According to this Evans Data Corporation survey, the number of Linux developers and Windows developers will be equal by the end of the year 2006. This development was noted by LinuxToday editor’s: ‘…With its dominant adoption rate, Apache may be doing more for the cause of open source development than Linux itself. Some survey numbers support Handy’s theory: 68% of the respondents are planning to code for Web applications. Since Apache is the most prolific Web server, it stands to reason that the openness of the Apache server is rubbing off on the development community. They’ve gotten a taste of open source development and they want more.

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Nowadays, large hospitals in Thailand have started investing a hefty sum of money in internal information management system to increase their healthcare service efficiency. However, the majority of hospitals in Thailand, especially those in remote communities, still lack Information Technology (IT) fund for such software development.

In Thailand, rural hospitals not only provide healthcare services, but also function as the center of community development. Providing access to hospital information management system to community hospitals means higher healthcare service efficiency and better quality of life for the people. Hence, �Hospital OS,� Thailand�s first open-source hospital information management system software, is born to strengthen local community development and knowledge sharing at the grass-rooted level.

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Kevin Toppenberg writes on the hardhats list:
I’m frustrated and need to vent a bit. My medical group now consists of 2 office complexes–the main office and my satellite office. At the end of this month, most of the doctors (those in the main office) will be changing management such that they become part of a nearby hospital. That hospital, in turn, is part of a much larger multi-state healthcare network. So the hospital is going to redo the network connections, bringing
hospital-level security. Everything has to be standardized. And guess what? There is “zero possibility” that a linux server will be
allowed on that network. And if I upgraded to the internet-capable CPRS client, and put my linux server on a separate network, even that would have to go through a (lengthy) coporate approval process which I doubt would be successful. So in a week, my main office will go from having a cost-effective opensource EMR, back to a point where transcriptionists type up notes in Word, print, then delete the file. What a waste! Supposedly “in 6 months” there is going to be a corporate-wide roll out of some other EMR with lots of bells and whistles. Who knows how that will work out…”

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One of the holy grails of computer science and medicine has been accurate speech recognition. This seems to be a technology that is always 5 years away. Anandtech has a review of Dragon Naturally Speaking and the built-in speech recognition for Microsoft Office 2003. The short version of Anandtech’s review: Dragon is better than Microsoft but both have accuracy issues. There is also the Free and Open Source Sphinx speech recognition engine not reviewed in the Anandtech article.

The accuracy issues pointed out in the Anandtech article appear to be the same issues that have plagued this technology for years. 95-99% accuracy appears good until you realize that this means 5-1 mistakes per 100 words.

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Infoworld’s John Udell has a thoughtful piece about medical information: ‘…Medicine is, among other things, a kind of information monopoly, as are other professional fields including IT. It’s inevitable that peer production will challenge these information monopolies, and medicine is a particulary interesting test case…’ Also, there is an announcement of HealthNewsReview website, which will gauge the quality of health information news reports.

As first seen on Slashdot, Business Week has an article on Dell computer offering an electronic health record (EHR) to its employees: “Dell will announce Apr. 10 that it is becoming the largest U.S. employer to offer workers electronic health records that track their insurance claims and drug prescriptions, which the computer giant says is a key step toward letting its 26,000 staffers coordinate their own care in a bid to improve medical safety and contain costs…” The article is sketchy on technical details of the system, how it works and if there are third party companies involved.

The Markle foundation has released the following: “Health and Technology Leaders to Unveil Common Framework for Achieving Private, Secure Health Information Exchange

What
National health care experts and leaders in health information technology from three U.S. communities will make the first public presentation of the Connecting for Health Common Framework – an approach for linking together the many existing and developing electronic health information systems, so that patients’ information can be made available in a private and secure manner, when and where it is needed.” Complete press release enclosed.

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The iPath project is attempting to create an Open Source telemedicine platform. Interesting site and project that appears to be moving forward. Appears to be based in Switzerland, could this be the next telemedicine Swiss Army Knife? 🙂

“The GPL is the only license that is moral for medical or health-related software.” That sentence sparked a long and intense debate on the use of the GPL in health IT at emrupdate.com.
The emrupdate.com GPL debate, is now linked to from GPLMedicine.org
An earlier unpublished email debate with the author of X-Med has now been posted to the site. Both of these are part of an effort to publish more of my health GPL activism on the web.

According to J. Antas e-health expert blog a number of standards have been adopted by the federal government for health IT transactions: ‘…These seem to be big news as this list has the potential to be the basis for further Health IT Interoperability initiatives. The main adoptees are: HL7 2.x, DICOM, SNOMED CT, LOINC and HIPAA (Trans. and Code Sets)…’