[OLPC library] [Re] 'OLPC-Health' takes off !!

[Joseph Dal Molin]

Hi Andreas....small world....

Just a few comments regarding EHRs and other health software for OLPC. 
The key issue to think about is not what will run on OLPC.....we proved 
you can run the most fully functional and sophisticated open source EHR 
on OLPC which today is VistA. VistA for those who are not familiar, is 
the foundation of the US Veterans health system (5.5 million active 
patients), runs in 60 hospitals in Mexicos's IMSS health system. What 
IMHO the focus should be is what role can OLPC technology and it's 
"business model" best play in health ecosystems? I don't see them being 
used by clinicians (in large numbers)....but definitely filling in the 
last mile of care and prevention which is in the home and community. The 
VistA ecosystem includes a web based personal health record....we are 
also looking into an un-tethered approach using Indivo....this might be 
an area to expore.

....some food for thought

Joseph

ps. MUMPS or M is what makes VistA so resource efficient....it also is 
the platform for Epic, McKesson and several other major healthcare 
software applications...it is also used in the financial industry in 
high performance transaction processing environments such as ING Bank.

Andreas Tille wrote:
> On Tue, 5 Feb 2008, Seth Woodworth wrote:
> 
>> I would love to see how our two groups can move forward together.
> 
> :-)))
> 
>> Content:
>>
>> *A repackaging of the 'Where there are no Doctors' and other works
>> from the Hesperian foundation into HTML from the original source
>> documents
>>
>> *A collection of Wiki-sliced articles from Wikipedia
>>
>> *A collection of images(copyleft) to help diagnose and instruct
>>
>> *An updated version of the Human Physiology wikibook with audio
> 
> Great.  I never heard of these documents and our med-doc section
> is need definitely an update.  If you have some links for download
> we are really interested.
> 
>> Software:
>> *We're researching what would be the best medical records software
>> for the XO. OpenMRS, OpenEHR, or VistA
> 
> I never made it to dive more deeply into the former two.  I spend some
> time on VistA which might be the most advanced software in this field.
> THe problem of VistA is that it is quite huge and the requirement of
> MUMPS (I never heard of this except in connection with VistA and nobody
> else seems to know it) makes it kind of hard to tackle because we are
> lacking some basic knowledge that will probably be required.
> 
> On the other hand VistA consist of several more or less independant
> modules (if I'm not missleaded) and we could try to start with some
> parts that might be on one hand more interesting for smaller laptop
> clients and are perhaps easier to package.
> 
> BTW, did you know about GNUmed?  At least the client is packaged
> for Debian and this seems to me a perfect thing for XO laptops.
> 
>> We are still in our foundation stages, so we would welcome the input and
>> collaboration of the Debian health community.  I'm working on documentation
>> and recruiting volunteers, but Arjun is the point of contact for organizing
>> our group.
> 
> You are very welcome to join our list.  The status is currently that
> we have a lot of applications in preclinical microbiological research and
> medical imaging which do not seem perfect targets for XO because of
> the power they might need and they are not very probably for "outdor
> use".  But we are gaining more and more momentum also to things that
> might perfectly interesting for you.
> 
>> Thank you for your interest in our project.
> 
> Sure we are interested in anything that is connected to free medical
> software.
> 
> Kind regards
> 
>        Andreas.
>