Open source gets hearing but no action at HIMSS

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It's a Time to Dance

For more than a decade I have been a strong proponent of open source in healthcare. If I were still an open source EMR vendor I would be dancing in the streets.

The FOSS community made several attempts to startup an interoperability strategy. This is a very expensive and time consuming thing to do. It doeesn't lend itself to adhoc FOSS projects. In 2001 FreePM and FamilyPracticeMedicine (two FOSS EMRs) demonstrated interoperability. However, this was only two and the approach would hae created a mess of various API exchanges in order to bring in the only half dozen or so FOSS apps at the time.

What we have with CCHIT at this point is a publicly available, FOSS test harness and all of the pre-certification criteria.

FOSS EMR vendors may not be able to say that they are CCHIT "certified" but if they can deliver the test harness and demonstrate functional 'compliance' then they are a long ways down the road to interoperability.

The situation with incentive payments "may" be an issue. If I were a FOSS EMR vendor I would be busy making the business case for me being able to prove compliance without having to add the overhead cost of certification. Interoperability compliance is the issue, not a rubber stamp by CCHIT.

The next step in proving compliance is multiple FOSS EMR vendors publishing their test data results.

It is truly a GREAT time to get all of this free functional testing work handed to you.

--Tim

Posted by: tw_cook   Posted on: 04/14/09 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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