Are you a practice, clinic or any other health care institution that is using medical open source software in daily routine? And wasn’t it quite hard for you to find the right software, to get it up and running and to finally customize it to your needs without having any experienced users or reference sites at hand?
Even a high number of downloads or a strong ‘activity percentile’ of an open source software project doesn’t tell you anything about the suitability for your purposes and in general about the stability and efficiency that are required for successful clinical practice.
But what if you could see on a per-project basis at which site it is already deployed and even whom you could contact and ask for advice and personal experiences?
Medical imaging is an essential, non-invasive, routine activity performed by radiographers and radiologic technologists. It is a discipline of the health profession which involves using technology to capture images of the human body.
The current press release on the VHA’s plans to upgrade VistA/CPRS are up.
Buried in the story is a tantalizing reference to the possible use of open source, modular approach using multiple development teams. Could this be the opportunity for VA-open source collaboration?
The conference Review Committee is seeking proposals for presentations based on "real-world" organizational experiences, evaluations, case studies or research papers relevant to the conference themes of SOA and Improving Health through Technology.
In developed countries, healthcare workers represent a significant proportion of the working population. For example, in the United Kingdom, more than 1 million people work for the National Health Service, a publicly funded healthcare system. Medical software therefore has a huge market to tap. Whatever stage of a country’s economic development, health care is one of the most important elements in society.
A surprise hit at this year’s SCALE expo in Los Angeles was a presentation by a Dentist from Scotland who had come to DOCHS last year to learn more about open source software for healthcare. After becoming dissatisfied by his proprietary practice management software, he decided to create his own open source solution – and become his own, one-man open source project! The result was Open Molar: http://openmolar.wikidot.com/start
– And it all started at the DOCHS conference.
Open Source Community, below is a letter that you can personalize and post on the public comment website. It is very important that you do this, the policy and the press is on fire and our duty is to educate our policy makers.
2 things you must do to help:
Post your letter here: http://www.regulations.gov/search/Regs/home.html#submitComment?R=0900006480a7c4a8 And fax, email, or cal your representatives.
Below is the letter:
Can someone compose a letter, short, clear, and to the point? The letter needs to hit the big points of how the open source paradigm addresses the problems. This will be the letter that the open source community embraces and uses to inform our policy makers by fax, email, in person. DEADLINE for public comment MARCH 15. That means do it now!
This one just in: Nationwide Electronic Health Record Network Pegged at $150 Billion.
I don’t have the expertise to fully comprehend these NPRMs that were recently issued, but did spend the last few hours reading large chunks of all three. The area they cover is huge, and I fear open source and small EHRs are about to lose big, and big corporate EHRs are about to get total lock-in courtesy of our government.
The bills cover a lot of territory, proposing many requirements that I do not think support “meaningful use” requirements. There are numerous interesting items, one surprising to me was that the ONC expects a Certified EHR will cost $163 million over 3 years to develop, excluding costs for testing and certification. The majority of the NPRM is framed with that mindset.
The ONC-HIT proposes a single certification body (who could’ve guessed) and expects only 3 vendors to apply for certification during the initial phase because of the cost and complexity of meeting the Certified EHR requirements.
If anybody knows how to read and respond to these types of things I suggest you do it now. Public comment period is very short, ends 3/15/2010.
References:
http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/2010/E9-31216.htm
http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/2010/E9-31217.htm
http://healthit.hhs.gov/portal/server.pt/gateway/PTARGS_0_11673_910783_0_0_18/ONC_NPRM_FINAL.pdf
To see public comments or make your own, go to http://www.regulations.gov and put in search term ‘E9-31216′ or ‘E9-31217′.
I particularly like the public comments at this link.
“Additionally a rushed, not well planned conversion to a new EMR will create the risk of a costly implementation failure with users ultimately rejecting the system.
NMHS believes that the data gathering required for meaningful use will require more resources than it can afford.”
