Free and Open Source in Healthcare Un Conference

I was reading the Healthcare IT guy’s blog and saw a post about a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) Healthcare IT conference going on in Houston July 31, 2009 – August 2, 2009. According to Shahid, one of the most outspoken proponents of FOSS in Healthcare, Fred Trotter, is one of the people behind the unconference.

I’m not sure why they chose Houston for this conference. I think Las Vegas would have been a much better choice, but yes I am completely biased because I live in Las Vegas. All of that said, I love what Fred Trotter is trying to do and so I’m excited to promote those who are pushing for free emr and open source emr (see also our Open Source and Free EMR list on our wiki).

You can go and register for the event at the incredibly reasonable rate of $60 if you do it before March 1.

My hope is that Fred also embraces some great streaming video technology such as UStream and makes the conference proceedings available to those of us that can’t make it to Houston. I know I’d tune in and I’d even be willing to embed the UStream video on this blog for others to attend as well. Only challenge might be the fact that it’s an unconference. Not sure the format they’ll be using and if that will translate well to video.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

6 Comments

  • I like the idea of video, and I have been planning on doing something with that. But I want to find a way to stream using FOSS.

    Do you know of any Open Source streaming engines that you can recommend?

    -FT

  • Hi Fred,
    Glad you’re visiting my blog. I don’t know of any FOSS solutions that can stream video to a number of locations. I know VideoLan can be used as a server for streaming video, but I’m not sure how easy it would be to connect multiple users to it.

    I can appreciate the effort in trying to get a FOSS stream, but considering that uStream, Justin.tv or other sites like it will stream it for free, that seems like it fits into the spirit of FOSS.

    I know in many conferences I’ve been to, the chat that goes alongside the video on those 2 sites has been as valuable and interesting as the conference itself.

  • I’ve heard about Courts using video conferencing technologies especially in the rural areas and villages. Even though it’s an expensive approach but it’s a great way for developing these areas.

  • I did a quick search of the internet and found a good FOSS solution for streaming video. Also it is designed for streaming in OGG format (also an open source format)

    http://www.jcraft.com/jroar/

    I found several solutions searching for “gpl streaming server” but this one specifically mentioned OGG.

    Take care

  • No I have never used it, But I have used Ogg vobis codex. for Audio compression and video compression. I do like the format Ogg.

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