Steve Jobs has died. Rest in Peace.

Wow, Houston Texas looks like it will be a hotbed of Health IT activities end of September early October. Astronaut VistA training, AMIA CMIO, Open Source Health Conference and Texas Health IT Summit. In chronologic order:

Astronaut VistA training September 25th-26th

AMIA CMIO boot camp Sept 29th-October 2nd

Open Source Health Conference September 29th-30th

Texas Health IT Summit September 30th-October 2nd

This article is yet another example of pervasive proprietary EHR statistical bias.

The linked article excludes an enormous segment: Veterans Affairs VistA, its close cousin IHS RPMS and its increasing number of private sector deployments. There are approximately 1,000 VA outpatient clinics and many more Indian Health Service outpatient clinics as well as more and more private sector deployments. Not counting them or pretending that they don’t exist gives an inaccurate view.

A Veterans Affairs requested VistA Modernization Report is now available. The good news: it prominently features and recommends open source and discusses the prospect of VA VistA as a national standard. The bad news is that it appears to be progressive while actually being regressive from current and past VA experience and practice.

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Ubuntu Netbook Remix (reviewed version 10.4) is Linux like you’ve never seen before. It has a smooth, attractive, interface that works very well with the netbook form factor. It is a clear winner, as good as if not better than operating systems from enormous corporations. There was a gotcha on my HP Mini installation in an otherwise great work.

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The 8th National Medical Banking Institute is an exciting cross-industry educational forum for the banking and healthcare communities. At the Institute, we explore how banks are improving healthcare by reducing costs and increasing access and the quality of healthcare.

The International Journal of Medical Banking (http://www.mbproject.org/journal) is intended to educate commerce, government and academia about medical banking principles and technologies.

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CONNECT is an open source software gateway that connects an organizations health IT systems into health information exchanges using Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) conventions, agreements and cores services to better serve patients throughtout the country. Built through collaboration of more than 20 federal agencies, the CONNECT gateway can help organizations reap the benefits of health information exchange with other healthcare institutions nationwide.

According to this article in Government Health IT: “The Health and Human Services Department will sponsor a “code-a-thon” Aug. 27 so open source programmers can meet to collaborate on ways to improve the CONNECT gateway, software that lets organizations access the Nationwide Health Information Network…”

We are live from the FOSSHealth conference in Houston, schedule here. Bill Vass of Sun (still not Oracle yet he confirms) NHIN CONNECT Efforts is talking about the difference between FOSS and proprietary in which RSA was openly and rigorously examined by experts and remains quite secure except for brute force methods, while the the closed proprietary Clipper chip was not and was broken within 48 hours…competition for support occurs with FOSS licensing whereas proprietary vendors can sit back and say hmmm, how much to have an America’s Cup entry this year?… More after the break.

A PC World article here states that: “Microsoft, which has been at odds with the Linux community over the years because of intellectual property issues, said on Monday it has released 20,000 lines of Linux code to the Linux kernel community…”