Open Paradigms, LLC president Tim Cook made a major announcement today of possibly the first independent consultant program and sign of growth for the fledgling Free/Open Source Medical Software industry: ‘After receiving several requests from IT shops and independent consultants Open Paradigms,LLC has developed the Torch Independent Consultant (TIC) Program. The TIC program is designed to provide independent consultants with the information and tools needed install and support the electronic health record application TORCH. TORCH is licensed under the GPL and can be downloaded from the Open Paradigms,LLC website…’ The full text of the announcement is within.

After receiving several requests from IT shops and independent consultants Open Paradigms,LLC has developed the TIC Program.

The TIC program is designed to provide independent consultants with the information and tools needed install and support the electronic health record application TORCH. TORCH is licensed under the GPL and can be downloaded from the Open Paradigms,LLC website.

The TIC CD contains the latest version of TORCH and other software as well as information about the electronic health record market and to market to physicians and their office managers. Registration in TIC also provides the consultant with initial telephone and email support. Additional support packages are available for TIC partners.

Less than 10% of physicians are currently using an electronic health record system.
HIPAA regulations are increasing the documentation and reporting requirements for access to patient identifiable data. Using TORCH makes that task a background function. TORCH also makes it possible to give patients or consulting physicians access directly to the records.

TORCH is a template driven, Python based application that can be extended to support and medical speciality. TORCH uses a web browser interface. There is a demo on our website.

Get more information about TORCH and more specifically the TIC Program at the Open Paradigms,LLC website.

To increase collaborative opportunities based on several recent inquiries, Open Paradigms has redesigned their website to take advantage of the membership capabilities of Plone, a content management system for Zope.

With the recent release of TORCH 1.1.0 there has been an increase in usage due to the easier installation process. To leverage this increased attention to create better user documentation and more useful templates, we have used the same software used in the TORCH intranet to create a more collaborative environment on the website. This, in addition to the support mailing list will provide a more active environment.

We also would like to point out that just because www.openparadigms.com isn’t a fancy flashy site does not mean that it isn’t built on a solid foundation. Take a look at some of these high traffic/high content sites that use Zope. Some with and some without Plone:

The Egyptian USAID Information & Communications Technology Project

Canada’s Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre

Design Science Toys

NATO

AARP

CBS New York

Austrian Government

As you can see, when you install TORCH you are not only getting your electronic health record application. But a complete content management system perfect to run your practice’s website and allow a collaborative approach to providing information to your patients.

An excellent overview of Plone is available here on the Plone.org site.

The next major release in the TORCH 1.x.x series will be 1.3.0 and will provide a closer integration of the Plone interface and user sign on. We also plan to use Plone content types in order to exercise the workflow system for all items in the EHR. There is no release date set for this version yet.

Design is currently in process for an openEHR compatible implementation. This will be TORCH2 but we will provide the ability to move your data from the TORCH 1.x.x series into a TORCH2 server.
There is no release date set for this version yet.

Trusted Open source Records for Care & Health (TORCH) Version 1.1.0 is now available. TORCH is an electronic health record application that is GPL licensed and and built upon a completely open source stack. All required components are included in the available download. You can find it on the Open Paradigms, LLC website in the Open Source section. Read on for the full text of the announcement.

TORCH is an electronic health record application that is GPL licensed and and built upon a complete open source stack. The available download includes all required components for installation on a linux, x86 based server. The various components are available for other operating systems but packaging for other OS’s and platforms will be left for the community to produce.

This is a maintenance release that includes better integration with CMFPlone and several bug fixes. The template system and scheduling module remain the same. The decision to retain these modules as is is based on the current functionality in Zope as compared to the vision for Zope3.

With the expected Zope3 (see: http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/ComponentArchitecture/FrontPage ) capabilities along with the pending release of the openEHR specification we have been working towards an application that will be leading edge. It will accomplish this through both foundational application blocks as well as future proofing by the versioned archetype reference model. This is described in detail by the openEHR Foundation (http://www.openehr.org) We expect to release a tested application no later than Q4 – 2003.

We are very excited about the near future. Several years of effort have gone into fulfilling the dream of a true “lego block” approach to open source health care application development, built around a standardized reference model, and using XML-Schema representations. We sincerely thank the openEHR Foundation and Zope Corporation for their comittment to open source and knowledge sharing.

For questions concerning TORCH specifically please contact Tim Cook tim@openparadigms.com.