Open Source Health Care Records Management

Post #216,095 by tuberculosis 7/22/05 12:53:02 PM Reply	Open Source Health Care Records Management [link\|http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/21/health/21records.html?ex=1279598400&en=65df5ef8b6ef3140&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss\|http://www.nytimes.c...er=rssnyt&emc=rss] With electronic files, patient records are not stuck on pieces of paper in endless files, but are on a screen at the touch of a key. The computers alert doctors to do medical tests and avert errors by warning when they write a prescription for the wrong drug or the wrong dose. Patients can often see their own files and even make their own appointments, online, from their homes. But most doctors have balked. The systems cost tens of thousands of dollars, and doctors worry that the companies selling them and providing support will go out of business. Many use computers to file health insurance claims, but only 20 percent to 25 percent of the nation's 650,000 licensed doctors outside the military and the Department of Veterans Affairs are using electronic patient records. Now, however, Medicare, which says the lack of electronic records is one of the biggest impediments to improving health care, has decided to step in. In an unprecedented move, it said it planned to announce that it would give doctors - free of charge - software to computerize their medical practices. An office with five doctors could save more than $100,000 by choosing the Medicare software rather than buying software from a private company, officials say. The program begins next month, and the software is a version of a well-proven electronic health record system, called Vista, that has been used for two decades by hospitals, doctors and clinics with the Department of Veterans Affairs. Medicare will also provide a list of companies that have been trained to install and maintain the system. -------- Looks like there might be a nice little consulting business there building turnkey systems and getting private practices up and running. The trick would be to get an install built so you could turnkey a bunch of these with very little effort and rake in the big $$'s. [link\|http://www.vistasoftware.org/vista/\|http://www.vistasoftware.org/vista/] "Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect" --Mark Twain "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." --Albert Einstein "This is still a dangerous world. It's a world of madmen and uncertainty and potential mental losses." --George W. Bush
Post #216,096 by boxley 7/22/05 12:57:46 PM Reply	not with my ten foot pole [link\|http://www.sptimes.com/2005/04/13/news_pf/Worldandnation/VA_faces_another_comp.shtml\|http://www.sptimes.c...nother_comp.shtml] any software that comes out of that crap hole must be really bad. thanx, bill Just call me Mr. Lynch \\ Any opinions expressed by me are mine alone, posted from my home computer, on my own time as a free american and do not reflect the opinions of any person or company that I have had professional relations with in the past 49 years. meep questions, help? [link\|mailto:pappas@catholic.org\|email pappas at catholic.org]
Post #216,097 by boxley 7/22/05 12:59:57 PM Reply	apparently you have to come down with MUMPS VistA also was written in a computer language called MUMPS, which is rarely taught. Finding programmers to maintain and upgrade VistA has proven expensive, the VA says. same source. thanx, bill Just call me Mr. Lynch \\ Any opinions expressed by me are mine alone, posted from my home computer, on my own time as a free american and do not reflect the opinions of any person or company that I have had professional relations with in the past 49 years. meep questions, help? [link\|mailto:pappas@catholic.org\|email pappas at catholic.org]
Post #216,099 by inthane-chan 7/22/05 1:07:48 PM Reply	Job Security ++
Post #216,104 by tuberculosis 7/22/05 1:47:16 PM Reply	Based on open source implementation on source forge You just have to learn to install it, not code for it. Once you work out your install scripts, you just replicate and bill. "Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect" --Mark Twain "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." --Albert Einstein "This is still a dangerous world. It's a world of madmen and uncertainty and potential mental losses." --George W. Bush
Post #216,110 by jb4 7/22/05 2:37:10 PM Reply	MUMPS?!? Isn't that the old DEC language that was supposed to be their (proprietary) answer to COBOL? jb4 shrub\ufffdbish (Am., from shrub* + rubbish, after the derisive name for America's 43 president; 2003) n. 1. a form of nonsensical political doubletalk wherein the speaker attempts to defend the indefensible by lying, obfuscation, or otherwise misstating the facts; GIBBERISH. 2. any of a collection of utterances from America's putative 43rd president. cf.* BULLSHIT
Post #216,113 by ChrisR 7/22/05 3:13:13 PM Reply	A low level database language of sorts. Started life in the [link\|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS\|medical records] domain. IIRC, someone on iwethey has worked with Mumps (for some reason linc comes to mind, but that's probably just misremembering).
Post #216,335 by lincoln 7/25/05 5:11:24 PM Reply	I've never programmed in it but it is one of the languages that Tandem has a compiler for. lincoln "Chicago to my mind was the only place to be. ... I above all liked the city because it was filled with people all a-bustle, and the clatter of hooves and carriages, and with delivery wagons and drays and peddlers and the boom and clank of freight trains. And when those black clouds came sailing in from the west, pouring thunderstorms upon us so that you couldn't hear the cries or curses of humankind, I liked that best of all. Chicago could stand up to the worst God had to offer. I understood why it was built--a place for trade, of course, with railroads and ships and so on, but mostly to give all of us a magnitude of defiance that is not provided by one house on the plains. And the plains is where those storms come from." -- E.L. Doctorow Never apply a Star Trek solution to a Babylon 5 problem. [link\|mailto:bconnors@ev1.net\|contact me]
Post #216,098 by Another Scott 7/22/05 1:03:33 PM Reply	I'm sure MS's lawyers will be after 'em re "Vista" too. ;-j
Post #216,103 by tuberculosis 7/22/05 1:45:44 PM Reply	MS vs the VA? Unstoppable force meets immovable object. Nothing will change. Anyhow, VistA has been in use since 95. "Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect" --Mark Twain "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." --Albert Einstein "This is still a dangerous world. It's a world of madmen and uncertainty and potential mental losses." --George W. Bush
Post #216,105 by mmoffitt 7/22/05 1:47:18 PM Reply	Here's our local variant. The co-founder of this company and I crossed paths in college. Interesting guy. bcnu, Mikem It would seem, therefore, that the three human impulses embodied in religion are fear, conceit, and hatred. The purpose of religion, one might say, is to give an air of respectibility to these passions. -- Bertrand Russell
Post #216,125 by scoenye 7/22/05 4:32:59 PM Reply	Heavily pushed over here There have been a variety of initiatives in Belgium to get the records in electronic format. But the model is not monolithic and there is no central repository. The GP is seen as the most logical place to aggregate a patients records with the external feed coming from the hospital specialist. The initial push has seen the development of several packages with reasonable acceptance among physicians (read: the inc\ufffdntives were right). Following a boost of those subsidies, big pharma caught the smell of money and most of the majors each bought out one of the package developers. So there is little risk left that one of the packages will be left orphaned. The way it technically works is that all the packages have a clearly defined data interchange protocol with most being able to understand several of the other's protocols as well. The data exchange is currently handled by two companies. Both rely on PGP encrypted mail for data transfer. One uses a central server with tracking, the other can use any mail server in the middle but offers no tracking. Choice of either is up to the receiving GP. The system essentially has a distributed backup because the records of the visited specialists are kept at the hospitals. Up 'til now I've only had to recover for one fried HDD whose operator had never hear of backups. So far things are going reasonable given that the target public and computers do not necessarily agree well with each other despite all those years of university education... Record at our hospital are kept in custom written software. We pool funds with 15 other public hospitals in a central IT development/support organization. The current generation of software used a specialist centric view of things in the sense that each specialty is a separate database. The UI consist of a lowest common denominator base plus extensions to handle the different needs. The version we're in the process of rolling out takes a patient centric view and aggregates all data in a single scheme.

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