Perfect. I was actually going to talk to you to see if you thought some of your group would like to be involved. Why don't you send them the whole email. Maybe something they see there will spark some interest.
There is lots of work that needs doing that isn't programming - like writing letters to see if we can get free use of material to make plugins, laying out how the program flow would go with those plugins, finding out how we need to keep the guardians, relatives, foster parents, courts, changing names, changing sexes, changing ages, changing status (emancipation, etc), etc., and their rights to information all straight in the record, (maybe we need a lawyer and a social worker), and then diagram the program for that, etc. I'm getting tired thinking about it and how little I know about this stuff. Internists have it easy! -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Pat Sent: Monday, October 04, 2004 2:55 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [Hardhats-members] Progress Report - Pedi and OBGYN projects -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Nancy, Wow! great stuff. I am going to send along your need for specific information along to the CARING e-mail list. I will also forward you request RE setting up the OB/GYN stuff. Never know, might find someone very interested in working with HardHats/WorldVistA. Pat Nancy Anthracite wrote: | I am happy to say we have made some real progress on the pedi project, and a | tiny bit on the OBGYN project. | | First, I got responses from several Hardhats/WorldVistA volunteers that were | willing to jump in and help - Mark Amundson, Wayne Brandes, Molly Cheah, | Paul Fu, Roy Gaber, James Gray, Gary Monger, Steve Owen, Thurman Pedigo, | Kevin Toppenberg, Cameron Schlehuber, and John Leo Zimmer (and if I missed | you, please send me a nasty email and remind me). Others, that are friends | of Hardhat/WV folks that have been helping out are Theresa Cullen of the IHS | and Scott Hamstra of the IHS, plus Henry Huggins and other IHS folks that | have been drawn in along the way, and Emory Fry from the Navy. | | I spent a whole lot of time sending out email all over everywhere looking | for some non-Hardhats that would be willing to help with the Pedi project or | VistA-Office project. I was particularly interested in getting an | organization like the AAFP or the AAP interested as they might have a | number of docs who were interested in electronic medical records and would | be willing to take a look at what we produced to tell us what was and was | not good about it. | | Well, after a whole lot of disappointment, we really hit one out of the park | when I got a response from Andy Spooner. Andy is the John Dustin Buckman | Professor, Associate Professor, and Director Division of General Pediatrics, | Department of Pediatrics, University of Tennessee College of Medicine. He | is also chairman of the American Association of Pediatrics Steering | Committee on Clinical Information Technology, and if that were not enough, | he is the Cochairman of the HL7 Pediatric Special Interest Group on | Pediatric Data Standards. He has seen VistA in action, and has students and | residents who have used VistA and like it and he thought adding Pedi was a | great idea. In addition, one of the goals of the HL7 Pediatric SIG was to | figure out how to provide developers the information they needed to make a | good pediatric record. My email came at a good time because, since we | represent a non-profit all volunteer, open source group, he felt we were a | good choice for them to work with to be sure they are on the right track in | giving developers the information they need. Wayne Brandes ended up joining | the SIG, and I didn't join (just didn't seem right being an internist), but | I was invited to attend their meeting in Atlanta in person, or via | telephone, to let their group know about us. I also was directed to the | documents that were the drafts of what they were working on , that were | already packed with information that we need for our project. They are | available on the web. | | Last Wednesday I attended all of their meeting that I could - i.e., anything | were there was a phone hookup for conferencing. They were VERY helpful and | it is only going to get better. They are currently working on a text | description of what a pediatric record needs to have that an adult record | does not have, and when they are done with that, they intend to make | storyboards of what they envision the look and feel of an ideal pediatric | EMR would be like. I can't imagine anything better for us to use, except if | it were available yesterday. | | While I was on the phone waiting for one of the meeting to start, I struck | up a conversation with Trent Rosenbloom who is a physician/informaticist | from Vanderbilt University Medical Center. He has been working on their | pediatric medical records and offered to help us any way he can. Steve | Lawless, another physician and Chief Knowledge Office (don't you love that | title) for a huge pediatric group called Nemours in Wilmington, Delaware was | also trapped waiting with me on the phone at a different time, and he too, | offered to help if he could. He found the story of what were were doing with | VistA very interesting and wished that their system were open source. Cheri | Throop, RN, MHSA, RHIT, CPHQ is the Administrative Co-chair for the SIG and | is truly outstanding at her job. She works for the Child Health Corporation | of America in Kansas City, MO. David Claussen, another physician, is the | other Cochairman and also has been very helpful, hosting a conference call | that Theresa Cullen, Emory Fry, Scott Hamstra and me all attended. He is | also heavily involved and coauthor of one of the most widely quoted papers | on patient safety and quality of care from the Institute of Medicine. | | With considerable luck, the vexing problem of pediatric immunizations may be | considerably less of a problem than we thought it would be. It appears the | CDC was well aware of the complexity and actually had written what I guess | could be described as a specification for the algorithm that would be | necessary for immunizations and posted it on the CDC web site. As I | understand it at this point, that algorithm has been written as part of a | HHS project to support state immunization registries, and is available to | the registries. I contacted Theresa Cullen and Mike Ginsburg (the | VistA-Office Project Manager) and emailed the CDC to see if we can find out | more about it. Mike seems to think that the program is in the public | domain. The IHS uses an excellent program, but unfortunately, it has to be | licensed, but the fees for the IHS re quite reasonable. | | Meanwhile, Cameron Schlehuber, who had agreed to tell us what to do for the | database side of things, surprised me. A few weeks back, I had sent him the | links to the CDC information on pediatric growth charts and tables to give | him an idea of what we needed to deal with that portion of the record. I | should have figured when he said something about it being "something that | would be fun to program" that he would be up to something. At 2:30 AM | Saturday I received and email with a KID file attached that puts all the | data into VistA from those CDC tables and has a MenuMan option that calls a | program, PEDGC, that calculates the percentile for about a half dozen | combinations of sex with weight and age, length and age, head circumference | and age, weight for stature, and BMI for age. Turns out he took a day to | load standard growth charts and code the formulae for percentile | calculations. Cameron also told me he will be coordinating the use of the | PED namespace (and all others) for the VistA Office EHR with the developers | under contract as well as others making contributions for that project. | | On the downside of the Pedi Project is that I have heard that the IHS | pediatric software that we were hoping to incorporate may be proprietary so | that we will not be able to use it. Other downside elements are that much if | not all of the development data that we need to do that portion of the | record ( things like when the child talks and walks and smiles, etc.) is | proprietary and will probably have to be put in as "plugins" that practices | can add if they are willing to obtain licenses. Growth data for special | groups such as children with Down's syndrome is also proprietary. I am | trying to get permission to use the information free of charge in the | development process and I am still hoping we will be able to find some data | that is free to use. | | As for the OBGYN project, that is going to be harder, I think. There does | not seem to be much, if any, activity in the national organizations for | OBGYN in informatics, but Emory Fry and someone I met from New York seem to | have OBGYN contacts who are interested. I am also pursuing some software | from a tribal hospital that is no longer a federal hospital with the IHS who | I hope will be willing to share it. | | This email is being posted to Hardhats, but please feel free to join the | mailing list for the Pedi Project, even if all you want to do is keep tabs | on what is going on. If you would like to help, by all means, jump in and | please make contact either by emailing me or posting to the Pedi Project | mailing list - [EMAIL PROTECTED] | | | | | ------------------------------------------------------- | This SF.net email is sponsored by: IT Product Guide on ITManagersJournal | Use IT products in your business? Tell us what you think of them. Give us | Your Opinions, Get Free ThinkGeek Gift Certificates! 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