Luis Ibáñez to be Interviewed in vxJourney Program on Thursday

Luis Ibáñez, one of the best known advocates of open source solutions in healthcare will be interviewed Thursday, May 1, by Fabian Lopez in the popular vxJourney weekly webinar. Ibáñez a contributing author to Open Health News as well as other publications, in particular Opensource.com, will talk about the VistA course that he has been teaching at the State University of New York at Albany. Details of the interview, which will take place at 4:00 PM EDT, can be found here.

This article, written by Ibáñez outlines the backround and story behind the course. The interview will provide a golden opportunity for those who wish to learn more about the SUNY project.

In addition, its an opportunity to get to know Ibáñez better. For the second year in a row Ibáñez was one of the winners of Opensource.com's Community Choice Awards. The awards, voted on by Opensource.com readers, are awarded to "members of our community who have excelled in contributing and sharing stories about how open source is changing the world." Ibáñez won awards in both the "Readers Choice Award" category as well as the "Social Sharer" category.

When not busy writing articles and teaching his VistA course at SUNY, Ibáñez is a Technical Leader at Kitware Inc., and Director of Open Source Community Development at the Open Source EHR Agent (OSEHRA).

At Kitware he is closely involved in the development of open source software for medical imaging applications, in particular, working with the Insight Toolkit (ITK). In collaboration with other instructors, Luis has been teaching a course on Open Source Software Practices at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) since 2007, and, as noted above, now is also teaching at the State University of New York at Albany, introducing the fundamental technologies that are essential for the open source EHR ecosystem, in particular MUMPS, VistA and EWD.

MUMPS (the language and database) remains fundamental for the Open Source EHR ecosystem. It has now been introduced in the regular curriculum at the State University of New York at Albany. During the webinar Ibáñez will share some of the insights on how to best teach M/MUMPS at the university level.