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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.'"
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.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
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.
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.
Why not RTFA?
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.