Thre is much complicated business logic in a medical organization. The insurance system is difficult for system development. This seems like a tremendous barrier to software development. But this type of barrier exsists not only in medicine but also in other areas. What do you think are the real barriers to developing medical software?

The particularly well-suited for medicine Z Object Publishing Environment (ZOPE) now has a high level presence in the UK according to this article in Linux Insider: ‘UK Web developers are throwing their weight behind Zope, an open source application server already popular in the US and Europe, but which has yet to crack Britain.
On 19 April, commercial Zope vendors will join forces to launch the Zope Association, which aims to promote open source technology in general and Zope as a development tool. The forum will launch in the House of Commons, with founding members including UK commercial organisations that already use Zope…’

We often collaborate with other medical specialists out of necessity. Some medical collaboration systems have been developed. They typically are constructed in a client/server model way. The server is administrated by a center hospital and the sattelite connects to the server. But in this model, we cannot collaborate with the other center hospital. We are enclosed by its network. So we have been developping the P2P collaboration tool for medical staff and get beyond the barrier. This project named MeGA-Net(Medical Grid Alliance Network) is supported by a grant under the under the Exploratory Software Project FY2003(IPA, Japan). This software has been opened under BSD liscence. You can view the CVS repository here.

We will have a kick-off meeting of Medical Open Source Software Council on April 17, 2004 in Fukuoka, Japan. 60 people applied the meeting. They are increasingly willing to disscus open source software and its applications in clinical informatics.

More information is here.
http://www.rd.human-media.or.jp/users/kmit/medopen/index.html
The table of contents is Japanese. Broken english version of it is shown below.
1)Review about development of medical open source software and its problem (KOBAYASHI, Shinji)
2)Open source software license(HATTA, Masayuki)
3)The ORCA project, open source clinical accounting system.(UENO, Tomoaki)
4)CLAIM implementation by Java and connect to ORCA.(NAKAYAMA, Hiroo)
5)The developement of clinical account stastitics system by Struts and Java. (MINENO, Takafumi)
6)The developement of clinical statistics and reporting system by COBOL (KUSUMOTO, Yoshiki)
7)ORCA for Vine Linux, Glclient for Win32 (KATOH, Tomohiro)

An article on eMediaWire discusses a groundswell of change from Windows to Linux among Biotech: �We�re gradually making the change for a variety of reasons. Reliability is a big issue: we have to be accessible to our clients (job candidates and recruiters) 24-7,� says Frank Heasley, PhD, president and CEO of MedZilla.com, a leading Internet recruitment and professional community that serves biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, healthcare and science. �Although we continue to use Windows for some applications, that is rapidly diminishing, and we are slowly converting our desktops to Linux.� The website: MedZilla.com is a new one to me.

Giannina Lodata and Laszlo@HealthHighway.com are announcing a call for participation to the Free/Open Source community in a Rural eDisease Management system. Complete details of the announcement can be found here

Hello,
I would like to notify everyone interested in Open Source healthcare software about a new Open Source project – Healthcare Desktop.
In short our project goal is to create an open source (snip.) software package that covers all aspects of work in modern hospital.

Due to our developement strategy we are currently looking for help from healthcare field professionals who could assist us in initial requirements and specifications phase, so, if you have a good experience in field and would be willing to assist our developement, please visit our site and consider joining our project.

Interesting article on Wired about Free/Open Source not just being about software. They use public health interventions with Cholera as an example as well as chronicle FOSS spread to other disciplines: ‘…But software is just the beginning. Open source has spread to other disciplines, from the hard sciences to the liberal arts. Biologists have embraced open source methods in genomics and informatics, building massive databases to genetically sequence E. coli, yeast, and other workhorses of lab research. NASA has adopted open source principles as part of its Mars mission, calling on volunteer “clickworkers” to identify millions of craters and help draw a map of the Red Planet. There is open source publishing: With Bruce Perens, who helped define open source software in the ’90s, Prentice Hall is publishing a series of computer books open to any use, modification, or redistribution, with readers’ improvements considered for succeeding editions. There are library efforts like Project Gutenberg, which has already digitized more than 6,000 books, with hundreds of volunteers typing in, page by page, classics from Shakespeare to Stendhal…’

Thomas Beale of OpenEHR spotted this paper by Eric Browne. ‘Eric is at the Computer and Information Science Department of the University of South Australia and is heavily involved in health modelling for federal projects in Australia.’ The paper discusses the limitations of both XML and HL7 in medicine.