June 2008 — Vol. 3, No. 6
In This Issue
- Open Source Applications and Collaboration
Dave Wanser, PhD - What Is Open Source?
Nilish Gupte, MBA, CPHIMS - Participate in the HIMSS 2008 Compensation Survey
- News Briefs
- Already There… Implemented Health IT
Behavioral Health Integrated Provider System (BHIPS)
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Special Issue - Open Source
This issue begins with Dave Wanser, PhD, Executive Director of the National Data Infrastructure Improvement Consortium. He discusses the benefits of Open Source Applications and Collaboration.
Nilish Gupte, MBA CPHIMS, shares his thoughts on "What Is Open Source?"
Participate in the HIMSS 2008 Compensation Survey and win one of 10, $100 American Express gift cards.
The Already There… Implemented Health IT column offers a physician perspective on the Behavioral Health Integrated Provider System (BHIPS).
Open Source Applications and Collaboration
by Dave Wanser, PhD
Executive Director,
National Data Infrastructure
Improvement Consortium
With a seemingly endless stream of articles on the evolving health information technology environment, and an equally imposing number of choices regarding solutions, an ambulatory care organization contemplating the deployment of an electronic health record (EHR) can be overwhelmed with choices. With each option comes a long list of issues to wade through.
Generally, however, the starting point for most organizations is selecting a vendor based on the assumption that purchasing a proprietary system is the norm. This process is more often preceded by anecdotes from numerous colleagues about their experiences than by research into users’ perspectives of how adequately applications have performed in similar settings Read More.
What Is Open Source?
Nilish Gupte, MBA CPHIMS
What is Open Source? It is software with source code available free to anyone who is interested in downloading it. On the other hand, with commercially available software, the source code is protected by intellectual property rights and cannot be disclosed.
So what are the advantages of having access to the source code? Read more.
Participate in the HIMSS 2008 Compensation Survey
By participating in the HIMSS Compensation Survey – you’ll help yourself and your peers find out if you are getting paid what you’re worth. Is there a discrepancy in salaries between men and women? Do organizations with larger NET revenues pay more? Does one state average higher salaries versus another state? Does experience matter when it comes to increasing your paycheck?
Click here to take the HIMSS Compensation Survey. This link is available through July 31. Results will be announced later this year on the HIMSS Web site. To thank you for your participation, you’ll be entered to win one of 10, $100 American Express Gift Cards.
CCHIT:
Visit the Web site of the Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology (CCHIT) at www.cchit.org for update on the certification process, information on a July Town Hall call and important upcoming dates.
Open Source Resource
Learn more about open source technology from the California Health Care Foundation. Read this white paper on the Foundation’s Web site at http://www.chcf.org/documents/healthit/OpenSourcePrimer.pdf to better understand this option for health IT.
Read More.
Our Ailing ER’s
Read this June 1 article by Stephanie Desmon of the Baltimore Sun. She writes about the problem of emergency room crowding with the fastest-growing group of ER users becoming middle-class patients with insurance, people who usually get their health care from primary care physicians. Their share of visits jumped from 52.4 percent in the late 1990s to 59 percent in 2003-2004, according to a recent study in the Annals of Emergency Medicine.
Read More.
Already There… Implemented Health IT
Behavioral Health Integrated Provider System (BHIPS)
Texas Department of State Health Services
2005 Public Health Davies Award of Excellence recipient
In this special issue on Open Source software, find out how this public health system developed a Web-based EMR using open source.
The Texas Department of State Health Services is well on the way to achieving its strategic goal of narrowing the substance abuse treatment gap between those needing treatment and access to care. Its electronic system, the Behavioral Health Integrated Provider System (BHIPS), a Web-based electronic medical record-electronic health record housed in Austin, Texas, has successfully influenced state and federal reporting requirements.
BHIPS supports a continuum of services and provides for a continuous quality improvement culture. Public health peers across the country have implemented and emulated at minimal expense the BHIPS EMR-EHR system.
Adoption and Interoperability: The BHIPS was the impetus for the Web Integrated Treatment System (WITS) created by the federal Substance Abuse Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) for other states interested in using shared technology. The BHIPS has recently been re-written in Microsoft .NET using the framework that allows the application to be database independent. It also allows the sharing of functionality across states reducing the effort on all using the common framework. There are five states and one urban county using the BHIPS/WITS for their substance abuse service systems. Due to the open source, non-proprietary nature of BHIPS, several other states are in negotiation regarding implementation of one of these systems. In fact, versions of BHIPS have been implemented by Nevada and are planned for implementation in Ohio. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice and local courts have also been able to adopt BHIPS for their own uses.
Due to the nature of the confidential data, the public is limited to accessing provider demographic information such as name, location, services provided and available capacity or to performance informational reports created by DSHS staff. Any additional access is controlled by the security measures described above. Graphs are available to the public that show overall State performance for the last two fiscal years. Providers can monitor their contract and clinical performance on a to-date basis through graphs that compare their performance to that of the State in general.
Scalability: Hurricane Katrina, the Category 5 disaster that ripped through the Gulf Coast on August 29th, 2005, had a multitude of ripple effects. Patients that fled the effected states, essentially becoming refugees, were at a loss for medical records and treatment providers. Literally overnight, 470,000 people came to Texas and the dynamic, interactive design of BHIPS allowed it to respond within a matter of hours to the public health need to identify and capture services to these patients electronically.