The American Academy of Family Practitioners (AAFP and the ASTM standards organization is reporting the: ‘ASTM Continuity of Care Record (CCR) is being developed in response to the need to organize and make transportable a set of basic information about a patient’s health care that is accessible to clinicians and patients. It is intended to foster and improve continuity of care, reduce medical errors, and ensure a minimum standard of secure health information transportability. Adoption of the CCR by the medical community and IT vendors will be a first step in achieving interoperability of medical records (one of CHiT’s guiding principles)…’ Thanks to Dan Johnson for this link.

The Philadelphia Business Journal is reporting that New Jersey will attempt a state wide EMR: ‘…An electronic health records system would improve the quality of health care and make health information available when and where it is needed,” Department of Banking and Insurance Acting Commissioner Donald Bryan said. “Diagnostic tools would suggest the best medical practices. Medical errors would be minimized. Payers and specialists would be able to avoid unnecessary tests and the system would lower administrative costs…’ They have high hopes indeed for this system. Depending upon the implementation, the reality could be different. Thanks to Medical Informatics Insider for this link.

ELINCS is a project to standardize lab reporting for the purpose of inclusion into an EHR. According to the project website: ‘…The EHR-Lab Interoperability and Connectivity Standards (ELINCS) project will develop a national standard for the delivery of real-time laboratory results from a lab�s information system to an electronic health record. Typically this process can be a fractured one in which lab results are sent to the ordering doctor�s office via fax or mail. The results must be filed in the patient�s paper chart or manually entered into the physician�s EHR…’ Public comments are being accepted May 13 through May 26 with more details at the above link. There’s also a press release. Thanks to Nancy Anthracite for these links.

Newsforge has a story about the University of North Carolina School of Medicine and affiliated hospitals use of Plone content management software. Free and Open Source Web content management software is a great success story for FOSS and UNC appears to be making good use of it: ‘ At the University of North Carolina School of Medicine and affiliated hospitals, intranet and Web site users felt like they were “visiting a foreign land” each time they landed on a different department, says UNC Healthcare IT staff director Jim Walsh. Each department had it own look and feel, which made a hodge-podge for people going from site to site to perform searches and look up information. Today, however, after a revamp that included migration to the Plone open source content management system, site visitors have sense of a unified organization, and UNC staff feel at home with the new technology…’ Linux Medical News does not use Plone yet, but may in the future since it is based upon the same Zope software.

Brad Barclay’s blog has a report about the Canadian EHealth Conference 2005. He concludes that the ‘doers’ (implementers) of EHR’s do not understand FOSS: ‘There are billions of dollars available in Canada to implement IT solutions for health care, but it could all be wasted because the “doers” don’t understand the concept of Open Source…in setting up their information technology, had they considered Open Source as a solution?

The answers were long winded, but boiled down to this: the panellists didn’t feel Open Source was a viable alternative at this time.

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Slashdot had a link to this article on IBM‘s website regarding a interesting epidimiological modeler that runs on Linux. The screenshot in the upper right hand corner tells the story. Excerpt: ‘…Policymakers responsible for creating strategies to contain diseases and prevent epidemics need an accurate understanding of disease dynamics and the likely outcomes of preventative actions. In an increasingly connected world with extremely efficient global transportation links, the vectors of infection can be quite complex. STEM facilitates the development of advanced mathematical models, the creation of flexible models involving multiple populations (species) and interactions between diseases, and a better understanding of epidemiology…’

Editor’s note: the website appears to be up now, but turn your speaker volume down for a noisy sales pitch. Health Data Management has a story on the California Medical Society endorsing Athena’s (note the spelling, this is NOT Aetna) ASP software which I hope works better than its website which at the time of this writing is down. ‘The California Medical Association has endorsed the software and services of athenahealth Inc. and will make them available at discounted pricing to its 35,000 physician members.

The Waltham, Mass.-based vendor sells physician practice management software remotely hosted via the application service provider computing model. It also offers outsourced billing and collections services…’

Why has Ontario, Canada chosen to link their Smart Systems for Health Agency to the proprietary .NET technologies? I recently was perusing the website for the Ontario, Canada Smart Health initiative and noticed that a lot of the job postings were for .NET technologies. The question I would have is why tax payer money is being spent toward what will amount to a proprietary solution? Are there sufficiently advanced Open Source projects which could be “suggested” to this agency for inclusion in their efforts?

AMA-News has an article on Free/Open Source EMR’s. This article has good information and overview, but is condescending in tone and contains inaccuracies such as: ‘There’s a new pitch for selling electronic medical records software’ The article mentions VistA, Medsphere, OpenEMR and TORCH as well as quotes from physicians using the software. There is also this: ‘…The ranks of open-source EMRs could soon grow by at least one as two foundations created by the settlements of physician class-action lawsuits against Aetna and CIGNA Corp. — Physicians’ Foundation for Health Systems Excellence and Physicians’ Foundation for Health Systems Innovations — are planning to develop and market an open-source EMR to physicians around the country…’ which is news to me. These new organizations are distributing grants, but the first round for submissions was March 1, 2005.

The March 2005 issue of Psychiatric Services has a column by Thomas Good the author of SQLClinic an electronic medical record geared toward Psychiatry which, has been used with other types of practices. This is a mainstream Psychiatry journal so it is good to see a FOSS project getting some press there. From the introduction by the column editors: ‘Open-source software addresses three crucial needs of users: it is easy to customize, it is inexpensive, and the user�s future is not tied to that of a vendor company. Although the software the authors describe in this month�s column is still too formidable for an individual practitioner, moderate- sized organizations should consider it near the top of the list. Let us hope that programmers develop a version tailored for solo and small group practices soon. We will report on it in this column when it occurs…’ There is a factual error in the article in that it states that the Open Source movement began in the early 80’s. Actually, the Free Software movement began in the early 80’s. The Open Source movement began in approximately 1998 and shares many of the goals, but is distinct from the Free Software movement. A short history of both of these movements can be found here.