Medical Ubuntu: Coverage and first round of interesting articles.

So far, our little post-on-a-whim "Ubuntu across the medical industry" idea has been featured on (and mighty thanks to!):

• Linux Today
• Centromimir.IT
• Centromimir LiveSpace
• Shashum.Com.Ar
• The Open Source Pimp
• Netscape
• Redtram
• Linux Medical News
• Africa By Art
  

We've also started doing a bit of digging... nothing like a good idea to inspire some late night surfing-with-purpose...

Mercy Hospital Opens Arms to Open Source... (Tina Gasperson)
"For almost 100 years a group of women called the Sisters of Mercy have been instilling a spirit of excellence into Baltimore's biggest hospital, appropriately named Mercy. Right from the start, the Sisters have made it their goal to push the medical institution beyond the ordinary by creating teaching affiliations, feeding the hungry, building state-of-the-art emergency services, and launching a neighborhood health center for the inner-city poor. In today's world, all that excellence requires a solid technology infrastructure--and one open source management package to manage a variety of systems.

"Mercy's data center houses more than 200 machines running Windows, Linux, Solaris, AIX, and other, more obscure operating systems. Mercy CIO Jim Stalder says about 160 of the servers are Windows-based, but because the health care services industry is 'fragmented,' with many essential applications available only on other OSes, he also has to maintain dozens of non-Windows machines..."

OpenVista(R)
OpenVista is the open-source version of VistA, which is an enterprise grade healthcare information system developed by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and deployed at nearly 1,500 facilities worldwide.

MedPix Medical Image Database Uses Healthy Dose of FOSS (Michael Stutz)
"MedPix is a sprawling online medical images database and diagnostic tool that's used around the world by radiologists, nurses, physicians, and medical students--and the whole system is powered by Linux and open source software.

"MedPix is hosted by the US federal government's health sciences university, the Uniformed Services University in Bethesda, Maryland. It's the brainchild of James G. Smirniotopoulos, M.D., a USU professor of Radiology, Neurology, and Biomedical Informatics and Clinical Sciences Chair of its Department of Radiology and Radiological Sciences..."

Interview with Fred Trotter: The Medsphere (Tony Mobily)
"Recently Medsphere, supposedly an 'Open Source' Medical Software Company, has sued its founders Scott and Steve Shreeve. Why? Medsphere claims that the Shreeves illegally released Medsphere software to Sourceforge. An 'Open Source' Software company is suing its founders for releasing code under a free license... that's a bit like Ford suing its employees for making cars.

Recently Fred Trotter has come forward with evidence that he claims makes the Medsphere lawsuit baseless. Read on for an email interview with Fred Trotter regarding who did what in the Medsphere lawsuit, and why every free software developer should care about what is happening to the Shreeves..."


Raw Matter: Free Software and Quality
"Ben Chaff argues that Free Software is better than average in terms of security when compared to the proprietary software market, but falls short of the standards that apply for software used in crash-and-people-will-die type of mission critical applications.

"I fear I have to cry foul here: developing software for the kind of systems he describes (nuclear power plant controlling, medical equipment, ...) means developing software with a large budget and a limited, relatively well specified functionality..."