiting to me, but is a possible answer to the ‘I’m not a typist!’ type doctor. While we are discussing closed source, this smells of the usual expensive Health-IT disaster in the making.
Mercury News: Insurers write off investment in MedUnite
The Mercury News has this story about MedUnite: ‘…An attempt by seven big health insurers to take control of electronic services that link them with patients and doctors has run into financial trouble, industry officials said, and most of the companies have written off all or most of their investment. Insurance companies expect to reap enormous savings if they can persuade hundreds of thousands of doctors to use computers and the Internet instead of telephones and paper to submit claims…’ Which also begs the question how is Healtheon/WebMD doing?
Forbes: Can Information Technology Save Lives?
Forbes has a wide ranging discussion with senior editor Robert Langreth about IT in health care and why it largely hasn’t happened.