Senate Bill Calls For Open Source Electronic Health Records

An anonymous reader optimistically writes that new legislation has been introduced in the Senate that would call for a nationwide adoption of electronic health records built on open source. The bill does not seek to supplant proprietary alternatives, but instead to either augment or offer a cost effective alternative. "'We need advancements in health information technology across the board to improve the quality of care Americans receive,' said Senator Rockefeller, Chairman of the Senate Finance Subcommittee on Health Care. 'To make this happen, we need universal access to affordable and interoperable health information technology — from small, rural health clinics to large, urban hospitals.'"

Comments

Good place to start

[orclevegam]

After talking with some people in the medical field, it seems like an excellent place to start would be in the medical imaging records. Just about all the advanced imaging equipment out there saves the images to a "standard" format that's about as standard as a MS Word file. Every manufacturer has their own custom version of the "standard" that's incompatible with everyone else, and regularly updated, thus ensuring a constant (and broad) income stream.

Re:I don't see this happening any time soon

[profplump]

From what I've seen they're reluctant to give out the schema because they don't have decent documentation and they're embarrassed by the DB. I support several companies that do claims processing using a system that uses fixed-record-length ASCII tables as the DB. The schema is defined only by an ordered list of column types -- you have to calculate the offset for each bit of data. And the column types aren't enforced -- you can put any type of data you want in any field -- the types just specify a field width. And don't even get me started on the lack of foreign key checking.

Re:Test it with the military first

[DragonWriter]

They should implement this in the military first as a test.

The VA was and other federal agencies already were the "test". From TFA: The Health Information Technology Public Utility Act of 2009 will build upon the successful use of "open source" electronic health records by the Department of Veterans Affairs as well as the "open source exchange model," which was recently expanded among federal agencies through the Nationwide Health Information Network-Connect initiative.

RTFA

[DragonWriter]

Why not use the one our tax dollars have already developed?

Why not RTFA?

VistA is the VA's EHR system.

FTFA: The Health Information Technology Public Utility Act of 2009 will build upon the successful use of "open source" electronic health records by the Department of Veterans Affairs as well as the "open source exchange model," which was recently expanded among federal agencies through the Nationwide Health Information Network-Connect initiative.

Re:Why open Source not open Standard?

[elBart0]

The standards for the data already exist. HITSP However adoption of the standard is optional, and healthcare IT is very very slow to update technologies. Most system to system healthcare messaging is currently done in HL7 V2.x which is a pipe-delimited text format and while new XML based standards exist, adoption of them has been slow and spotty, at best.