Health care is a top priority for President-elect Obama, and he wants your help in reforming the system to provide quality, affordable health care for all Americans. That’s why this holiday season, we’re asking you to give us the gift of your ideas and input. Sign up to host a Health Care Community Discussion anytime from December 15th to 31st. We’ll provide all our hosts with special moderator kits that will give you everything you need to get the discussion going. And Senator Tom Daschle, the leader of the Transition’s Health Policy Team, will even choose one discussion to attend in person. http://change.gov/page/s/hcdiscussion
AMIA Free/Open Source White Paper
The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) Open Source Working Group has released its Free and Open Source White Paper with press release here: “…Even the most skeptical interpretation of the numbers presented on Free and Open Source deployments and patients shows that these systems are being used in sizable numbers,” said Ignacio Valdes, MD, MSc the primary author of the paper and chair of the AMIA Open Source Working Group. He continues, “This paper is for practitioners, CIO’s, IT staff, and policymakers making difficult health IT decisions with valid concerns about cost, ethics, interoperability, patient privacy, security and the future of their organizations in the hands of proprietary software. This white paper should be a must-read for every organization that uses or is contemplating the use of Electronic Medical Records.” Complete text of the press release after the break.
European Comission Report on ICT standards in the health sector
The European Comission has published a report (PDF) entitled: ICT standards in the health sector: current situation and prospects. The report discusses Open Source as well as OpenEHR and difficulties of HL7: ‘…the RIM documentation is
described as being “disastrously unclear”, poorly integrated with HL7 v3.0 documentation,
and inconsistent.
Federal Health Board Panel Announcement
The Medical Banking Project announced that it is collaborating with the Mayo Clinic Health Policy Center to organize a panel with top-level health care CEOs and policy experts to discuss the creation of a new “Federal Health Board” at its 2009 Medical Banking Institute on March 11-13, 2009 in Nashville, TN. More here http://tinyurl.com/medical-banking-fed
Identifying U.S-African Collaborations and Projects that Would Benefit from Expanded Bandwidth to Africa
The Internet Educational Equal Access
Foundation (IEEAF), along with several partners, has received
a planning
grant from the National Science
Foundation to propose very high speed Internet extensions, on
the order of 10 Gbps, to connect the academic, research, health and
non-governmental organization (NGO) communities in African countries
to the rest of the world. Such connections would provide African
universities and medical centers connectivity equivalent to the best
available to comparable institutions in the United States. To win
the large grant that would allow the network connection to be implemented,
California Partners Release Open Source ELINCS Instructions Using Mirth to Transform HL7 v2.x into ELINCS (HL7-R1)
Contact — Tanya Laino 707.462.6369 HEALDSBURG, CALIF. — November 21, 2008 — Early this year Alliance Medical Center received a grant from California HealthCare Foundation to demonstrate a simple software tool to receive electronic laboratory results in the new ELINCS format. ELINCS (“EHR Laboratory Interoperability and Connectivity Specification”) is a messaging system intended to standardize the electronic reporting of test results from clinical laboratories into electronic health record (EHR) systems. A new “HL7-R1” format of ELINCS was adopted by HL7 this past Summer. Today Alliance Medical Center is joined by two partners in releasing a technical specification titled “Using Mirth to transform HL7 v2.x into ELINCS (HL7-R1).”
PhoneReminder 1.0, appointment reminder software for OpenEMR, released
OpenEMR HQ, a small software startup in NE Oklahoma, announced the release of PhoneReminder for OpenEMR. PhoneReminder is add-in software to the OpenEMR medical records package that allows users to automatically notify patients by phone (voice or text message) of upcoming appointments.
Feature on Midland VistA
Medsphere’s reference deployment of VistA, Midland Hospital, has been featured in computer world. The article reveals interesting facts that I was previously unaware of:
To assess these risks, Midland turned to Deloitte Consulting, which provided a plan to mitigate them: gauge Medsphere consultants’ willingness to sign on as Midland employees should Medsphere go belly up.
Overall a good article.
Open Source Ultrasound System from South of France
As Vincent reported in his post “Medical GNOME“, the French company Supersonic Imagine (founded in 2005) just announced its next-generation ultrasound system for breast lesion imaging that will come with mostly Open Source software components.
Continue reading
DOCHS Extends Call For Papers
DOHCS the 2009 Demonstrating Open Source Heath Care Solutions conference, has extended their call for presentations until November 15th. The 3rd Annual DOHCS conference will be held on February 20, 2009 at the LAX Westin Hotel in Los Angeles, CA. The event will be held concurrently with SCALE 7x, the 2009 Southern California Linux Expo.