Latest Blog Posts

On November 1st Newsweek published an extraordinary Op-Ed by Samuel Shem titled Why Computerized Medical Records Are Bad for Both You and Your Doctor. In the article, Shem, pen name for the American psychiatrist and well-known author Stephen Joseph Bergman, presents evidence that poorly designed electronic medical records (EMRs) and over-regulation are to blame for the growing crisis of physician burnout and suicide. The rate of suicides among physicians has risen to a staggering number--three per day. Shem argues that there is a "better way," and that is shown by the electronic health record (EHR) system used by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). The VA's EHR is called VistA. Shem's view is supported by a large and increasing number of physicians and nurses. Read More »

One of the most surprising developments at HIMSS19 is the large number of companies exhibiting their Fax Technologies. Long derided by reporters, health IT consultants, and EHR vendors, fax technologies have been growing in leaps and bounds while EHRs continue to fail to deliver interoperability. Just a couple of years ago faxes were used in around 75% of medical records exchanges. Latest numbers indicate that faxes are now used to exchange more than 85% of medical records. Most people would react in horror to such figures. How could physicians and medical personnel rely on antiquated paper technologies like faxes? The real story to be found on the exhibit floor at the HIMSS 2019 conference is that what we are seeing is a rapid transition to digital fax technologies and platforms. And this transition is taking place because physicians and medical staff have figured out they work!

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Although not officially listed as a track at the HIMSS19 conference, there are a series of very important presentations on the use of open source software for disaster preparedness and response. This is a critical topic that we have covered extensively in Open Health News. As we detailed in this article, there was a major failure in being able to provide victims of Hurricane Harvey, as well as Hurricane Irma and Hurricane Maria with access to their medical records. Few emergency medical responders could access their records either. The two success stories that came out of the hurricanes were two open source electronic health record (EHR) systems, OpenEMR and the VA's open source VistA EHR.

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OpenMRS and the Kenya Health Informatics Association have issued an invitation to the OpenMRS Implementers Conference in Kenya. The conference will take place from December 4th to the 8th in in Nairobi, Kenya. The invitation was issued by Paul Biondich, the Executive Director of OpenMRS, and Steven Wanyee, Executive Secretary General, of the Kenya Health Informatics Association (KeHIA). The OpenMRS conference will be held back to back with the HELINA scientific conference which begins on December 3rd.This is the 12th OpenMRS Implementers’ conference, the 6th in Africa and the 2nd to be held in Kenya. OpenMRS Implementers’ Conferences are a way to bring health care professionals and OpenMRS implementers together to collaborate, share implementation experiences and discover new ways to improve OpenMRS.

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Six major technology companies have thrown their support behind the White House's initiative to use an open source, collaborative, approach to accelerate the progress of health data standards and interoperability and to give patients access and control of their medical records. The companies; Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Salesforce signed a pledge that was presented at the White House's Blue Button 2.0 developer conference. The conference took place last Monday. Dean Garfield, president and CEO of the Information Technology Industry Council (ITI) told the press that “As transformative technologies like cloud computing and artificial intelligence continue to advance, it is important that we work towards creating partnerships that embrace open standards and interoperability.

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The Healthcare industry is in profound crisis as the HITECH Act of 2009 led medical facilities across the United States to spend in excess of $3 trillion on the purchase and implementation of expensive electronic health records (EHRs) under the Meaningful Use program. Yet, the most fundamental goals of electronic records Nirvana that were promised have not been achieved. For multiple reasons, EHRs have turned out to lack usability and be non-interoperable. In fact, most monopoly EHR vendors are engaged in what is commonly called “data blocking.” In most cases physicians are unable to obtain medical records for the patients they are seeing and patients have a hard time getting a hold of their own medical records. That means that the medical records are not available at the most important moment, the caregiver/patient encounter, and are not available to the patients themselves and their family members.

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The deadline to apply to host the 2018 International OpenMRS Implementers conference is coming up on April 30 [updated]. Nations that want to host the meeting need to answer the detailed questionnaire by that time. For those Open Health News readers who have missed one of the greatest health IT stories of the decade, the Government of Uganda hosted the 2016 OpenMRS meeting in their capital city of Kampala. The conference was such an extraordinary success that a large number of other national governments volunteered to host the 2017 Implementer's conference. There are currently close to 40 countries around the world where OpenMRS is being implemented throughout the county in large-scale deployments.

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OSEHRA is going to be holding a special one-hour Innovation Webinar tomorrow as part of the National Health IT Week. The focus will be on open source applications and tools that are gaining traction for clinical quality measures. Well known and very mature is popHealth. The webinar participants will discuss the latest upgrades in version 5.0 of the software. They will also present a new entrant into the field. That would be the Cedar project, an open source tool for testing the strength of Electronic Clinical Quality Measure (eCQM) collection systems that receive Quality Reporting Document Architecture (QRDA) files.

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Undaunted by the devastation caused by Hurricane Harvey in Houston, the Stephen F. Austin Community Health Network (SFA) responded to the crisis by leveraging open source technology to reach out to their patients and victims of the hurricane in areas of Texas that are virtually inaccessible. The Health Network, a Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC) covering Brazoria County, is one of the areas hardest hit by Hurricane Harvey and currently recovering. Using an advanced cloud-based version of the OpenEMR software, the SFA Community Health Network has been able to treat patients in clinics physically unreachable by their medical providers.

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OSEHRA will be holding a webinar on Tuesday, May 16, to provide an update and discussion of the status of the development of a cloud-based version of VistA and eHMP running on Microsoft Azure. The project is sponsored by Microsoft and was announced two months ago in a statement by Don Hewitt, the Vice President of Business Operations of OSEHRA. Hewitt writes: One of our newest members, Microsoft Corporation, is sponsoring an open source project group to implement a proof of concept for VistA in the cloud...

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The HIMSS17 Conference taking place in Orlando, FL, is clearly the turning point for open source in the healthcare information technology industry. Although the label "open source" is barely mentioned in the program, the fact is the majority of the presentations at the conference are either based directly on open source technologies or open health concepts. These include the large number of presentations on interoperability, FHIR, and the open/modular Medicaid IT revolution.

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