Newsforge has an article on a pharmaceutical services company that has gone to Linux: ‘…When Siler looked at the potential financial impact and the eight-month timeline involved in setting up and getting trained with Oracle or another big company and compared it with the 60-day setup and greatly reduced license fees associated with Gluecode’s product running on Red Hat Linux, he was easily able to convince his superiors that open source was the way to go.

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Here is a summary of a healthcare panel that discussed Free and Open Source Software in medicine at the 2005 PC Forum: ‘… Larry Augustin, CEO of Medsphere, [as well as being founder of Sourceforge and on the board of OSDL] believes that open source software will play a key role in solving the healthcare dilemma. His company wants to be the Red Hat of healthcare, and has ported software originally from the Veterans Affairs Admininstration to Linux. He said that the vast majority of hospitals can’t afford the high-end proprietary system, and that open source will change the economics.

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NYT Magazine has an in-depth article on different ways of looking at health care reform that take into account that rising health costs also yield more health benefits. Health-IT is mentioned starting on page 6: ‘…Many doctors still write prescriptions and keep records manually, and Cutler says that digitizing the health-care system would save considerable administrative expense and improve quality. It would minimize prescription errors, speed paperwork and make a patient’s medical history portable. But the big kick is what information technology could do for the doctor’s understanding of his own performance.

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JAMA has a research article on how TDS, a closed-source Eclypsis Computerized Physician Order Entry system (CPOE), facilitated some types of medication prescribing errors. Unknown is how this one product compares to other products of the same kind, whether proprietary or free and open source. Medical informaticist and Linux Medical News contributor Scot Silverstein has posted a response to the JAMA article. Thanks to J. Antas blog for these links.

David Wheeler has recently updated his article on Why Open Source Software / Free Software (OSS/FS, FLOSS, or FOSS)? Look at the Numbers! The article has use data for GNU/Linux in general as well as the Apache web server software in particular which continues to far exceed any other vendors market share including Microsoft. Many other metrics are also included in this quantitative paper. Linux Medical News first reported on this article in July 2001. Thanks to J. Antas blog for the link to the update.

J. Antas blog has a commentary and an interesting link to a Linux Journal article on choosing system administrators. In the authors opinion, Linux system administrators are more productive and versatile that Windows NT or Unix system administrators.

Here is the text of the speech by David Brailer, MD PhD National Coordinator for Health Information Technology given February 17th, 2005 at the HIMSS conference in Dallas, Texas: ‘…This year, we will release a complete Strategic Plan, as called for in the President�s Executive Order. This will build upon the Framework for Strategic Action by providing detailed plans and critical steps for who, how, and what will be required to implement the President�s vision. This Strategic Plan will be a guide for key stakeholders in the private and public sectors. In the short term, we are focusing our efforts on the building blocks of EHR adoption, interoperability and streamlined Federal health information systems. We have prioritized these building blocks because they enable the private sector institutions and public organizations that foster a market-based solution, and because they are foundational for downstream efforts like personal health records and state-of-the-art biosurveillance…

SCALE 3x will be held this weekend in Los Angeles at the LA Convention Center. Speakers include Kevin Foreman (Real Networks), Jon Hall (Linux International), Larry McVoy (CEO BitMover), Marc Hamilton (Sun) & 30 other sessions. In addtion to the talks there will be over 40 exhibitors including IBM & Novell. IBM will demo the new OpenPower 710. If you’re in LA drop by on 2/12-2/13. There will also be a dinner and GPG Key Signing party. For a free exhibit hall pass register with the promo code “FREE” or a discounted full access pass with “NEWSP”.

‘ Eight of the nation’s largest technology companies, including IBM, Microsoft and Oracle, have agreed to embrace open, nonproprietary technology standards as the software building blocks for a national health information network. According to this NYT/CNET article.

Office of the National Coordinator Health Information Technology (ONCHIT) was established on April 27, 2004 by Executive Order #13335 issued by President Bush. ONCHIT establishes the position of National Health Information Technology Coordinator within the Department of Health & Human Services. Click here to view the Executive Order.

“On November 15, the Office of the National Coordinator Health Information Technology (ONCHIT) released a Request for Information (RFI) that seeks public comment regarding how widespread interoperability of health information technologies and health information exchange can be achieved through a National Health Information Network (NHIN).

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