Freemed now in Japanese

The FreeMED Foundation is proud to announce that it is 10% + along with a Japanese translation for FreeMED. These translations become more and more important as we port FreeMED to other countries and societies, including in the programming the ability to conform to other medical paradigms.

In the process we hope the project will gain from that largess and that best medical practices / mangagement styles will evolve as templates from the conjoined areas.

In working with that translation we have come upon two even more valuable resources: (1) there is a peer to peer network in Japan for working with medical records. FreeMED is engaged in working with that net (2) there is interest in using FreeMED for research purposes.

FreeMED's structure, using the centrality of episode of care, can be worked to allow for data tracking, symptom tracking and even tracking with patients on experimental therapeutic regimens. Better yet, the program is elastic enough to permit such workings and connections. Because FreeMED uses XML data types we can interchange with most other programs. There is a powerful HL7 handler built in although often we need to write front ends to make the data appear within the program.

Of late we've begun to do some graphical report work so that data can be trended. We're looking at some open source statistical packages to enhance some of the data manipulation.

From the hinterlands... that's all for now

Whois DrGnu

DrGnu was a pseudonym I chose because at the time, before the 'internet', (yes kiddies there was a time before there was instant access) of 600 and EVEN 1200 baud modems for bulletin boards, I had a curly moustache which was reminiscent of a gnu. Of course it was somewhat redolent of the recursive GNU.

What sorts of things might you see on my pages? My interests are varried and include medicine and some research topics, open source medical systems, kiting, skiing and being. On the last I'm often vocal and you may expect to see controversial opines here.

I work as a podiatrist in a Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC) serving the poorest of the poor; often homeless, helpless hapless. Often we may be their only voice. I also work with FreeMED Software Foundation, an open source medical system creation group. Expect to see posts about these things often.

My musings, I like to think of as 'views from the hinterlands'. I grew up on a farm in Eastern Connecticut and have rather more rural than urban thoughts about life.

Expect THIS description to change with time and work.

DrGnu

Disaster Planning

We were talking the other day about the impending tragedy in all of the Southeast, that of rotting or unreadable paper patient records or even destroyed hard drives and machinery to make those drives work in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

In a post to linux med news I had talked about using a distributed, secure warehousing system for holding medical records. FreeMED, an open source practice management and electronic/ computer record system may have a solution. This differs from individual based solutions or from having (heaven forfend) the government in posssession of medical records. The records would be encrypted and readable only by the pass key holder.

When we designed FreeMED, which is web based, we knew that the weakness in backup was the busy schedule of the physician. We knew that despite the best of intentions, regular backups might be made but piled over the server so that a disaster would destroy both machine and backups. Although taking a weekly backup off site seems a great idea, having an electronic system removes the decision making, or lack thereof, from derailing backups.

At first we used rsync to make backups on servers which were not co-located. It means that backups from my machine in Hartford, CT were available in Windham (at my home servers) and in Claremont, NH. The difficulty; not HIPPA compliant. As a beta test, however, a wonderful idea.

Since the data is XML why not use PGP keys, warehouse the data on servers with set aside partitions, almost like a distributed RAID array. With regular (mine backs up hourly) incremental backups, recovery can be 100%.

How can FreeMED do this? We use a document management system so that 100% of documents can be electronic including received faxes, previous hard copy charts, images, and even laboratory results (see Linux med News Story). What we propose is that the government become involved in the warehousing, setting up vendors for distributed data holding. Since the data is unreadable, no one can use the data other than the key holder, the physician of record; since it is distributed, a disaster in any quadrant or area of the country would not affect other areas.

Lets prevent disaster, not become one.

Proactive, forward thinking, ready.

Thats todays GnuNews

GnuNews

And the beat goes on.

It was heartening to hear all the politicians wax heavily in favor of helping all those 'poor folk' in New Orleans. Why you'd think they'd never tripped over one of the poor folk in Washington DC, never been panhandled in Los Angles, never walked over the drunks in the alleyways of New Orleans.

In fact that could not have happened given their quick snorting at the piggie trough of block grants, happily cutting out any aid to the poor, stripping away monies to clinics which serve the underserved and poor in the city and rural areas. Pledging on the one hand to make it all better than the original in New Orleans while simultaneously stripping the very funds which in the long term would help those very people. How very typical. How FEMA of them.