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:
Tag Archives: Interesting Developments
Potpourri: WalMart, GoogleHealth and Cerner
From the hardhats blog came this and this discussion of Cerner dissing GoogleHealth partnership as well as that Cerner’s model is threatened by open-source. The next article is about Wal-Mart’s impact with its retail stores and how it is a boost for eClinicalWorks and a jab for ’70’s technology’. I say: “Hey Wal-Mart, why don’t you use and fund development of ClearHealth/MirrorMed instead?”
Google Health Has Launched
Florida Hospital Migrates to Linux
Linux Insider has an article about a Florida hospital and others going Linux: The healthcare industry in general and hospitals in particular are very conservative about trying anything new. Healthcare officials are often reluctant to risk the reliability and security they perceive in their existing computer networks, according to Red Hat officials specializing in healthcare technology. Over the last two years, however, healthcare and hospital network administrators are discovering open source as more affordable than proprietary installations.
OpenMRS a participant in the 2008 Google Summer of Code
OpenMRS is excited to accept applications for the 2008 Google Summer of Code. It’s the community’s second year of participation in the project, which brought a dozen open source developers into the community to build facilities such as statistical patient matching algorithms, and quick installers into OpenMRS. If you’re an actively enrolled student, and would like to spend your summer learning how to participate in an open source community, come visit our project page, and apply. For more information, you can visit http://soc2008.openmrs.org. There’s also a fairly active irc channel (#openmrs on freenode), if you have questions.
Open eHealth Foundation and partners announced at HIMSS 2008
At the HIMSS 2008 conference in Orlando, Florida, the Open eHealth Foundation released a press statement describing the formation of this new organization with new partners including InterComponentWare, Agfa HealthCare and Sun Microsystems. More after the break.
Synapse EMR
The Linux version of Synapse EMR has been refreshed in preparation for the release of a LivePC containing both the client and server. The latest release is now almost functionally equivalent to the Windows version. Instructions are available on how to install the client on Ubuntu 7.04.
FOSS at HIMSS, Dr. Janice Honeyman-Buck
Ignacio invited me to represent LinuxMedNews at this years HIMSS conference. There is a lot of FOSS activity here, we have already been to the first important Open Source focused talk from Janice Honeyman-Buck
The FOSS healthcare community is very small, and we all know tend to know each other. We go to many of the same conferences, we track the same mailing lists (mostly openhealth) and we track the same blogs (you are reading it…). One of the refreshing things about our movement is that once in a while, someone will have the same ideas, for the same reasons and start working without any contact with the blogs and mailinglists that I follow. For me, meeting Dr. Janice Honeyman-Buck was one of those moments. I meet Janice about 30 minutes before her talk and
we immediately hit it off.
Google PHR Pilot Begins at the Cleveland Clinic
Many news sources are reporting the Google PHR Pilot announcement such as the NY Times: ‘…on Thursday, Google’s technology for personal health records, which is still in development, is getting a big endorsement from the Cleveland Clinic. The big medical center is beginning a pilot project to link the health information for some of its patients with Google personal health records…’
OpenMedSpel expanded to work on Mozilla products
OpenMedSpel, a free and open source medical spelling word list, is now available as add-ons for Firefox, Thunderbird, and SeaMonkey.
The availability of a free and open source browser based medical spelling application is of great value for those who use or develop browser based medical applications such as electronic medical records.
Learn more about OpenMedSpel here.