AHRQ is announcing that HHS has awarded $139 million for grants and contracts that further Health Information Technology (HIT) adoption. Read on for the full press release. Information on the specific projects awarded can be found at http://www.ahrq.gov/research/hitfact.htm
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: AHRQ Public Affairs
Wednesday, Oct. 13, 2004 (301) 427-1862
(301) 427-1857
Fred Trotter is the recipient of the 2004 Linux Medical News Achievement Award. The award was given at MedInfo 2004 in San Francisco with Will Ross accepting the award for Trotter. Trotter is the founder of the Free Medical Billing (FreeB) project as well as working on theFreeMed poject. Read on for the complete text of the acceptance letter: ‘…There are two reasons that receiving the award is so humbling. The first is the list of past award winners, and the second is the list of nominees for this years award. Both lists contain some of the most accomplished technologists in our field. I have always felt that a great part of success is being respected by those whom you respect. This award, more than anything represents that kind of success to me…’ This seems like a good opportunity to announce changes to the LMNA award. Beginning in 2005, the award will consist of two categories: individuals and projects. The possibility of a third, separate, category for the VistA project is a possibility.
Once again, the field of nominees for this year’s award is stellar and choosing the winner will be difficult. The award will be given at this year’s Medinfo 2004 conference in San Francisco, California on September 10th at some time between 11:30am – 1:00pm. Exact location to be announced. Tim Cook of OpenParadigms will be presenting the award this year as I will be taking an oral board exam at precisely the same time. The complete text of the nominations are within, but the nominees are:
DrWinn, CEO of e-MD posted to EMRupdate: ‘…I recently announced that we would donate our medication database (developed at a cost of over 1.2 million dollars) to the open source community. This will likely be adopted by OSSI or the AMA and provide a much lower royalty rate to EMR vendors and translate into a lower EMR purchase price for physicians…’
Dr. David “Hercules” Brailer, MD, the National Health Information Technology Coordinator, wowed a standing room only crowd with a breathtaking pace of nonstop political and technical star speakers at the opening day of the 2004 NHII Conference. Featured speakers included HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Cisco CEO John Chambers, and former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich. It was an NHII love fest, with successive speakers praising Dr. Brailer ever more effusively. Overflow crowds watched the proceedings on large video monitors in a big room across the hall from the packed main gallery.
Nominations are officially open for the 4th annual Linux Medical News Software Achievement Award to be presented at the September 7th-12th Medinfo Fall conference in San Francisco, California. Deadline for entries is July 15th, 2004. Currently this is NOT a officially sponsored event of AMIA/IMIA. Open source software isn’t ‘magic pixie dust’ and there are real people making significant personal sacrifices as well as doing difficult work to make medicine’s free software future a reality. This award is intended to honor the individul or project who has accomplished the most towards the goal of improving medical education and practice through free/open source medical software. The award winner is chosen by a panel of judges. Past recipients have been Tim Cook of Open Paradigms, K.S. Bhaskar of Sanchez Computer Associates and Thomas Beale of Ocean Informatics.
I was reading an interesting article in Healthcare Informatics entitled Reality EMR’s. Interesting because I had been wondering lately about progress with Electronic Medical Records EMR’s of both the Free/Open source and Closed source kind. You see, Linux Medical News passed its 4th birthday at the end of March and it seems as though there is much talk but precious little progress among EMR’s in general.
Obviously I have taken the side of Free/Open EMR’s for good reasons but I examine Closed source to see how it is doing as well. So I had expected this article to trumpet how well proprietary EMR’s are doing.
I had little to fear. It seems like ‘Deja Vu all over again’ in the article. Particularly the same old story about a physician who quit practicing 10 years ago to start an EMR company that was going to cure all of Health-IT’s ills. It was sounding good until you hit this line:
‘…Now everything except physician progress notes and orders is online, with the help of software from Burlington, Vt.-based IDX Systems Corp. Computerized physician order entry (CPOE) pilot projects are evolving in three of the system’s five regions, with full-scale CPOE implementation expected within the next year or so…’
‘Everything’ except progress notes and orders? With the rest on the way in the next year or so? Doesn’t sound very definitive to me. It also doesn’t say how much they are paying IDX for this system that does ‘everything’ sort of kind of. The rest of the article details a morass of incompatible systems and sites as ‘Success springing up all over’. It seems like we are doing the time warp again.
Updated again 5/3/04 — that’s May, not March and that’s Tuesday morning May 11th 🙂 On Tuesday morning May 11/2004 opensource developers and enthusiasts in health care will convene at the University of Toronto for a 1/2 day workshop on Opensource Systems in Health Care. The workshop is part of a 3-day conference entitled Opensource and Free Software: Concepts, Controversies and Solutions presented by the Knowledge Media Design Institute at the University.
An announcement of the pending opensource release of ePresence, a webcasting utility developed at the KMDI is expected at the conference
The Opensource in Health Care workshop features Dr. Yuri Quintana, Dr. David Chan, Mr. Joseph Dal Molin, Dr. Khaled El Emam, Mr. Robin Carriere and Dr. David Ryan. The workshop themes will include history of opensource in health care, opensource software systems in primary care, opensource and regulatory agencies, issues in the international deployment of opensource and opensource from a Canadian CIO perspective.
The primary mission of this website is Free and Open Source software in medicine news. But, we noticed a number of article replies to a story of Medical Claims Clearinghouses saying that Medical Billers Network is a scam. After we posted the story entitled “MedicalBillersNetwork Scam?” The number of responses from people who believe that they have been scammed has been amazing. Click the link to the original article above and read the discussion threads to read their stories.
A group that stands to benefit greatly from Free and Open Source Medical Software is Medical Informaticists. Medical Informaticist Scot Silverstein, MD has used the phrase ‘Director of Nothing’ to describe jobs for Informaticists that promise everything, but deliver little in terms of authority to achieve organizational IT goals. Examples are all the responsibility for IT, but no budget the Informaticist controls, no staff and little standing in the heirarchy. I would add that in my opinion, many medical organization decision makers do not know what an Informaticist can do, but they think they know what a vendor can do. This can lead to an inequity of power which Free and Open Source Medical software can greatly equalize. Therefore, a not so subtle message to Medical Informaticists is: advocate and use FOS Medical software and the profession is likely to benefit greatly. Continue using proprietary medical software and you may suffer the consequences of a balance of power against you.