Which EMR System? (Part Two)
FreeMED, which has a decent interface, is a fairly complete software package which appeared to meet all of our qualifications. However, the user community is a bit lacking, and the company which supports it, Unified Medical Informatics, didn't respond to any of our requests for information.Interestingly enough, this project appears to have been greatly influenced by Fred Trotter (more on him shortly), though it includes the REMITT billing software, which was built by someone who was hired to work on FreeB (another billing software package). The developer of REMITT is B-MAS, and B-MAS is actually the "parent" company of Unified Medical Informatics. FreeMED is based on older versions of PHP (version 4) and MySQL (version 4). We were unable to establish what commercial support would cost.
5 Comments:
We at Unified Medical Informatics (UMI) would like to clarify that UMI is in no way owned, maintained, or affiliated with B-MAS LLC. B-MAS LLC. Does not have the permission to use any of our designs, language, or intellectual property. B-MAS continues to falsely claim that they are owners and creators of UMI, its proprietary technologies, and its ethos. The management of B-MAS has even gone so far as to copy and paste our entire business web site on a subsidiary page of B-mas.com and edit the contact information for their own purpose. The founders of UMI inc. had an informal pro-bono consulting arrangement with the management and ownership of B-MAS LLC, we had hoped to embark on a new endeavor together, sharing our collective experiences and knowledge, but it quickly became apparent that this course of action was indeed not in the best interest of UMI. Please be aware that www.unifiedmd.com is the official web site of unified medical informatics, contained within is the correct contact information and official marketing materials. UMI is an officially licensed partner of the FreeMED Software Foundation.
UMI has a long, well documented history of creation and existence, we are an organization that prides itself on innovation and excellence
Thanks for your response, it is interesting information, certainly. However, the page that I linked to actually has you (I assume it is you) linked in as an email address for contacting. I believe it is shown as sudoshi@b-mas.com
If what you are saying is true, then B-MAS is certainly in the wrong, and I would think that you might want to consider some sort of legal action.
But then, at one point while I was researching FreeMED, B-MAS's website actually pointed to UMI. That's quite strange if UMI and B-MAS do not work together.
We are indeed pursuing legal recourse for intellectual property theft. Due to the nature of the case I cannot comment further publicly. The current B-MAS website and all derivative pages was in fact created by UMI staff, and therefore due to the original intent of B-MAS, LLC. to purchase/merge UMI assets whilst maintaining UMI automony and relations with the FreeMED Foundation, many of the links on the B-MAS site point to UMI. It is confusing to say the least, and I sincerely apologize. All links at the www.unifiedmd.com site and the freemedsoftware.org site are correct. Only these sites are trustworthy places for information regarding the FreeMED project and commercial support. UMI is the ONLY officially designated FreeMED support and implementation consultancy. This is in writing between the BOD of the FreeMED Foundation and Unified Medical Informatics Inc. and PA S-Corp., holding duly trademarked names and logos therein. I feel the courts will vindicate our case. Thank you for your kind attention. Look forward to further dialogue.
To the blogosphere:
FreeMED Software Foundation, INC is a not for profit foundation organized for the research, development, organization and distribution of Open Source software, some of which is devoted to the medical world.
Our principal project is FreeMED, an open source, modular, medical record project which to date has more than 9000 downloads of the current version 0.8.x from our website. We are translated into Spanish, Japanese, French, Catalan, German and several other languages (which are either in process or nearly complete). There is a demo site available for the current 0.8.3 version.
The Foundation has a worldwide community including an international Board of Trustees and a Clinical Avisory Committee.
Although as with most Open Source packages, you may download or utilize versions at your own risk, three commercial entities have taken the challenge to assist users with commercial installs including but not limited to onsite installations, help desking and additional materials and customization not generally available to the non-commercial edition.
Parties interested in the current version of FreeMED now under development and slated for 2 Feb 07 release (our 8th anniversary since release of 0.1) or interested in working with the Board of Trustees or the Clinical advisory committee may contact us through the FreeMED web site.
Questions may also be directed to either Dr Irving Buchbinder, Chair of the Foundation or Dr Volker Bradley Chair of the Clinical Advisory Board for the FreeMED Software Foundation.
We welcome all though the inquiries either for direct use of FreeMED, for referral to one of our commercial support groups or those interested in joining the Foundation for commercial support of FreeMED.
To issue a slight clarification...
(I'm the principal programmer and architect responsible for both FreeMED and REMITT. I do not work for any commercial company doing FreeMED support, but rather work directly with the FreeMED Software Foundation in active development of the next series of FreeMED release, version 0.9.0, which is based on Apache 2, PHP5 and MySQL 5. We expect a release in early 2007, with one last 0.8.x maintenance release beforehand.)
The numbers are currently a bit over 3000 downloads for the 0.8.3 release, and somewhat over 10000 for the 0.8.x series of releases in total. There's also a live CD with over 3000 downloads, etc.
I would like to further clarify the dispute between FreeB and REMITT. They are not, and have never been, based on the same code. I did indeed contribute a lot of code to FreeB (including the structure for the XML-RPC interface, the patch which allowed Frontier::RPC2 to use authentication, fixing the architecture, and a plethora of other things), but REMITT was written from scratch with no assistance from any other programmers. Fred asserted that he had "written" REMITT and that it was merely a derivative of FreeB because I had attempted to use a "transport" which I had originally written for FreeB after modifying its architecture slightly to conform to the REMITT API. Since I wrote that module while under contract to Synseer (Fred's company), he assumed that REMITT was merely a derivative of FreeB. This issue has been debated across message boards and news sites (in particular, LinuxMedNews) for a while.
FreeMED does have an active user community ... there are forums and mailing lists available on the freemedsoftware.org website which include user documentation and other collaborative information sources for people interested in FreeMED.
As for FreeMED being "greatly influenced" by Fred Trotter, that's only somewhat true. He was only involved in the project for a year or two, and most of his contributions involved funding development of claims and billing related systems (interface to FreeB, claims manager, etc) and a HIPAA audit. He was asked to recuse himself from the Board of Directors of the FreeMED Software Foundation due to a conflict of interest, and has used the freemed org site to promote "mirrormed", his fork of ClearHealth.
There is no bad blood between the Foundation and Fred, we just aren't currently working together, nor have we collaborated since he left the Board of Directors.
Jeff Buchbinder
Software Architect
FreeMED Software Foundation
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