Keith Lofstrom wrote:
> My wife's new clinic will be running OpenEMR, an open source
> medical records program. Sometimes patients (or their other
> doctors) want copies of their records. Rather than kill trees,
> I am thinking about putting their patient record on a stripped
> down linux live CD, along with a specially configured version
> of OpenEMR.
>
> This would have interesting "evangelistic" consequences for
> both Linux and OpenEMR.
>
> To do this properly, the patient data portions of the live
> CD should be password encrypted. Also, it would be nice
> to have a very fast CD writer, with some kind of automagic
> labelling system so that the CD gets a readable label before
> it is handled by people (we don't want to accidentally swap
> the CDs going to two different patients).
>
> A live CD has the additional advantage that we are no longer
> dependent on the patient's own dodgy home PC security for
> protecting their medical information. If they want, they
> could probably mount their hard drive and copy the information
> to it, but anyone smart enough to do that may be slightly
> more clueful about security, and assumes responsibility in
> any case.
>
> And as I understand it, many Linux Live CDs boot on intel
> Mac hardware reasonably well.
>
> How does this sound? Would you like your own doctor to
> do something like this?
>
> Keith
>
Evangelism aside, and just plain having fun as well ...
the core need is sharing records in a secure way
... so one might ask oneself ...
(a) if the recipient has to boot from the CD, is the record truly
sharable?
(b) is there a HIPPA standard format that might be more useful?
(c) what happens when a record is sent to another medical office?
I don't know the answers, nor do I have a need to know ... and there are
probably other questions as well. What I am saying is that I have had
enough personal experience in trying to get information shared between
offices ... even if they are all 100% MS ... to suggest that that one
try to focus on need and reality.
Need in this case is share the record
Reality is what actually happens, or is likely to happen, or be
tolerated
Make it too complex and it will probably not fly
Hope this helps
Regards
Fred James
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