Topic 17

Libre Software for Medicine

Keywords

• Interoperability
• Medical Software
• Physician Office Software
• Outcome
• Electronic Health Records

Motivations

The gathering of medical data on a world wide scale, its use by third parties and the use of medical data for purposes of data mining are all difficulties we face. In the Open Source community, because we see the code, we know what is being done with our patient data, we, the physicians can exercise greater control.

It is imperative that we in the Libre community open and establish a dialogue on interoperability of systems. The building of yet another medical 'tower of babel' will only serve to fragment our Libre community, disseminate our resources and decrease the chance that Open Source products will compete sucessfully in the medical software marketplace.

• Speak to the administrative treatment of data
• Develop a consensus on data interchange
• Speak to the problems of record flow
• Discuss the problems of proprietary systems (CPT, ICD, ICPC) being used as standards, therefore essential to the Open Source system, often placing those systems out of the monetary reach of developing nations who may benefit most from Open Source software.
• Support those promotors of Libre Medical Systems
• Speak to the issues of secure data transmission, secure office data and secure medical systems in general.

Subtopics

The sub topics will be presented as individual papers, to be listed here as they are accepted.

• The following presenters have registered as of April 30, 2001.
• FreePM - Christian Tismer
• Spirit project - Brian Bray

Program

The program has yet to be established as of April 20, 2001. It will most likely be a full day of presentations and discussions. There will be a morning closed session and an afternoon PUBLIC session.