Fred Trotter

As many of you know,  I am often asked to represent the FOSS Health IT community in negotiations with various organizations. My first opportunity to do this was with CCHIT, that negotiation has turned out pretty well. Then I represented the FOSS community at the NCVHS hearings on Meaningful Use.
Most recently, I have had requests [...]

When I get a good question from a conference or email, I like to answer it in a blog post so that I can just link it in when others ask me the same thing in the future.
One of the good questions I got was:
Why are there so many “Open Source Health Care” non-profits, yet [...]

A few months ago, CCHIT suffered from what I like to call “angry letter round 1″.
This is were I send a very pointed, ultimatum letter to an organization of the general form “your are hurting my community, stop it or else”. Personally I find that about %50 of organizations respond positively and about %50 do [...]

Recently CCHIT has come under fire for being too focused on large proprietary vendors and specifically, its association with HIMSS.
These attacks have gotten so bad that Mark Leavitt has posted a rebuttal, which has generated a tremendous amount of attention over at THCB ( a blog well worth adding to your RSS feed)
Mark raises several [...]

(Update 08-13-09 I have already presented this to NCVHS)
Introduction
I represent a community of health software developers and clinical users that respect software freedom. This community operates in the legacy of the VA VistA underground railroad. There are several important commercial EHR vendors that respect software freedom they are an important part of our community [...]

A central problem with CCHIT is the feature bucket.
CCHIT certification represents compliance with a list of hundreds of functional requirements. This would be great if that list of features were 100% a good idea, but the reality is far from the truth. From the FOSS perspective we feel that there is a considerable dumbing-down effect [...]

Fred Trotter is a hacktivist. He works for social change by coding and promoting Open Source (FOSS) Health Software. In recognition of his role within the Open Source Health Informatics community, Trotter was the only Open Source representative invited by the NCVHS to testify on the definition of ‘meaningful use’ under ARRA. Trotter also represented [...]

The meeting with CCHIT worked. The FOSS community, to the degree that such a thing is possible, had authorized me to go nuclear on the issue before the meeting. I had been given assurance that the community has been so frustrated with dealing with CCHIT that if they did not work with us that [...]

MOSS (Misys Open Source Solutions) has come into it’s own as a force both within FOSS and within it’s chosen domain of interoperability.
MOSS is led by Tim Elwell and Alesha Adamson, they could often be found at the interoperability showcase where they performed as one of the few PIX/PDQ services.
At this conference especially Tim was [...]

I am preparing for the meeting tomorrow with CCHIT and FOSS. I had previously used Google Moderator to get a feel for what my communities position on this issue is. Moderator allows for the same question to get posted again and again, so often the same idea was represented twice. So ignoring duplicates and ideas [...]