OSCON: Will Health Care Partners Embrace Open Source?
The health care sector is set for a technology-driven transformation as the federal government pushes adoption of electronic health records and pursues national health information exchange. Hardly surprising, the Open Source Convention (OSCON) has a health care track that will focus on open EHR/EMR software and the government’s standards-based Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) among other topics. What’s in it for VARs? Here are some clues.
Resellers could find themselves involved in implementing or hosting open source health software. Building applications that take advantage of NHIN is another possibility.
So here’s a summary of what you can glean form OSCON 2010, slated to run July 19-23 in Portland, Ore.:
- Open EHR: One discussion will focus on open source VistA (Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture), one of the most widely used EHR systems. K.S. Bhaskar, senior vice president, Fidelity Information Services, Inc.; Ben Mehling, senior director, research and development, Medsphere Systems; and David Whiles, director of information systems, Midland Memorial Hospital, Midland, Texas, will provide an introduction to the technology. Bhaskar was a co-founder of WorldVistA, which aims to improve VistA for use beyond the VA. Mehling has been facilitating collaboration among clinicians, developers and business partners on OpenVista. Whiles managed the deployment of OpenVista at Midland Memorial Hospital.
- Another session will target the modernization of VistA, which some observers contend is difficult to deploy and relies on outmoded technology. David Uhlman, chief executive officer of ClearHealth Inc. will discuss the lessons the company has learned from legacy technology and how it has adapted VistA’s strength into a Web-based practice managed and EMR system.
- Also at OSCON, Fred Trotter, a consultant/advocate for open source health software, will talk about companies aiming to take VistA to the next level in his overview of open source health solutions. The talk will cover applications such as OpenMRS, OpenEMR, Tolven and ClearHealth.
- NHIN: David Riley and Brian Behlendorf, both of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, will discuss CONNECT, an open source gateway for health information exchange. CONNECT uses NHIN standards to link up providers, insurers, and government entities.
- Arien Malec, a contractor with the Office of the National Coordinator, will discuss NHIN Direct, an open government initiative that intends to promote public/private collaboration in the development of health information transport standards. Trotter, meanwhile, will also cover CONNECT and NHIN in his session.
Reality Check
Still, The VAR Guy’s blog team wonders just how much momentum open source will gain in the health care industry — especially as companies like gloStream attract VARs and MSPs onto a Microsoft-centric EMR platform.
We’ll be listening to learn if OSCON attendees embrace the open source health care pitch.
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I wonder in your list of topics why OpenEMR Meaningful Use Certification was not mentioned? Dr Sam Bowen and I will be speaking on that topic as well.
http://www.oscon.com/oscon2010/public/schedule/detail/14893
Thanks!
Tony McCormick
Tony: The VAR Guy’s team apologizes for failing to mention your efforts. Please let our resident blogger know how attendees react to your session.
-TVG
NEHTA (National E-Health Transition Authority) in Australia has come up with an official set of standards which allow both closed source and open source software vendors to interact on the National E-Health system.
The systems that NEHTA themselves are developing are based in/built with open source technologies. I am under the impression that parts of their systems will also be open source.
This is good news for VARs in Australia I guess.
DDevine: The VAR Guy will check out the NEHTA moves. Thanks for the tip and for your readership.
-TVG
great info thanks
Consumers of these EHR products are most likely to look for packaged and ready to deploy solutions. As a result, Open Source will be used to the extent that it lowers product costs and support costs for the companies developing the products. As with any market, some companies will successfully introduce Open Source whereas others will desire products built by known suppliers. It all depends on whether the companies think that Open Source brings them value.
Have you looked at OpenEHR? – see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenEHR and http://www.openehr.org
openEHR is an open standard specification in health informatics that describes the management and storage, retrieval and exchange of health data in electronic health records (EHRs). In openEHR, all health data for a person is stored in a “one lifetime”, vendor-independent, person-centred EHR. The openEHR specification is not concerned with the exchange of data between EHR-systems as this is the primary focus of Message standards such as ISO13606 and HL7.
Wellscent@6: Your points are on the mark. Health care organizations are very conservative IT folks: They only consume IT when it’s secure and complies with regulations. The traditional closed source players will use FUD to raise concerns about open source options…
Geoff@7: The VAR Guy was not familiar with OpenEHR. He’ll give it a look. Thanks for the tip.
-TVG
https://sites.google.com/site/cosihealthit/
Lots of mature systems and long running activity is going on in the open source health IT arena. The site above might be useful to those wanting to see a large, categorized collection of links to open health IT systems, projects, organizations, etc.
I hope they decide to start using open source. It is a much cheaper and much more efficient way of doing things. That would pave the way to open many medical records.
I don’t disagree with this post