Vish Sankaran has agreed to receive the 2009 Linux Medical News Freedom Award on behalf of the Federal Government for the NHIN Connect project. Click Read More for the full text of the acceptance letter after the break which contains interesting history and what has transpired to make NHIN Connect what it is.
Dear Dr. Valdes, Continue reading
Nominations are officially open for the 8th annual Linux Medical News Freedom Award to be presented at the November 8th-12th AMIA Fall conference at the Hilton Washington and Towers, Washington, D.C. Deadline for entries is August 31th, 2008. This is NOT a officially sponsored award or event of AMIA. This award is co-sponsored by the IMIA Open Source Working Group. Free and open source software isn’t ‘magic pixie dust’. There are 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 individual 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, K.S. Bhaskar — Fidelity Information Services, Inc., Thomas Beale — Ocean Informatics, Fred Trotter — Synseer, MirrorMed and the FreeB project, Joseph Dalmolin of WorldVistA/e-cology, Nancy Anthracite, WorldVistA, Will Ross of Mendocino Informatics, Paul Biondich of the OpenMRS project, Webreach for Mirth, WorldVistA CCHIT certification, Gerry Douglas, MD Malawi RHIO.
This years HIMSS conference in New Orleans is over. Here’s the conference wrap-up:
Read more for details.So this was my first HIMSS conference. I’ve attended many AMIA conferences. The major difference from the more academic-oriented AMIA is that HIMSS is a vendor shin dig with booth babes, unbelievably gaudy and enormous vendor booths, the smell of big money and major speakers like Steve Ballmer, Colin Powell, Michael Leavitt and Steven Covey.
The good news is that there is a Free and Open Source presence! The VistA Software Alliance, Medsphere had booths as well as the Tolven group giving an amazing presentation. OpenEMR has come back to life as well after several years of dormancy.
The bad news is that I attended a disappointing talk by Paul Tibbits, VA deputy CIO for enterprise development and judging by the presentation, the VA is in for a long dry spell of centralization and in my opinion is not likely to have substantial innovation for sometime.
As well, there was the big Medsphere open sourcing announcement. But the lawsuits continue, making the ability of Medsphere to lead in the future in doubt.
Secretary of Health and Human Services Michael Leavitt’s talk indicated that CCHIT certification is being pushed hard and according to him, 55 vendors have qualified.
Colin Powell talk was great. His connection with Health IT is that he is a limited partner in revolution health which is in a space that is starting to have a surprising amount of competitors (incluing a company I’m involved in called Your Doctor Program) but with the usual fragmentation and lack of consensus.
All in all, it was great to see a FOSS presence at an overwhelmingly and historically proprietary show. Freedom appears to be on the march.
Preparing for its 5th annual event, SCALE 5x, the Southern California Linux Expo has issued a call for papers. SCALE 5x will be held on Feb 10-11, 2007 at the Los Angeles Airport Westin. Past speakers have included Chris Dibona, Jon “maddog” Hall, and Andrew Morton. If you are working on an interesting open-source / Linux related project, or just want to address the community SCALE welcomes you to submit a presentation proposal.
Nominations are officially open for the 6th annual Linux Medical News Freedom Award to be presented at the November 11th-15th AMIA Fall conference in Washington, D.C. Deadline for entries is July 30th, 2006. This is NOT a officially sponsored event of AMIA. Free and open source software isn’t ‘magic pixie dust’ and there are 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, K.S. Bhaskar — Fidelity Information Services, Inc., Thomas Beale — Ocean Informatics, Fred Trotter — Synseer, MirrorMed and the FreeB project, Joseph Dalmolin of WorldVistA and e-cology.
Dear reader, do you like the new look of LMN or hate it? What do you think should change or stay the same? Linux Medical News is now 6 years old and has had only minor changes in its look since its inception. New looks are in order for the site with the goals being less clutter and more appeal. The curved title bars are gone, the Google site search box moved and made relevant to Linux Medical News, the banner ads colors are now in synch with LMN, the icon subject list at the top is gone, icons have been freshened and the black background at the top is now white. The banner logo may be freshened up soon. I’m still trying to figure out what would be a good icon for the ubiquitous ‘Interesting Developments’ subject heading.
Linux Medical News RSS feed has been spiffed up courtesy of Linux Medical News reader Jubal John. Thanks Jubal! You can now easily add Linux Medical News to your favorite RSS feed as well as enjoy a much more robust RSS feed than before. Note the cool RSS feed button with the official RSS icon near the top of the page. Let us know how you like it.
It has been a banner year for FOSS in medicine. The year wrapup will come next week.
As you can see from the banner above and to the side, Linux Medical News and the Journal of Open Source Medical Computing (JOSMC) now carry Google Ads that are targeted to this websites content. Linux Medical News does not control what ads are displayed. GoogleAds decides what ads are relevant to this site by an algorithm. Clicking through on an ad results in a micropayment to Linux Medical News for carrying the ad. (Dear Reader Hint: clicking through on ads helps Linux Medical News generate revenue to keep the site growing and improving). I have seen a few ads for closed source medical software displayed on this site through GoogleAds. LinuxMedNews readers may find this a contradiction. So what do you think readers? Is carrying ads for closed-source medical software on a free and open source medical software news site a problem? You decide.
Wrap up reports and reviews are in and SCALE 3x, the third annual Southern California Linux Expo appears to have been a huge success, with over 900 attendees, 30 seminars and 42 booths on their exhibit floor. Linux Journal and FedoraNews (1, 2, 3) have their articles online. In addition LinuxQuestions.org’s LQRadio has a series of interviews available as mp3. They include interviews with Flight Gear booth,LinuxChix LA and Brion Vibber of Wikipedia. They plan to release more interviews with Linux Astronomy, LAMPSIG, and SCALE’s PR Director Orv Beach in the near future. Pictures and presentation slides are also available on the SCALE website.