Apparently Kaiser is having issues. Apparently a project manager “sent a scathing e-mail to most of the company’s 140,000 employees” and the “The executive overseeing Kaiser Permanente’s ambitious $3-billion push toward computerizing the medical records of its 8.6 million members resigned Tuesday, a sign of the challenges facing the project.”

Jacob Reider, MD over at DocNotes has a post up about How to setup Switchvox and gtalk to use as a VOIP solution to his practice. Switchvox is VOIP solution based on Asterix. A great example of using FOSS to run a medical practice more smoothly.

Neil Versel is reporting that Snowmed International might be giving up the proprietary nature of Snomed Clinical Terms.

LMN readers may be interested in the following article published on the BBC News website:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/5388182.stm

It starts:
“Ubuntu. That was what Bill Clinton told the Labour party conference it needed to remember this week.”

Only one of the current comments refers to the Linux distro – but I am sure we can change that …. ;-))

Cheers, Peter Murray

I recently picked up Understanding AJAX by Josh Eichorn. Josh is a core ClearHealth developer with Uversa. I am about halfway through it and it is an excellent reference for any web-based EHR developer. AJAX holds the promise of making a web-based EHR just as interactive as a thick-client application. Understanding AJAX covers the basics of AJAX and then spends a lot of time discussing the various AJAX libraries available and how to make use of them. Because so many languages and libraries are covered, there is almost no FOSS EHR project that could not benefit from the techniques described.

This is quite an accomplishment for both Josh and Uversa.

Fred Trotter

The goal of the Mirth Project is to develop Mirth, an open source cross-platform HL7 interface engine that enables bi-directional sending of HL7 messages between systems and applications over multiple transports.

By utilizing an enterprise service bus framework and a channel-based architecture, Mirth allows messages to be filtered, transformed, and routed based on user-defined rules.

Mirth Project is based on another piece of open source software: HAPI

Being fully-aware of all the criticism I shall receive from the so-called “Open Source and Free Software” grounds, I am taking my individiual liberty to say the following: I think the biggest contribution to Open Source and Free Software comes from the Microsoft itself!

A “hard-to-digest” commentary on Open Source and Free Software and Microsoft…

Yes, in Turkey I personally had the liberty to copy and freely distribute copies of expensive Microsoft products in the past; how? Well, IPR and copyright has not been legally protected since a few years and also even though we now have legal framework to do so in practice it still does not work…Up to my knowledge there are hardly any specialised lawyers and judges in the country to take on such lawsuits. Even the activities of BSA (Business Software Alliance) still have a questionable legal validity and as far as I know, in very little cases where they kind of arrest and publicise in newspapers and etc. are just for show-off.

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There is a relatively new, open source project on sourceforge called Office Manager – Medical Edition. It was designed to be as easy to install and use. While it has a good deal to go to be as feature rich as many of the other software packages, it is MUCH easier to install and use. It has patient management, inventory management, rudimentary accounting, claims management, HCFA 1500 forms, insurance management, Point of Sale to integrate with insurance billing, scheduling and administration. It works on Linux, of course, but also mac, windows, and pretty much any GUI operating system that can run java. Michael Lee (myself) is the sole author of the program and is looking to find a way to work on the program full time. It was developed on my own time to support a group of doctors. Check it out.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/office-manager/

National Association of Rural Health Centers (NARHC) supported a widely viewed EMR presentation which dismissed open source EMR’s as wishful thinking and not appropriate for any public non-profit rural health center. What follows is a discussion between an open source CottageMed developer and Roger Erickson, a well-informed open source supporter, regarding the contrarian views of presenter Kerry Casperson and the NARHC.

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The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services today released a report summarizing over 500 responses totaling nearly 5,000 pages of information to the HHS’ Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology’s (ONCHIT) Request for Information (RFI) published November 15, 2004 seeking public comment on how to best achieve widespread interoperability of health information through a nationwide health information network (NHIN).

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