According to Molly Cheah on the openhealth list Dr. Joan Dzenowagis has a presentation (pdf’ed ppt) entitled Bridging the Digital
Divide in Health The Role of Free and
Open Source Software: “Dr. Joan Dzenowagis, is based at the World Health Organization, where she is Project Manager of the United Nations Health InterNetwork, led by WHO. This initiative is one of the four initiatives of the UN Millennium Action Plan launched by Secretary General Kofi Annan in September 2000. The Health InterNetwork is a public-private partnership which aims to improve the flow of health information for scientists, health professionals and policy makers in developing countries, using the Internet.”

Thanks to J. Antas for this link. According to this Tatle article Norway plans to drop proprietary file formats completely in government: ‘…The plan clearly favors Open Source communities and solutions, and Linux, but will also favors Apple computer where increasingly open source technologies and open standards are finding their way into the historically proprietary Mac OS. It remains to be seen what response the plan will prompt from Microsoft, who has been very reluctant to open up its word processing, spreadsheet and media formats. Without support for open standard formats, Microsoft will rapidly make itself irrelevant as supplier to both public sector, businesses and private persons, as they all have the need to communicate electronically with the government in the future…’

Thanks to J. Antas for this link. According to this e-Health Insider article, the UK ‘Choose and Book’ patient scheduling system is a bomb: ‘…Johnson said: �The BMA has been saying for a long time that patients are not so interested in a choice of five hospitals but they want a good service in a clean local hospital�.

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The LinuxMed 2005 Congress will be held over the Internet from September 1st to November 30th. More information including information for lecturers can be found here. Tambien el anuncio en espanol aqui. ‘…LinuxMed 2005 is the First Virtual Meeting over Internet of Free and Libre Opensource Software , and its applications in Health Care and related disciplines…The exprience begun with LinuxMed 2002, developed by BioLinux Group, from July 1st to 3rd, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. We invite you to participate in LinuxMed 2005 sharing your experience in the opensource development and implementation. Please, see the instructions for lectures here. Death line is June 30th, 2005. For more information contact us infobiolinux-linuxmed@yahoo.com.ar…’

CONI, as the committee is popularly known in Italy, has approved its sports medicine department locally called L’Instituto Nazionale di Medicina dello Sport (INMS) to use a custom version of Care2x, an open-source integrated hospital information system.

According to Umberto Rampa, the department’s IT director responsible for the project, it took the INMS around 17 months to make the important customizations up to using the modules in real productive environment. The institute has more “outpatient” character. Their “patient”, mostly athletes, isn’t sick but rather a kind of superman.

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The Observer is reporting about the United Kingdom’s National Health Service ordering a trial of Linux as part of its �2.3 billion computer modernisation plan. ‘…The plan could see Java Desktop software rolled out across the NHS’s 1 million staff and 800,000 computers to replace Microsoft’s Windows operating system and Office suite of programmes…’

Thanks to Andrew Ho for these links. eWeek has a quote by the ‘father of Java’ James Gosling who ‘delivered a keynote on “The Future of Open, End-to-End Software Systems” where he highlighted a few of his favorite Java systems. One was for the Brazilian National Health system, which Gosling said contained “a big pile of Enterprise JavaBeans.” He said the system runs on five national server farms that look at 12 million people in 44 cities, he said. The Brazilian National Healthcare system has about 10 million lines of code, Gosling said, and the organization plans to turn its software over to the open-source movement. “It’s like 10 million lines of code,” he said. “I don’t know what SourceForge would do with this,” he quipped. SourceForge.net is an open-source software repository maintained by VA Software Inc. More information can be found here.

Linux is being adopted officially in public administration offices of the region of Extremadura, Spain (Washington Post). The regional government paid a local software company for putting together a software box including Linux and various software (Linex); they are doing also an advertisement campaign in favour of free software.

A very recent document on entitled Government Guidelines for the development of the Information Society (RTF format, sorry, in italian) identifies Open Source as one of the enabling factors. It explicitly cites ehealth as one of the strategic fields where the Public Administration may effectively use Open Source. These are good news, in line with some European Union ideas.

Tech Central has a report on the Primary Care Doctors Organisation Malaysia (PCDOM) use of Open Source software for its PrimaCare Network Services (PNS) project: ‘… �Besides cost, the principles behind the Open Source Software (OSS) movement are similar to those of the medical profession � that is, the sharing of information on research findings, new medical techniques and breakthroughs,�…back in the 80s I used Clinic Boss, a proprietary clinic management system � when the vendor went bust, I had to throw away my system,� said Dr Molly Cheah, president of PCDOM.