LinuxChix Los Angeles

Senator Grassley of the Senate Finance Committee overseeing Medicare and Medicaid reads the Riot Act to software vendor over closed source tactics for Electronic Health Records.

These include a “hold harmless” clause – shifting any responsibility for system errors onto the physician and “gag rules” to prevent public disclosure of system defects.

Can it get any more un-open-source than that? Looks like another argument in favor of Open Source software for healthcare.

Love this! Connecting to community through community. In the words of the Mozilla Foundation,

Mozilla Service Week is all about community – your community. We want you to find a way to use technology to make a difference in your neighborhood, your school, your library, your town, a fellow public benefit organization. We welcome any act of service, no matter how small.

How to participate? Visit the Mozilla Service week page for more information. Find a volunteer opportunity in your town, your city, your state, your country, or your world through the Idealist Mozilla partner listing of volunteer opportunities. You can search by location, field of interest, or desired skill set.

I’m off to see if someone needs a volunteer webmaster. I’ll let you know how it goes.

UPDATE 9/15: Issue is gone (I hope!). Everything I wrote about fsockopen, cURL, etc. forget it. It was a server firewall issue. The reason for the ad hoc creation of dynamic rules which intermittently blocked outbound http requests is still under investigation, but the installation of a firewall that had better integration with the backend web administration interface looks to have helped.
UPDATE 9/13: Issue is back. All outside connections, including rss feeds, are out. Damn.
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The Anita Borg Systers Pass-it-on Award applications for a financial stipend of $500-$1000 USD to women either in, or aspiring to be in, the field of computing. From the RFP page some possible uses for the stipend could include

• Small amount to help with studies, job transfers or other transitions in life.
• A broader project that benefits girls and women.
• Projects that seek to inspire more girls and women to go into the computing field.
• Assistance with educational fees and materials.
• Partial funding source for larger scholarship.
• Mentoring and other supportive groups for women in technology or computing.

Applications close November 4, 2009. More information and an application can be had here http://www.anitaborg.org/initiatives/systers/pass-it-on-grants-program

The latest posting at LinuxMedNews seems to indicate things are heating up a little.  What has been getting interesting has been a rising tide of voices including politicians both in the US and Canada as well as OSS vendors. Now there’s an Open Source Letter to President Obama online where the general public is invited to add their comments.

Woe to the unsuspecting Veterinarian not using proper species biometric logins!

(Absolutely couldn’t resist)

A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages posted by James Iry is a wonderfully funny, and irreverent look at software development. My favorite?

1987 – Larry Wall falls asleep and hits Larry Wall’s forehead on the keyboard. Upon waking Larry Wall decides that the string of characters on Larry Wall’s monitor isn’t random but an example program in a programming language that God wants His prophet, Larry Wall, to design. Perl is born.

Yup, that’s Perl.

Makes me think of my history (herstory?). The first computer I ever worked on was the Apple IIe that included the C/PM card for the full 80 column computer experience. Ah, the memories of WordStar and playing Pong on that Apple.

I see Mr. Obama’s group seems to believe in the use of Drupal.

Don’t ya just love leadership by example?

Perhaps the notion of open source EHRs is really on a roll. The Dept of Defense and Veterans Health Administration have long been criticized for the lack of interoperability between their 2 healthcare systems. The VHA is open source and the DoD has been proprietary. Now, in a stunning turn of events, it sounds like they are thinking about having a more open EHR for the DoD.

Let’s see, we’ve now seen a US Senator, the Wall Street Journal and now even the land of proprietary procurement purchases talking about open EHR systems.  What next?

The VHA’s home-grown electronic healthrecord system is open source (through the Freedom of Information Act) and freely available to anyone who wants to download it from the VHA’s website. The Wall Street Journal has recently suggested it might be a viable  solution for medical facilities seeking a lower cost alternative to proprietary EHRs. (Those of us VistA watchers have been saying this for a long time.)