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Hope For FOSS In Electronic Health Records
Fred Trotter writes "CCHIT is the dominant Electronic Health Record certification body in the US. It is also decidedly anti-FOSS and has been for years. Certification of one kind or another will be required for EHR systems to qualify for funding under the Stimulus Act. If CCHIT is chosen as the certification body, and the current certification strategies continue, it will not be possible to have a funded EHR that is both certified and truly FOSS. Now, however, CCHIT has agreed to meet the FOSS Health IT community at HIMSS 09 to address this issue." We discussed the shortcomings in the stimulus bill as it relates to FOSS a few days back.
Here are a few more links...
List of open source healthcare software:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open_source_healthcare_software
Welcome to openEHR:
http://www.openehr.org/home.html
"openEHR is about enabling ICT to effectively support healthcare, medical research and related areas. Today ICT is used ubiquitously elsewhere, but is far from effective in Healthcare. The main problem in health is the lack of shareable and computable information.
The principal challenge for health ICT is to represent the semantics of the sector, which are far more complex than in other industries. Doing this requires a knowledge-oriented computing framework that includes ontologies, terminology and a semantically enabled health computing platform in which complex meaning can be represented and shared. At the same time it must support the economically viable construction of maintainable and adaptable health computing systems and patient-centric electronic health records (EHRs).
The openEHR endeavour is about creating specifications, open source software and tools in the technical space for such a platform. In the clinical space, it is about creating high-quality, re-usable clinical models of content and process - known as archetypes - along with formal interfaces to terminology."
If the US has idiots in onbstructionist ways working in positions of power, then maybe, if other countries are technologically superior in such areas, offer help to them so they can grow and come back to haunt and compel the USA to "get with it, already!".
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
For a discussion of FOSS medical records systems, circa 2005, see http://www.ssrc.org/wiki/posa/index.php/F/OSS_Opportunities_in_the_Health_Care_Sector
Also, consider that the US government has already paid to develop several healthcare systems itself. VistA and RPMS (they're related) serve the VA and Indian Health Services. They're free to download, and local sites often create, apply, distribute, and support various patches independently of any central control. It's free and open-source, at least in a sense. Installation and support (and hardware) aren't free, but a FOIA request will get your the code for free, at least. There's at least one other piece of such software in use for active military personnel, I remember it being mentioned on /. within the last few weeks (but I'm too lazy to find the link.)
Disclaimer: I work in this industry.
To be blunt, CCHIT is among the least significant and cheapest of the regulatory considerations in healthcare software, particularly when you're talking hospital-caliber systems. Far more onerous are the FDA regulations and oversight (at this level, healthcare software is regulated as a medical device), and similar bodies in other countries. Software bugs can also create enormous legal risks; malpractice or wrongful death claims are never cheap, and bad code or human error does not get you off the hook. All of this means enormous testing and documentation costs, shared by both the software companies and the hospitals. (The VA, as an arm of the federal government, enjoys some legal advantages over other hospitals in this regard.)
Combine this with the enormous complexity and the domain expertise required to model what can occur in a hospital, and you have a market with a very high cost to enter - not the best opportunity for open source. Indeed, there's been several highly-capitalized and failed attempts to enter the market by tech giants ...
That said, most modern healthcare software contains and uses healthy quantities of open-source code, but generally not of the GPL variety. We regularly contribute to the projects we use, inasmuch as our employment contracts permit. However, generally speaking, these projects are not specifically healthcare oriented (though there are exceptions - hapi is a personal favorite.)