[PLUG-TALK] Medical Informatics, OpenEMR, and Tom Sawyer's Fence

Keith Lofstrom keithl at gate.kl-ic.com
Wed Oct 31 19:30:59 UTC 2012


Perhaps some of you recall Mark Twain's "Tom Sawyer".  Tasked by
Aunt Polly with whitewashing a fence, enterprising Tom pretended
it was so much fun that he reluctantly allowed other kids to help
in return for money or gifts.

Tony McCormick presented OpenEMR to PLUG a while ago, and we are
now bringing up the software with the help of Diane, a bright
Medical Informatics student at OHSU, working on an internship/
capstone requirement.  She is the envy of her fellow students,
most of whom are doing gruntwork like data entry for their
internships.  We may invite some of those unfulfilled students
to work on other small tasks (in addition to their assigned
internships).  Or not, we don't want to upset things at OHSU.

Perhaps there are some coders who would also like to whitewash
this fence.  We won't charge for the privilege, but we do need
to screen candidates for maturity and security savvy, and have
them sign a passle of HIPAA privacy agreements. 

Some of the tasks include untangling and documenting the code,
adding logging, perhaps adding features, or improving the ones
that are there.  OpenEMR is in production use around the
world, and gubmint certified, but there are some rough edges
and missing configuration and data translation tools that
make it hard for small practices to plug and play.

The EMR itself is implemented in PHP and MySQL.  I do most
of the offline data manipulation with Perl and vi.  Later
on, we will be playing with hylafax and scanners.  Perhaps
we will integrate the asterisk phone system with the EMR. 
They run on the same overbuilt-but-lightly-loaded server.  

We can't pay anybody, but Diane is ambitious and is thinking 
about starting a business to help thousands of other small 
medical clinics.  She will need geek help to do that;  she
can install Ubuntu and set up vpns and do other sysadmin
tasks, but she is not a coder.

Right now, the EMR field is crowded with $$$$$ "solutions"
that sequester clinic data in closed formats, holding it
hostage to whatever predatory pricing the vendors choose to
implement.  This is putting small practices out of business. 
Those who want to help fight this trend to corporatization
and centralization, while helping people and spreading open
source goodness, have an opportunity here.

There is room in the medical ecosystem for lots of consultants
and contractors, so although we can't pay you (for now) we can
help you learn.  There are opportunities to get modest amounts
of money from lots of clinics later.  

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993



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