MirrorMed, Medical Manager and mm2mm

So originally MirrorMed was a fork of ClearHealth. It was done to satisfy my need to get certain features done… but now ClearHealth has moved far past it… the usefulness of the “fork” part of this has diminished to nothing.

Still there were a few useful things in MirrorMed that have not been replicated in ClearHealth or anywhere else that I know of.

The most useful of these was a tool that I built called mm2mm

mm2mm is a Medical Manager to MirrorMed integration engine. Basically it a php parser for the medical manager data files that allows you to seamlessly move to MySQL. I have used this tool more than any other part of MirrorMed, and so I am now releasing it Open Source (AGPL 3) and completely costless. You can download it from the MirrorMed sourceforge site.

For those who are interested in Medical Manager, you might enjoy reading the history of Medical Manager, which I maintain. Recently someone reminded me that there have now been convictions in the Medical Manager dealership scandal.

Medical Manager was my family business for many years. My Aunt and Uncle still work tirelessly to support clients and my grandfather, now deceased, helped them start the business. The Medical Manager dealership scandal, where Medical Manager ousted small dealerships and apparently accepted bribes to buyout the larger dealerships originally taught me that nothing but Open Source was viable in healthcare informatics.

The release of mm2mm has brought me full circle with Medical Manager. It makes it trivial to use a FOSS EHR like ClearHealth, OpenEMR, OpenVistA or Astronaut VistA on top of an instance of Medical Manager but most of the people who have used mm2mm as beta testers were interested in creating a web-archive of the medical manager database or in entirely migrating away from Medical Manager.

Medical Manager was a great product, but years of neglect and proprietary thinking have doomed it. It might be possible to save if it was released as Open Source now, but it is probably too late.

Oh well…

-FT