BLOG on IT/IS in Healthcare & Life Sciences Joerg Schwarz on Healthcare [Health + Care]

The terrible disaster caused by the recent magnitude 7.8 Earthquake in China is a cause of mourning for the victims to many of us.

My wife is from China, and she talks to her family every day in order to get better updates on the emergency response. Pictures of mothers crying for their children, Husbands for their wifes and children for their parents move our hearts. There is little we can do but show our sympathy and try to help the best we can.

Sun has, like many other companies, coordinated a disaster relief drive that allows all of us (Sun employees and everyone else) to help survivors through this difficult situation: 

 

 

 

Roger Maduro's Newsletter about VistA and Open Healthcare contains several interesting updates about VistA implementations, and also about the combination of strengths between VistA and Tolven. Medsphere and Tolven reached an agreement to use the Tolven EMR, which was announced at HIMSS, so it looks like we can expect interesting things in the creation of a fully functional clinical application stack for acute care hospitals with a state-of-the art EMR core. And, as I might add, available on a highly scalable SAMP stack.

Finally, we made the last step. After building a legacy in giving away millions of dollars in free, commercial grade software, we now offer free hardware to software developers who port their application to Solaris! Too good to be true? Try it!

Sun Developer Network (SDN) is a free program for the developer community. It might be a well kept secret, but the developer tools SDN members can access for free are state of the art (Netbeans, Sun Studio Tools), not only for Solaris, but for cross platform development. Combine this with a very robust application server (Glassfish) and RDBMS (mySQL), and developing web service based applications  on a SAMP stack (Solaris, Apache, MySQL and PHP) becomes a breeze.

Now, if you need a server or workstation to run the entire stack on Solaris, you can get this for free too, as part of the Partner advantage program, which is of course also free. On top of that, we can help with benchmarks of your Solaris applications, so actual deployment capability can be tested and sized before the actual deployment. And when the first deployment comes around, you can leverage the free try-an-buy program for our CMT servers, both for developers and endusers. These servers are ideal for web services deployments in eHealth applications.

At HIMSS'08, Medsphere announced that they will wrap OpenVistA around a Tolven core. This is an interesting development, now reflected in ZDnet. See what's possible with open source? Tolven's rigouros data structure seems to emerge as a standard, which would be really helpful for the industry. And VistA has still a lot to give in clinical application knowledge. Certainly a match we'll have to observe.

This entry is a response to a badly researched comparison between Windows VISTA and MAC OS. As a recent convert, I collected experience with both and comment that in my experience MAC OS is clearly the better OS and a better "deal" than VISTA, contrary to the PC World blog entry.[Read More]

George Mason University is working on a great tool for research citation libraries, called zotero - check it out.

Usually I use Endnote from Thompson - my University provides free access and its truly a life saver for the vast amount of papers one has to write in a doctoral program. But it has of course limitations. Zotero  adds some very nice and interesting features. Academic research is, both from a philosophical and practical standpoint, probably the most appropriate field for using open source tools accelerating the free flow of ideas and concepts.

For now, I won't ditch Endnote, but I can't wait to try the OpenOffice plug-in. Zotero for OpenOffice is promising and badly needed, and I just hope the plug-in will also work with NeoOffice. The fact that the zotero plugin for Mozilla works on a Mac is certainly a good step in that direction.

Let's see what Kevin has to say on the topic.

If you are interested in a job as business development manager for the payer segment, where you can help to build and shape our industry strategy and alliances, check out this job posting.  And if you know someone, let him/her know, too.

 

ICW, one of our PHR partners, got more startup money. Anybody who's been involved with startups knows how difficult it is to get through the initial phase before the revenue starts flowing, let alone in a new field of health care. So: herzlichen glueckwunsch!

 

Read this blog by Esther Dyson, one of the final reactor panelists of Health 2.0 and you'll notice I'm not the only one recognizing the potential, yet critical need for aggregation and integration.

The "World of Health IT" conference (WHIT'07), a European HIMSS derivate, is coming up in October in Vienna, Austria. My journey will take me to Brussels and Berlin before finally venturing to Vienna.

It's kind of odd, but a number of things are happening in recent weeks that make this trip to Berlin quite special.

Our partner for PHR, ICW, will hold a partner summit in Berlin the week before WHIT. As stated many times, I'm a big fan of connected PHRs as a center piece for consumer directed health care, and I'm looking forward to learn what is next for ICW.

It also gives me a chance to go back to Berlin. A journey to Berlin is always very emotional for me, mainly because I love Bertholt Brecht. I grew up in what was then called West Germany (now there is only one Germany, but growing up this distinction was important) and had not had a chance to visit East Berlin during my trips to West Berlin. So in May 1990 I took for the first time the S-Bahn to Alexanderplatz, which was still divided into an East and West partition, and walked to the Brecht monument in front of the Theater am Schiffbauer Platz. There, I just stood next to Brecht and read along with the statue "Questions of a worker who reads", crying tears of joy and excitement. That's unification for me. ("Fragen eines Zeitung lesenden Arbeiters" is, however, not my favorite poem - but that's another story)

Last time in Berlin, I met my long time friend who had moved to Berlin, at this very place, the Brecht monument. We paid homage to Berthold before walking to the "Staendige Vertretung". There we were, two high school friends twenty years later, both traveled and far from home, close to our spiritual godfather Brecht, drinking our local brew Koelsch in a place that is full with memories of the Bonner Republic that doesn't exist anymore - the Republic of Konrad Adenauer, Willy Brandt, Herbert Wehner and Helmut Schmidt.

But that's not all. The last two weeks I was watching "Das Leben der Anderen", making of and background, which invokes yet other memories of the "other" German post-war republic. Interesting that the author and director of this movie was born in Cologne, West Germany (like me). Maybe it takes some distance to gain perspective. Anyway. ICW sent me a model of a Trabant car as an invitation token. They will organize a rally through Berlin using those cars at the eve of their event. But I'm going to skip that. The Trabant reminds me too much of the Republic portraited in "Das Leben der Anderen", the other republic.  And I'm sure Brecht, could he blog today, would agree with me that the Stasi Republic betrayed much of what Brecht believed in. So I will instead go see Brecht and remember the Bonner Republic.

Finally, the "Aeltestenrat des Deutschen Bundestages" will be here at the EBC tomorrow and I'm looking forward to host them. While I'm a bit scared to do a presentation in German, it's good to speak the language of Brecht and Heine once in a while, and a good preparation for the time in Berlin and Vienna. Maybe I should do my next Blog entry in German?

In order to stay connected with the Health 2.0 community. Matthew Holt recommended to join their Facebook group - so I did. What can I say - I'm a linkedin kind-a-guy

 

 

Yesterday was the groundbreaking for a castle to be built in my hometown of Morgan Hill, CA. No, we're not back to the 14th century here in the south county. It's all for science.

 A few weeks ago, we spent our vacation in Spain - my favorite country in Europe.

Fantastic food, great people and culture. My wife, who comes from China, was in Europe for her first time, and loved it. We did a two day trip to Granada in Andalusia to visit the (original) Alhambra. Not only did I always want to see it, I wanted to see it before we have our own Alhambra in the little town in live in here in California. Anaheim has Sleeping Beauty's castle, the fairy tale copy of Schloss Neuschwanstein in Germany, and Morgan Hill will have the Alhambra, an ivory tower copy of the Alhambra in Granada for mathematics researchers.

Now, if you want to visit the original Alhambra in Granada, which is a good idea, I'd say, don't be as naive as we were. We arrived in the afternoon, and everybody was laughing at us - tickets to get into the Alhambra sell out fast and are gone in the morning. Either pre-order them months in advance, or stay in Granada and go, like I did, at 6am in the morning to the entrance, just to wait two hours in an increasing growing queue waiting for tickets. Then, go and admire the wonderful architecture, which is, as I now know,  an example for non-euclidean geometry. Hence the Math castle in Morgan Hill. I'm not sure latter will even be open to the public. Your entrance  ticket might be a Ph.D. in Math, and that's harder to get then standing in line at 6am in Granada - especially given the great chocolate bread and cafe they  sell to the early morning crowd.

Neuschwanstein, Bavaria	Anaheim, California

Granada, Spain	Morgan Hill, California

HIMSS was a great show for us - over 300 new contacts. We're still working on the follow up.

David Lin took some picture -here is a small selection.

Every year we're looking from some trade show give aways. This year we had footballs, donated from the JCAPS B2B group. Ever experienced how addictive these little things are? Once you get your hands on them, you can't help but throw them to someone on the other side of the aisle. If HIMSS exhibition rules next year prohibit Football play at the show floor, it's our fault. No, it's the fault of these little temptresses.....

 

Yes, although we are in Healthcare, we like to drink a beer once in a while.
In Germany, were I came from in the ancient past, Beer is considered a healthy beverage. So here you go, part of the Healthcare team taking medicine

 

 from left to right: John Barto, SE manager; Steve Nelson , Security and SunRay guru,  Mark Handy, OEM Design win  Manager, Tony Cina, our ISV solutions specialist and David Lin, ISV Engineering (helps our ISV partner to port to Sun).

In the center of attention of this serious briefing prior to the show opening you can see Peggy Taylor, the queen of event planning.

The three guys who wear Dinner Jackets are Mike Stephens, Ralph Butler and Jim Bindon. Probably just came back from a round of Golf....

When somebody tells you she is leaving California because of the weather, you should be alarmed. Something is not right. But if someone leaves California for Boston, that's serious trouble. I have to think about my past home in Germany every time I hear this Augustana song, and it makes me enjoy the blue sky here even more. 

Here are some of my favorite YouTube entries of Augustana's Boston

1. official clip

2. on Letterman

3. great cover (hang in for a few secs)