From the 16th until the 18th of April 2008 Med-e-Tel, the international educational and networking forum for eHealth, Telemedicine and Health ICT will take place at the Luxexpo in Luxembourg.

Beside various other interesting events, a workshop about Facilitating Collaboration to Facilitate Tele-Success will be held on Friday 18th of April and is split into four different sessions:

• From the Bottom Up: Designing from the User Perspective (Bill Parlette, iPath Association, Switzerland)
• What Else Is Going On? Building a Project Database (Holger Schmuhl, apfelkraut.org, Germany)
• Practical Considerations: Infrastructure, Links and Tools (Erik Blantz, INVENEO, USA)
• Price-Performance via Open Source Tools (Dr. Etienne Saliez, VCT-TK, Belgium)

The workshop will take place in Conference Room 4 starting at 9:30h until 16:00h.

With the session “What Else Is Going On? Building a Project Database” chaired by apfelkraut.org we hope to gather and discuss your requirements, expectations and experiences about a future database that is listing all available open source software projects for the health care sector. We are looking forward to your active participation!

Update (2008-04-16): My presentation is available here.

for more information:
Med-e-Tel (official homepage)
Med-e-Tel (program)
The Bob Blog - “Just a reminder, Med-e-Tel is fast approaching”
Free Medical Software (freemedsw.apfelkraut.org)

After one week I performed today a major update of the overview of open source software for the health care sector at freemedsw.apfelkraut.org.

Meanwhile more than 70 FOSS projects are listed and counting … According to the number of visits per day there seems to be at least some interest in this overview (Wed: 40, Thu: 120, Fri: 270, Sa: 130 visits). Thank you!

While adding new projects I also extended the number of categories:

• Clinical research
• DICOM tool(kit)
• DICOM viewer/server
• Electronic medical record
• HL7 tool(kit)
• Hospital management system (changed)
• Integration tool(kit) / middleware (new)
• Practice management system (changed)
• Radiology information system (new)
• Signal processing (new)
• Telemedicine (new)
• Visualization (new)
• Other
• Standards

Furthermore I though it would be useful to include also a link to the RSS feed of the news and releases of each project. So that you can check the latest developments by a single click or just add it to your favorite RSS reader.

Moreover if you want to stay up-to-date about what is going on at freemedsw.apfelkraut.org, you can also add this blog to your favorite reader. I will announce major updates or related news under the category Open Source .

In case you find a broken link or incorrect information I would appreciate your help! Please send me a message or leave a comment at freemedsw.apfelkraut.org. You can submit change requests or new projects via a form which is available here.

Is this overview of any help to you?

What should be the next improvement(s)?

An overview of open source projects for the health care sector just went online. I created this list out of the need to have an up-to-date, detailed and comprehensive list of free medical software. When I was looking for a tool for a certain purpose, I found some listings, but most of them were out-of-date or limited to a particular project type. I was also afraid of digging sourceforge.net or freshmeat.com as it always takes some time to find the right stuff.

Beside the name of the project and a link to its homepage, also the license type, the supported platforms and the type of client (native vs. web-based) is given. Furthermore I included a short description of each project, which is taken from the projects homepage.

It is an approach to provide somewhen a comprehensive list that contains also additional information on each project. For a start I created just a static page. Future plans are to transfer it into a dynamic page with much more details available and additional features like a search function.

I would greatly appreciate your help in case you find broken links, incorrect information, if you have improvement suggestions or if you know a project to be added. Please leave a comment or sent me an email (see contact)!

The listing contains projects of the following categories:

• Clinical Research
• DICOM Tool
• DICOM Viewer / Server
• Electronic medical record
• HL7 Tool
• Practice / hospital management system
• Other
• Standards

The overview is available at http://freemedsw.apfelkraut.org.

Update: You can now submit new projects via a form that is available here.




[Doctor Tux logo taken from m77]

[taken from www.howtotell.com]

… is a counterfeit copy of Microsoft Windows XP Professional, really!

In my Oxford Advanced Dictionary the term counterfeit is defined as “deliberately made so as to be exactly like sth., in order to deceive” amongst others. In respect of this interpretation I see myself obliged to slightly modify this warning:

Attention !!!

Most probably you have received a CD with your new computer or quite unlikely you have received it after handing over quite a bunch of money to your favorite dealer. So if this CD looks something like this:

[taken from www.howtotell.com]

Be aware that you have been deceived ! Although the finishing with the amazing glittering holograms might suggest that you are holding a CD with a high-end, secure, user friendly and multi-tasking operating system in your hands … I am sorry, but this is a fallacy! It is just Windows … and you might agree that you can get cheaper and presumably more beautiful saucers at your local housewares store.

But if the CD looks similar to this one:

Congratulations ! You made the right choice and are holding a CD with a real high-end, secure, user friendly and multi-tasking operating system in your hands. Even if the finishing of the CD and the way how you got it may not be as our fellows from Redmond want it. Let me guess … it was handed over to you by a long-haired, round-bellied, pizza-addicted nerd (if one may allow me to draw this meanwhile old-fashioned picture of those “Linux guys”)? Or did you even just download it from the Internet and burn it by yourself?! So as long as there is something like Ubuntu, SuSE or whatever Linux distro on the CD, you can be sure that you have chosen the right OS.

@Microsoft: Do you really think that the use of your software makes so stupid that one cannot distinguish between a genuine copy or a counterfeit copy of your masterpieces? Or let me put it another way, who at all would make an illegal copy of your software while there is software for nearly every need available for free?