Obama's Health IT Dilemma: The 'Some Dude' Problem

Boston Globe: hurdles in digitizing health records

Posted by Ignacio Valdes, MD on Friday January 02, @09:25AM
from the Letter highlights hurdles in digitizing health records dept.
The Boston Globe has an article on the difficulties President Obama will face with spending $50 Billion in Health IT: "As Barack Obama prepares to spend billions on health information technology as part of his plan to revive the US economy, some specialists are warning against investing too heavily in existing electronic record keeping systems...If America's physician practices suddenly rushed to install the systems of their choice, it would only dramatically intensify the [tower of] Babel that already exists," wrote David Kibbe, a senior adviser to the academy and a longtime proponent of health information technology, and Bruce Klepper, a healthcare market analyst..."
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OpenEMR HQ Announces OpenEMR Certification Program

Posted by David Kennerson on Tuesday December 30, @09:44PM
from the OpenEMR dept.
Earlier today, in a weekly conference call with customers and consultants, OpenEMR HQ CEO Anthony Papillion formally announced the launch of the companies OpenEMR Certified Consultant and OpenEMR Gold Certified certification programs for individuals and companies wishing to demonstrate their knowledge of the OpenEMR medical records software product and offer their customers a guaranteed level of service.
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GNUmed Live CD 0.3.8 released

Posted by SebastianHilbert on Wednesday December 24, @01:17AM
from the dept.

A new GNUmed live CD is out. With the help of this CD one can testdrive GNUmed without altering the currently running environment such as operating system. No installation neccessary.

Just download the CD image (http://www.gnumed.de/downloads/live-cd/) and either burn it to a CD or set up VirtualBox, Vmware/Vmplayer, QEmu or the likes to accept the CD image as a virtual CD drive.

Just boot the CD in your physical or virtual PC/Mac and testdrive GNUmed.

GNUmed client 0.3.8 is included and configured to connect to either the public GNUmed server via the internet or connect to a GNUmed server included with the CD. No setup needed.

Have fun and please let us know how it works for you.

Sign up to host a health care community discussion over the holidays

Posted by Ed Dodds on Tuesday December 09, @07:53AM
from the dept.
Health care is a top priority for President-elect Obama, and he wants your help in reforming the system to provide quality, affordable health care for all Americans. That's why this holiday season, we're asking you to give us the gift of your ideas and input. Sign up to host a Health Care Community Discussion anytime from December 15th to 31st. We'll provide all our hosts with special moderator kits that will give you everything you need to get the discussion going. And Senator Tom Daschle, the leader of the Transition's Health Policy Team, will even choose one discussion to attend in person. http://change.gov/page/s/hcdiscussion
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AMIA Free/Open Source White Paper

Posted by Ignacio Valdes, MD, MS on Thursday December 04, @03:43PM
from the AMIA dept.
The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) Open Source Working Group has released its Free and Open Source White Paper with press release here: "...Even the most skeptical interpretation of the numbers presented on Free and Open Source deployments and patients shows that these systems are being used in sizable numbers,” said Ignacio Valdes, MD, MSc the primary author of the paper and chair of the AMIA Open Source Working Group. He continues, “This paper is for practitioners, CIO's, IT staff, and policymakers making difficult health IT decisions with valid concerns about cost, ethics, interoperability, patient privacy, security and the future of their organizations in the hands of proprietary software. This white paper should be a must-read for every organization that uses or is contemplating the use of Electronic Medical Records.” Complete text of the press release after the break.
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European Comission Report on ICT standards in the health sector

Posted by Ignacio Valdes, MD, MS on Tuesday December 02, @12:31PM
from the International/Europe dept.
The European Comission has published a report (PDF) entitled: ICT standards in the health sector: current situation and prospects. The report discusses Open Source as well as OpenEHR and difficulties of HL7: '...the RIM documentation is described as being “disastrously unclear”, poorly integrated with HL7 v3.0 documentation, and inconsistent. Under these circumstances, it may be difficult for HL7 v3.0 to establish a large user base. Currently HL7 v3.0 is still in the early adoption phase. Without a large user base, this standard is rendered ineffective – for the same reason that telephones can not be effective unless there are multiple users. HL7 already has a well established user base for their 2.x messaging standards in many countries of the world. However, since HL7 v3.0 is not compatible with v2.x, this user group must be re-established. Convergence with Europe’s CEN/TC 251 standardisation work is under way, which may help HL7 in this respect...'
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Federal Health Board Panel Announcement

Posted by Ed Dodds on Thursday November 27, @07:23AM
from the dept.
The Medical Banking Project announced that it is collaborating with the Mayo Clinic Health Policy Center to organize a panel with top-level health care CEOs and policy experts to discuss the creation of a new "Federal Health Board" at its 2009 Medical Banking Institute on March 11-13, 2009 in Nashville, TN. More here http://tinyurl.com/medical-banking-fed
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Identifying U.S-African Collaborations and Projects that Would Benefit from Expanded Bandwidth to Africa

Posted by Ed Dodds on Thursday November 27, @07:06AM
from the dept.

The Internet Educational Equal Access Foundation (IEEAF), along with several partners, has received a planning grant from the National Science Foundation to propose very high speed Internet extensions, on the order of 10 Gbps, to connect the academic, research, health and non-governmental organization (NGO) communities in African countries to the rest of the world. Such connections would provide African universities and medical centers connectivity equivalent to the best available to comparable institutions in the United States. To win the large grant that would allow the network connection to be implemented, the team that won the NSF planning grant is seeking evidence of academic collaboration, particularly in science and in health, between U.S. and Africans in four countries-Ghana and Senegal most importantly, but also Madagascar and Mozambique-to help the NSF understand, appreciate, and value the impact of having these high speed connections in place.

California Partners Release Open Source ELINCS Instructions Using Mirth to Transform HL7 v2.x into ELINCS (HL7-R1)

Posted by Ignacio Valdes, MD, MS on Saturday November 22, @07:19AM
from the ELINCS lab and Mirth dept.
Contact -- Tanya Laino 707.462.6369 HEALDSBURG, CALIF. -- November 21, 2008 -- Early this year Alliance Medical Center received a grant from California HealthCare Foundation to demonstrate a simple software tool to receive electronic laboratory results in the new ELINCS format. ELINCS (“EHR Laboratory Interoperability and Connectivity Specification”) is a messaging system intended to standardize the electronic reporting of test results from clinical laboratories into electronic health record (EHR) systems. A new “HL7-R1” format of ELINCS was adopted by HL7 this past Summer. Today Alliance Medical Center is joined by two partners in releasing a technical specification titled “Using Mirth to transform HL7 v2.x into ELINCS (HL7-R1).”
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