For those who do not follow ancient history (more than 2 years on the Internet) of the Free and Open Source health software movement, I got my start with FreeB, which was the first GPL medical billing engine. It was designed to help address the medical bill formatting problem. If you are not sure […]
Security in Medical Devices, implications
There are more and more examples of how standard hacking techniques apply in healthcare, with serious consequences. Recent issues include RFID hacking and interference issues. Recently, a talk at BlackHat regarding hacking medical devices, including pacemakers, has begun appearing in popular blogs. What is most dangerous about this is not actually the hack itself, but […]
The Holy Grail
VistA is a robust and complete EHR system, but it relies on MUMPS. This makes VistA extremely expensive to configure and maintain. The open source web-based EHR systems are easy to deploy but have underwhelming feature sets. The holy grail of open source Health Informatics is a web-based CPRS (CPRS is the frontend for VistA). […]
The coming problem with the ASP-lock
Here is an interesting post about a person who was locked out of their google account. Apparently, this person lost access to: Google Docs Gmail Family photos in Picasa If you read the updated post, you will find that he has already gotten back in. But this person knew to write a blog post. And […]
Meeting Mike Doyle
Apparently, the people at Medsphere still read my posts. Mike Doyle noticed my comment that I had not meet him in my last post, and he made an appointment to have a phone call with me. I just got off the phone with him and… I was impressed. He seemed willing to reach out to […]
Medsphere advocates for the community. Bravo!!
I have been impressed lately with “the new team” at Medsphere. I have interacted with COO Rick Jung and CMO Dr. Edmund Billings. (I am disappointed that Mike Doyle and I have not met, but he is respected by some whom I respect.) I am happy to see that Medsphere has finally taken a stand […]
Vindicated
I must admit. I love the feeling of being proven right. Granted, it appeals to my egotistic streak. (which despite my attempts to suppress it, my wife remains keenly annoyed by). A few weeks ago, at TEPR, I did my regular talk the Health of the Source, which is basically an update on the whole […]
In all Fairness
Its time to set the record straight on what are valid criticisms of HealthVault and Google Health and what are not. If you have ever read my posts, then you can be sure that when an organization needs criticizing I am the first to give it them with both barrels. But here both Google and […]
Health of the Source
I pretty regularly give a talk entitled “The health of the source”. The subject of the talk is everything that has happened in health FOSS, since the last time I gave the talk. Thankfully things move along fast enough that I am never short of content. You will find this article dripping with useful bias […]
Defining terms
(Update August 9th 2016: This site has been dead for some time. But there is a wayback machine link that lives on) NAHIT has released its definitions. In summary: An EMR is a record for the doctor. An EHR is a record for the doctors. (with data ready to move) A PHR is a record […]