ZDNet’s Dana Blankenhorn opines about ‘open source values’ in this op-ed piece: ‘The Committee for Economic Development, a 65-year old advocacy group which claims to represent “the best in business thinking,” has issued a clarion call for open source values in medicine…’

Tim O’Reilly blogs that open source licenses are obsolete because of software as a service and that open services licenses are needed: ‘…And that, after all, was my message: not that open source licenses are unnecessary, but that because their conditions are all triggered by the act of software distribution, they fail to apply to many of the most important types of software today, namely Web 2.0 applications and other forms of software as a service…’ This echoes my January 11, 2007 article ‘Browser Based EMR’s Threaten Software Freedoms’ here: ‘…Proprietary, browser based EMR/EHR’s have the possibility for the provider to control the customer in ways that previous generation LAN based EMR/EHR’s can only dream about. Privacy abuse, security holes, the ultimate in vendor lock-in and EMR/EHR monopolies is more possible than ever before…’

Dear LinuxMedNews,

Recently it has come to my attention that the PatientOS project has been representing itself here, and in other public forums, as a legitimate FOSS EHR project. In fact, Patient OS is attempting to fracture the FOSS EHR developer community. I have written an article on why I believe this is the case, including what I mean by a “legitimate project” entitled, FOSS Sin: Pointless Duplication of Effort.

Enjoy.

Time Magazine has an amusing story from the doctor’s perspective of patients that Google for information about them: ‘…Susan had chosen me because she had researched my education, read a paper I had written, determined my university affiliation and knew where I lived. It was a little too much � as if she knew how stinky and snorey I was last Sunday morning. Yes, she was simply researching important aspects of her own health care. Yes, who your surgeon is certainly affects what your surgeon does. But I was unnerved by how she brandished her information, too personal and just too rude on our first meeting…’

Misys might be open source now according to this press release only it seems that they forgot to actually release the source according to Matt Asay: ‘…What he failed to mention was the license, the location (to download the source), and to give any details on how to get involved.

You won’t find the project on Sourceforge. Codehaus doesn’t have it, either. Nor does Misys on its own website, apparently.

What benefits will Misys derive from open source if it doesn’t engage an external development community?…’

Fred Trotter has a in depth analysis
of public statements by Dr. Deborah Peel of the Privacy Rights Foundation and a comparison and contrast of what is being said publicly but what is actually committed to by the HealthVault Privacy Policy: “Has Microsoft committed to keeping the promises that it has already made? No, just the opposite. Their privacy policy concludes:�We may occasionally update this privacy statement�

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Fred Trotter has a critique of HealthVault: ‘…Microsoft is famous for incorrectly implementing standards and creating new incompatible dialects. Microsoft has done this even when it goes in the face of a previously strong standard. Then they use their monopoly position to push adoption of their own dialect of a standard. Adoption of the Microsoft dialect then increases the reach and influence of the Microsoft monopoly, which increases Microsoft�s ability to enforce their own dialects, etc etc. If you have no idea what I am talking about then Google for the history of Microsoft�s implementations of Java, Kerberos and Javascript.

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Google is announcing plans for Personal Health Record (PHR) software. Microsoft announced a similar but controversial effort less than two weeks ago. Google’s offering is said to be available in 2008 so no analysis is possible yet. “Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products and user experience, said Wednesday here at the Web 2.0 Summit that Google plans to support the “storage and movement” of people’s health records…Although she provided only scant details on the effort, she noted that Google became interested in the personal health record market as it watched Hurricane Katrina take aim at the Gulf Coast and all the paper-based records stored in various medical offices and hospitals in the region…”

MDNG has an extremely frank article that is noteworthy by who its author is: a medical doctor who is president of an Electronic Health Record (EHR) company. The article states in number 1-4 that: the award an EHR received, the ‘non-biased expert’, the referred EHR using physician, and the respected physician leader of your local society may have been paid off by the EHR company to say favorable things about a product! Others are that they will nickel and dime you to death, they’ll use your data as a bargaining chip to prevent you from leaving, they emphasize Return On Investment (ROI) to distract you from how overpriced the product is, ‘EHRs don’t improve quality of care and often make you less efficient. And since you won’t figure this out until you are actually using the product, EHR vendors won’t let you try-before-you-buy, and there is no return policy!…A Center for Certification of Health Information Technology (CCHIT) CCHIT-certified product, by definition, is often more expensive and less usable than non-certified products.’ No mention of Free/Open Source Software licensed EHR’s as an alternative. Sigh.

Physician Practice has reader survey data (site asks for zip code and some demographics to view the whole article) on Health IT adoption. While the data is not particularly rigorous scientifically, it has some interesting results and comments by respondents: �There are no standard leaders in medical software as in many other industries,� says another. �There are too many variations and vendors. The interfaces are proprietary rather than open. It is difficult to spend that much money, knowing that the support in the future may be limited and that there may eventually be a standardized software out there.�

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