Fred Trotter

Recently, VA VistA has been getting a tremendous amount of attention. Lets take a look at the recent events that highlight what VistA is and why it is important.

Mexico decides to implement VistA in many of its state run hospitals.
Medsphere gambles investment dollars on the idea that VistA can be used in private hospitals.
WorldVistA wins […]

My next article on HealthVault, does not belong here on FredTrotter.com, I am a guest blogger over on free software magazine and when I have an issue that touches on software freedom, I like to post it there (where it will be read more…)
Please enjoy HealthVault: Software Freedom and Personal Health Records
-FT

An article I wrote about Vendor Lock-in in health software has been published in the recent Fall 07 edition of EHR Scope.   From the article:
 You can fire your paint store, your dentist, your lawyer, your mechanic and even your
doctor. You can fire them for any reason. Yet you cannot fire your proprietary EHR software vendor. […]

Dr. Deborah Peel has endorsed Microsoft’s HealthVault PHR. From the Patient Privacy Rights press release:
PatientPrivacyRights.Org founder, Dr. Deborah C. Peel, will stand with Microsoft in Washington, D.C today at a press conference to announce the launch of HealthVault.
Is Dr Peel qualified to make this recommendation?
Please take a look at Dr. Deborah Peel’s bio, she has […]

Somehow I doubt that Microsoft will respond to my criticisms. This is what the Free and Open Source community needs to attempt if Microsoft refused to budge.
We need to write a tool, using the Microsoft HealthVault API to export the data from HealthVault. Preferably this should export to a standard format, but comma delimited is […]

Microsoft often does the wrong thing. But that does not mean they have to. There are three requirements for behaving ethically as a PHR host.

You must release all of the sourcecode to your PHR under a license that qualifies as both “Free (as-in-Freedom-not-price) Software” and Open Source.
You must allow for the export of all data […]

I hope I have made my case that “patient privacy” is complex enough that merely “Recognize that patients have the right to medical privacy” is the ethical equivalent of saying “When considering the medical ethical issue of abortion , you must recognize that often women want to get pregnant and have a child.” This is […]

I have passed my CISSP certification, marking me as an Information Security Expert. I had to pass a complex test and demonstrate that I had three years of full-time security experience to become CISSP certified. I have a four year degree in Computer Science, and I have been trained in Information Warfare by the United […]

Has Microsoft committed to keeping the promises that it has already made? No, just the opposite. Their privacy policy concludes:“We may occasionally update this privacy statement”
Which means that when the commitments that Microsoft has made regarding HealthVault become inconvenient, they will simply change them.
Will the data that you enter into HealthVault be secure? Would my […]

Microsoft, of all the companies that might consider creating a PHR, is especially problematic. Microsoft has a long history of standards abuse.
Lets consider a parallel issue to the “personal health record”, personal email. I use gmail and have used yahoo mail in the past, but for this example lets pretend that I used Hotmail, a […]