International Development Research Centre of Canada has just released a book on telehealth in developing countries. Download it now from http://www.idrc.ca/en/ev-136734-201-1-DO_TOPIC.html (Full disclosure: I wrote chapter 3 🙂
A lot of people have asked me why there are no standards for health information in the Philippines*. This is a tricky question and one that does not have a right or wrong answer. But allow me to re-phrase it as follows: what happens when regulators (those who impose standards) are also implementers of those […]
In the last Med-e-tel conference in Luxembourg, it became apparent that a national eHealth masterplan was crucial if any country were to progress definitively into the integration of ICT in health. In most countries, an eHealth council leads this process. Surprisingly, the Philippines was mentioned as a model for the crafting a national council. Other […]
Not many know that there is a thing called the Philippine Health Information Network (PHIN) which is spearheading the Philippine Health Information System. The effort is led by DOH with support from the National Statistics Office, the National Statistical Coordinating Board (NSCB), PhilHealth, and other government agencies. I will post more about the PHIN as […]
The International Open Source Network ASEAN+3 together with DabaweGNU has started the FFEHR project — a Firefox extension project that functions as an electronic health record. The FFEHR project aims to instruct new open source developers on the use of the Cruxade and Firefox 3.x environment for application development. It also aims to engage medical […]
Modeling the real-world has always been a challenge to any health informatics professional. The fact is that the way humans perceive their world is vastly beyond the capabilities of technology to document. In essence, the best way to model the world is to live in it and be part of it. But for lesser mortals, […]
Much has been said about open source and there are better sites that give more information (www.fsf.org, www.opensource.org). But let me write about free and/or open source software (FOSS) for health. I am biased towards enforcing FOSS fundamentals for health applications especially those which are mission-critical. The reason is that a full audit of the […]
What is an admission? You ask an ER physician and they will say it is when the patient with a stab wound enters the emergency room. Ask the trauma surgeon and they think it’s when they write “Admit to Trauma” on the chart (even if the patient is still physically at the ER). And when […]