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Mercy Health Sets Up Drupal and Alfresco for Their Main Portal
Mercy Health supports several hospitals and clinics across many different geographical locations in the US. Each geographical location has historically had its own dedicated intranet site, and these sites were on different technologies and each had a separate support structure. It was determined that a single unified co-worker portal was needed to support the vision of One Mercy, a patient and provider portal. Read More »
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VA CIO Stephen Warren on The State of Open Source at the VA
Stephen Warren, the acting VA CIO was recently interviewed on the topic of giving continuity to an open source initiative started by the previous CIO Roger Baker. The VA CIO oversees more than 8,000 IT professionals and manages an annual budget of $3.3 billion. When interviewed at WJLA in the ABC channel, Mr. Warren shared the following insights. Read More »
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The Evolving Role of Open Source Software in Medicine and Health Services
In this article, we highlight the barriers to progress and discuss the dangers of pursuing a standardization framework devoid of empirical testing and iterative development. We give the example of the openEHR Foundation, which was established at University College London (UCL) in London, England, with members in 80 countries....We argue that such an approach is now essential to support good discipline, innovation, and governance at the heart of medicine and health services, in line with the new mandate for health commissioning in the United Kingdom's National Health Service (NHS), which emphasizes patient participation, innovation, transparency, and accountability. Read More »
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Who helps your Linux distribution run smoothly? Thank a packager today
The people behind the scenes who work tirelessly to make your Linux distribution run smoothly are the packagers. The vast majority of Linux packagers are volunteers who dedicate their evenings and weekends to create and maintain the gears of the Linux distributions they love. Read More »
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Disrupting Healthcare IT - The Easy Way to Develop a Beautiful and Usable EHR User Interface
Despite the best endeavors of the “mainstream” IT community, it’s an interesting fact that the top-end of the EHR marketplace is dominated by systems that use an otherwise little-known and poorly-understood database technology: Mumps. Not only does this represent something of a closed book to the outside development community – they universally balk at the idea of having to use this technology’s native language, but also the companies that have developed and own these EHRs keep their technology tightly under their own control. Read More »
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North Carolina's Central Regional Hospital Rolls Out VistA For Less Than $1 Million
Central Regional Hospital, a state psychiatric and medical facility located in Butner, North Carolina, has just completed a full-scale implementation of the open source VistA electronic health record (EHR) system. The hospital, after three years of work, was able to self-implement and customize the fully-featured EHR at a cost of less than $1 million. The 398-bed hospital serves the acute and long-term inpatient mental health and medical needs of North Carolina citizens from 26 counties and employs more than 1,900 staff, including 50 doctors, 300 professional nurses, 700 nursing assistants, 40 psychologists, and 70 social workers. Central Regional Hospital is a major teaching site for 23 psychiatric residents per year from Duke University and the University of North Carolina medical schools. It also provides training for medical students from both schools as well as psychiatry subspecialty fellowship training. Read More »
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Policy: NIH Plans to Enhance Reproducibility of Biomedical Research
In a recent editorial in the journal Nature, Francis Collins and Lawrence Tabak from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) discuss the concerns that NIH has with current lack of reproducibility in biomedical research, and propose steps for improving the repoducibility records. In their editorial they point out that we have traditionally considered science to be a self-correcting field. Given the expectation that over time, all reported works would be replicated by peers. Read More »
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VistA: From Start To Go In 5 Minutes
[The] original two to three day process of trying to take home VistA EMR from yester year is now something that can be completed in the time it takes for you to walk to the nearby coffee shop for a refill and return to your office. Thanks to the extraordinary engineering work of Chris Edwards (a developer for KRM Associates and Certification Manager at OSEHRA), all of the "tough decisions" are made for you. Read More »
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OpenMRS 2.0 Released-Major Milestone for the Open Source EHR
The OpenMRS community is excited to announce the release of OpenMRS 2.0. [This] release brings a new focus to OpenMRS. Instead of just releasing a generic enterprise-grade platform and leaving it up to each implementation to configure, OpenMRS 2.0 includes more functionality “out of the box” that should help you be more productive, faster...OpenMRS 2.0 features a completely new and modern user interface, built from scratch to be much more user friendly. Our new UI is still in its early days, so you may find some missing features. We will be continually improving the UI with your help and feedback. Read More »
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VistA: The Open Source EHR Hackable Platform
[A]s a result of the work of Christopher Edwards, developing the OSEHRA Installer for VistA, which includes the suite of EWD.js products and a raft of demonstration applications, we now have exactly what Tony was suggesting: VistA, the Open Source EHR Hackable Platform. Read More »
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