I am utterly not surprised to hear that OpenMRS is shining in Haiti. This reminds me of the tremendous reponse that the VA had to hurricane katrina using VistA. For fun you should ask those involved for the inside scoop of how VistA enabled an entire hospital to uproot and move over the course of […]
Category: Values
VistA License debate: its about proprietarization
It looks like WorldVistA is, for now, holding fast to the GPL and AGPL for VistA licensing. I have been a vocal advocate for compromising with DSS and Open Health Tools around the LGPL. The LGPL would allow for some innovations to be licensed under the GPL, and others, in the core of VistA to […]
Who owns the data
Who owns the health information? the patient to whom it refers? the health provider who created it? the IT specialist who has the greatest control over it? the researcher who aggregates it? the health 2.0 company that harvested it? the notion of ownership is inadequate for health information. No one has an absolute right to […]
Away from iphone and towards a better platform analogy
As many of you know, the CHIP/Indivo/Harvard guys (who I guess I should call the ITdotHealth guys) wrote an article in the NEJM saying that we needed something like the Iphone app store in Healthcare IT. I wrote a rebuttal saying that, among other platforms, the Google android platform was a better fit. Frankly, I thought […]
Stick your neck out
Recently, someone contributed a library to help with the webification (<- clearly this is a real word) of VA VistA. In a recent HardHats thread, he expressed his discouragement. I responded and I thought it might help other discouraged developers out there to read me reply. Sometimes the Open Source community just does not respond […]
Why so many non-profits?
When I get a good question from a conference or email, I like to answer it in a blog post so that I can just link it in when others ask me the same thing in the future. One of the good questions I got was: Why are there so many “Open Source Health Care” […]
NCVHS Testimony on Meaningful Use
(Update 08-13-09 I have already presented this to NCVHS) Introduction I represent a community of health software developers and clinical users that respect software freedom. This community operates in the legacy of the VA VistA underground railroad. There are several important commercial EHR vendors that respect software freedom they are an important part of our […]
Computer Science should be required for Medical School
Hi, Currently, in Texas, one is required to take Physics I and II and Calculus I (or equivalent stats class) to apply for Medical School. That is not all, of course, but they are requirements. So far, I have never meet a Medical Doctor who needed to use calculus. In fact the only ones that […]
We need a conference
So I am going to run a conference. I figured this was about as bad a time as I could pick, since no one has any travel budget, and people are getting laid off left and right! However, I have been wanting to do this for long enough that I have decided to something about […]
The Tridgell Effect
If you follow Linux Kernel Development, you may have heard of git. Git is a de-centralized source code management system that is famous for its speed. Git was originally developed specifically for the Linux project by Linux founder Linus Torvalds. But other projects have begun using it. X.org, Ruby on Rails, and WINE are all […]