WorldVistA held its 7th VistA Community Conference at Shepherd University June 27-29, 2008. Key note speakers included Dr. Kolodner, National Coordinator for Health IT, and Jessica Kahn, Medicaid Transformation Project Manager. Attendees included representatives from India, Malaysia, Puerto Rico, and many other public and private sector health care organizations across the U.S. More information about the conference, and presentations made can be found on the WorldVistA web site at www.worldvista.org . It is also recommended that individuals consider visiting the Shepherd University health IT web site at www.shepherd.edu/surc/cosi .
OpenEMR HQ Announces ‘Plug and Play’ EMR Appliance
OpenEMR HQ announced on Thursday that it will begin offering a ‘plug and play’ EMR appliance as of July 14th, 2008. This last minute announcement came as the company also announced its plans to offer a native OpenEMR client for Microsoft Windows operating system on September, 15th, 2008.
July 18th Conference: Connecting California to Improve Patient Care in 2008
The Connecting California to Improve Patient Care in 2008 conference will occur on Friday July 18, 2008 — 9:00 A.M. to 4:15 P.M. Ukiah Valley Conference Center, 200 S. School St., Ukiah, California Conference Cost – $35 (includes lunch). This looks like one of those small conferences that end up becoming very important.
Congress Health IT Bill and Cerner Lobbying
Alberto Borges, MD writes in with news that a major Health IT bill is up for approval in Congress and that Cerner spent $180,000 in lobbying the government in the 1st quarter alone. Might the passage of this bill heavily favor the formation of a cartel of proprietary vendors? Dr. Borges also has a presentation from 04/2008 on many subjects, including positions or lack thereof of Presidential candidates on Health IT.
Misys OS Development Manager
In addition to a Director of Open Source Solutions, Misys is also expanding its open source development team and is searching for a Manager of Open Source Development who will lead a core group to internal developers in support of open source projects. This is a great opportunity for a seasoned OS healthcare developer with solid management experience who isn’t afraid to her their hands dirty.
Manager, Open source Development
HealthCloud CHMED Developer API Public Beta Available
If you have followed our previous posts on an open source medications database ClearHealth you are already aware that we now operate a fully public domain data resource regarding medications for use with our ClearHealth system. We have been struggling with a way to make this available and relevant for a wide audience for use in many applications and have now completed the beginning of that effort. Considerations had to be made taking into account liability and the frequently changing nature of some of the data (daily or even hourly in some cases).
Free medical tool tackles disease
BBC news has an article on the use of OpenMRS in Africa. ‘A free and simple piece of open source software is helping manage the spread of disease in developing countries. The Open Medical Record System (OpenMRS) is providing countries, such as South Africa, with an online patient medical record system…’ The project leader Dr. Paul Biondich was awarded the 2007 Linux Medical Freedom Award
EFMI Special Topic Conference on Open Source
The EFMI (European Federation for Medical Informatics – www.efmi.org ) Special Topic Conference (STC) for 2008 will take place in London, UK on 9-11 September 2008.
This EFMI Special Topic Conference (STC) will be organised by members of the IMIA and EFMI Open Source Working Groups with a focus on Open Source in European Health Care.
The CCR, CCD and other specifications
I find it interesting that we do not have a category for standards/specifications here. Maybe it is my fault for not suggesting one earlier?
The linked (below) blog post by Dr. David Kibbe I think exemplifies the NIH (not invented here) syndrome and how we so often want to rewrite (misrepresent) history in the US healthcare IT industry that we should (MUST) give pause.
NEJM: Electronic Health Records in Ambulatory Care — A National Survey of Physicians
New England Journal of Medicine has the results of a study on the very low use of EHR’s in primary care with NY Times take on the study. Unfortunately, the message seems to be that financial incentives to doctors for pretty much any proprietary EHR system is what is needed with no analysis or thought whatsoever of their problems vs. open source ones: