Nominations Open for 2002 Linux Medical News Achievement Award

Nominations are officially open for the 2nd annual Linux Medical News Software Achievement Award to be presented at the November 9th-13th AMIA Fall conference in San Antonio, Texas. 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 who has accomplished the most towards the goal of improving medical education and practice through free/open source medical software.

Individuals can be nominated by themselves or others by sending a 1-2 page essay to ivaldes@hal-pc.org on why the individual nominated should receive the award. The award will be given by a panel of judges to the most deserving nominee. Suitable nominees are not limited to software engineers, but can also be project leaders, academics, journalists, documentation writers and any others who have made significant contributions to open source medical software.

The award will be given at the November American Medical Informatics Association 2002 Fall meeting in San Antonio at a date and time to be announced. Attendance is not required to win the award. Deadline for nominations is Friday, October 1st, 2002.

Employees of Linux Medical News and their relatives are not eligible for the award. Posters to Linux Medical News who are not employed by Linux Medical News are eligible for the award.

PR: Large Hospitals, Small Practitioners Benefit from Free Service

Medical practitioners and facilities are finding a valuable time-saving tool in Transcription Match, a free database found at MedicalTranscription.com. The service uses MySQL a popular free/open source database software. Launched in May, Transcription Match has sent 175 company reports to physicians and facilities to date. Transcription companies must meet pre-qualifying experience goals in order to participate in Transcription Match. CEO Melinda Decker explains: “Our listings vary tremendously. We’ve got individual transcriptionists, which some physicians prefer, listed alongside large corporations such as Medquist.”

The online database of transcription providers levels the playing field for the small service or independent medical transcriptionist. “We’re finding our inquiries are coming from medical practitioners of all shapes and sizes,” says Decker “They’re coming from large hospital corporations as well as from sole practitioners. Some of our inquirers are very tech savvy, some are still using analog tapes that require pickup and delivery. All of them are seeking HIPAA compliance.”

When a large university medical center in Texas was recently seeking an additional outsourcer for their medical transcription, they went to MedicalTranscription.com and initiated a “Transcription Match” search. A regional cancer center in Ohio used the same search to securely replace their existing in-house set-up which they felt was no longer efficient. A hospital in coastal Massachusetts used “Transcription Match” to locate a medical transcription service that could integrate their product directly into the existing electronic medical records systems on site. A North Carolina internist wanted to find a transcription service that would assist him in moving toward an EMR system in the future, while providing HIPAA compliant services for him in the present.

Informatics-type strategies are also utilized. VP of Information Technology John Nistad states, “The inquiries we receive are beneficial in determining the trends of our industry. Statistical (but not identifying) inquiry data is shared with all services listed on MedicalTranscription.com, to enable them to adjust their offering as the market dictates. In addition to being out there, our listing companies are learning more about the needs of their clients and as a result, can provide better service.”

Utilizing the free Transcription Match enables the medical facility to locate the service that can meet their needs based on specialty, volume, dictation technology, MIS integration, EMR capabilities and much more. Physicians and medical practices can also find information about electronic medical records, ASP services and more.

For more information:

MedicalTranscription.com Inc.
P.O. Box 6
Layton, NJ 07851
973-948-5151
www.MedicalTranscription.com

Infoworld: genome is open source, too

Infoworld,reports in this article about two genome researchers views of open source expoused at the O’Reilly convention: ‘…two leading researchers involved with the sequencing of the human genome delivered presentations citing the benefits of open source both in the development of computer systems and in science.

Ewan Birney, team leader for genomic annotation at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), and Jim Kent, a research scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, spoke Thursday at the O’Reilly Open Source Conference here.

“I don’t think you can have science without open source,”…

www.care2x.com – Opensource Healthcare Software

I came across this site www.care2x.com which describes itself as follows (uses MySQL,PHP and Apache): ‘CARE 2002 is a smart software for hospitals and health care organizations. It is designed to integrate the different information systems existing in these organizations into one single efficient system.

CARE 2002 solves the problems inherent in a network of multiple programs that are noncompatible with each other. It can integrate almost any type of services, systems, departments, clinic,processes, data, communication, etc. that exist in a hospital. Editor: It also is hosted on Sourceforge.net with license listed as GPL. Anyone care to post a brief history of the project?

Potpourri

A little potpourri with no direct Free/Open Source relevance: according to the Tennessean, it seems that HCA is linking all its hospital supply purchasing by a Internet based ordering system which is supposed to reduce costs. Read all about it here.
The Boston Globe has a piece about why doctors resist a computerized diagnostic assistant, while the Orlando Sentinel writes about a non-free system that some doctors are using and others resist. I’m leaving out the usual bumper crop of info-mercial type articles of medical software companies that never seem to materialize as a standard, national system. Hey! what would happen if free and open source software is used?

Thesis on OSS

Hi, I am a newcomer to this site. I am thinking to do a thesis on OSS for my Master degree. I am from the background of Computer Science / Business Administration. So my topic will be more inclined towards these perspectives. But now I haven’t got a clue about the specific topic, nor what kind of research to do (survey, case study, etc). So any hint or suggestion from the community will be highly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Tim Cook Leaves Free Practice Management, Inc.

Citing irreconcilable differences in philosophy the developer of FreePM resigned his positions as President and CTO, in mid June, from the company he co-founded in 2000 to market services and support for the software.

It is expected that the company will be issuing a news release on it’s website at http://www.freepm.com in the near future.

Tim Cook
twcook@iswt.com
731.884.4126

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