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Monthly Archives: April 2010

Standards for Health Information in the Philippines 1999

An NIH publication. Full text here.

Effect of Image Compression on Telepathology

Archives of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine Volume 124, Issue 11 (November 2000) pp. 1653-1656 Full text available here.

History of Health Informatics in the Philippines

This needs updating but I am posting it here for those who are looking for references. Get it here.

What’s in the license fee of a proprietary hospital information system?

What actually do we pay for when we purchase a proprietary hospital information system? Let’s dissect where the money goes. 1. software development. This goes to the salary of the programmers who were hired by the vendor to develop the software. Interestingly, if the software is already running in another hospital, this cost has been […]

Hospital Information Systems Cost Centers

Want to automate the hospital? First, it depends on how big is the hospital. HIS are expensive and unless the hospital is big enough to generate revenues, a full HIS is not advisable. Having said that, there is benefit for HIS — it’s just that you have to make sure you lay down the HIS […]

EHR Fundamentals

We’ve been receiving a lot of calls for installations of electronic health records. For starters, electronic health records are expensive. It’s not for all (definitely not for the weak-hearts, unsure, and equivocal). Having said that, if a decision has been made, a systematic implementation is crucial to success. First, is there a sponsor? The sponsor […]

Why Health Facilities Should Prefer Open Source Over Proprietary Software

I have been very vocal about free and open source software (FOSS) for healthcare, mostly for philosophical reasons. But that approach is not always shared by other people with different views of the world. It seems ‘economics’ (being mostly quantitative) is easy for many to understand so let me use that as the platform for […]

Shortest entry in this blog — Which Electronic Health Record?

OpenMRS. More at www.openmrs.org

LOINC – codes for lab tests

Laboratories are one of the most non-standardized components of a hospital information system. It’s a pity because it is also a profit center for most facilities. Even if your lab machines are HL7 compliant (topic of another post), you should still ask whether the system can map to LOINC and if you or the vendor […]

OpenMRS — free and open source — worth a peek

There’s this new kid on the block (new meaning less than five years in EHR time). OpenMRS is short for open medical record system which is a result of research by Partners in Health (Boston) with South African counterparts. It runs on Java/Tomcat/Hibernate/MySQL, and has an elegant data model (EAV). For those interested in health […]