Indivica’s business has been growing rapidly. We are currently expanding our team to meet the needs of our customers and to develop exciting new products.
If you are passionate about the delivery of innovative technology and the transformation of Health IT, and want to work in the dynamic and fast paced world of a start up, then check out the currently available opportunities listed in our new Careers page.
We are very happy to welcome to the OSCAR community Queen’s Family Health Team, Department of Family Medicine, Queen’s University.
If you visited one of their four clinics this week, you may have noticed the staff a little more wide-eyed than normal.
Queen’s has been using an EMR for many years, and so the conversion from their old system to OSCAR has been quite an activity. Countless hours of preparation and planning have gone into making the transition as seamless as possible.
At 8:30 on June 7th the first patients were being seen. Soon thereafter, records were being entered, results were being reviewed, forms and requisitions where being filled, and the first prescriptions were being electronically signed and faxed to the local pharmacies.
A collection of clinics with well over 100 users needs some reasonable hardware to run their practice. Queen’s primary server, an OSCAR 750, has dual quad core hyper threaded Xeon CPUs coupled with a non trivial amount of memory.
EMR conversions are pretty intensive operations. Tens of thousands of medical records have to be meticulously moved and reviewed to ensure data integrity and patient information is maintained.
Throughout the process is important to maintain good sense of humour and to remember why you decided to move to a new EMR in the first place.
Thank you Queen’s for to moving to OSCAR.
Say goodbye to that “third person” in your examining rooms.
OSCAR is the only Ontario Certified EMR platform that runs on the Apple iPad. This fact is true because OSCAR is a standards based web application that has not been hardwired into a specific operating system or web browser.
OSCAR clinicians today are currently experiencing the joys of engaging their patients using the unobtrusive iPad technology. Early feedback has been extremely encouraging, although there are still some issues to work through (native printing within the iPad is not currently supported, however, there is an app for that).
iPad and iPad-like technology will revolutionize your engagement with your patients and, if you are an OSCAR user, you are already good to go.
OSCAR users – isn’t it nice to know that you picked the right solution, one that was mindful of the pervasive transformative technology trends? Congratulations.
(Yes – this is a big deal)
Today, Indivica announces the availability of a new range of OSCAR servers based on the latest industry hardware and software platforms.
The all new OSCAR 310, OSCAR 510 & OSCAR 750 servers from Indivica are built with the new Ubuntu 10.04 LTS 64-bit server operating system and the latest i5, i7, and Xeon CPUs from Intel.
The new Ubuntu 10.04 LTS platform delivers today’s most advanced and stable operating environment while having the capability to leverage the newest hardware available on the market today.
The OSCAR 750 Series server is truly a massively powerful platform for the most demanding clinical environments. Dual Intel Xeon Quad Core Nehalem CPUs leverage 24 GBs of RAM, raided 2 TB disk drives and twin GB Ethernet to deliver OSCAR at phenomenal speeds.
The OSCAR 510 Series drives your OSCAR EMR via Intel’s new Quad Core i7 CPU, 8 GBs of RAM and a blazingly fast 1.5 TB disk. The OSCAR 510 is perfect for your ever growing practice.
The new entry level OSCAR 310 Series servers have been completely redesigned, delivering Intel i5 Quad Core power, with 4 GBs of RAM and a 1 TB disk drive. Incredibly, the new OSCAR 310 is available at the very same price as the previous entry level model. Just $999.
For more information, visit the Indivica OSCAR Store.
Shelter Lee has posted videos from the recent BC Oscar User Group Meeting.
The first one is here and the rest can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=310FF13164E7AB03.
One of the major reasons that people choose OSCAR is our vibrant and extensive community of users and supporters.
When we get together, as we did recently in Vancouver, for a user’s group meeting, it has become customary to hand out a few OSCARs in recognition to the exceptional contribution of specific individuals to the OSCAR ecosystem.
This year’s recipients are as worthy a bunch of OSCAR as ever.
Awards were received by:
Congratulations to all.
For more details about the award winners, you can see the full post on the OSCAR Canada website.
The BC OSCAR User Group invites you to come and hear about Free / Open Source software and how physicians and midwives are driving the OSCAR (Open Source Clinical Application Resource) Electronic Medical Record in BC. There will be a presentation by Dr David Chan, from McMaster University, OSCAR’s founder, and the OSCAR user community in BC. OSCAR users will demonstrate the EMR including use with voice recognition software, tools for maternity and newborn care, leading chronic disease management tools, prescribing tools, billing and much more!
OSCAR is an open-source (free), Canadian EMR, developed by a collaborative community of programmers and users. Users pay no licensing costs and have the freedom to choose from a range of support companies. There are over a thousand OSCAR users and over a million patients on the system nationally, and it has won several prestigious awards for IT innovation. It’s ease of use, excellence in programming, high level of functionality, and low costs for ongoing support and implementation, are part of why OSCAR is experiencing rapid growth.
For more information visit http://www.oscarcanada.org/
Where:
Paetzold Auditorium VGH,
Jim Patterson Pavilion on the 1st floor
(Parking is available at 2775 Laurel St, between 11th and 12th)
When:
Monday, April 19, 2010 – 6:30 pm to 9:00pm
Cost:
Free
RSVP :
http://tinyurl.com/ydyfebe
You are invided to the next BC OSCAR User Group Meeting: Monday April 19th and Tuesday April 20, 2010. The event will be held at in Vancouver at the Paetzold Auditorium at Vancouver General Hospital.
The agenda for the BC OSCAR user group meeting is available here and includes many interactive sessions for learning more about OSCAR and sharing experiences with other OSCAR users.
Please register to reserve your space.
The folks at O’Reilly have been talking a lot lately about the massive effort currently underway in the US to modernize the Heath IT infrastructure.
A number of posts are of particular interest to those people trying to figure out how to pull information together from so many different systems.
First, Tim O’Reilly discusses the emerging trend towards “government as a platform”, that is, the government taking the role of defining what needs to be shared and what needs to be connected, but not actually getting involved with the specific implementation or hosting of the systems. O’Reilly uses the example of the Office of the National Coordinator, to illustrate:
There is also substantial funding for Blumenthal’s office, the Office of the National Coordinator, or ONC. (This office was created by the Bush administration, but didn’t receive substantial funding prior to the Recovery Act.) But rather than building a massive, centralized system for electronic health records, ONC’s goal is to define the rules of the road for interchange of patient records. In internet-style, the expectation is that common protocols and file formats will allow vendors to compete on a level playing field to build the actual applications. But they aren’t just writing paper standards; they are creating building blocks that actually implement those standards. (The internet analogy would be software like Bind, which implements the DNS protocol, and the root domain name servers, which for many years were funded by the US government.)
Also worth reading is Andy Oram’s May 3rd report on the HIMSS Heath IT conference. Andy talks about the technology of openness and interoperability in a land of highly mobile people:
The U.S. has a mobile population, bringing their aches and pains to a plethora of institutions and small providers. That’s why health care needs interoperability. Furthermore, despite superb medical research, we desperately need to share more information and crunch it in creative new ways. That’s why health care needs openness.
Oram covers what technology has been done and how it is fairing, and what still needs to be addressed and how different organizations are approaching the challenges. Of particular interest is the section on open source health projects such as Vista, OpenMRS, and CONNECT:
CONNECT is championed by the same Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology that is implementing the HITECH recovery plan and meaningful use. A means for authenticating requests and sending patient data between providers, CONNECT may well be emerging as the HIE solution for our age. But it has some maturing to do as well. It uses a SOAP-based protocol that requires knowledge of typical SOA-based technologies such as SAML.
Two free software companies that have entered the field to make installing CONNECT easier are Axial Exchange, which creates open source libraries and tools to work with the system, and the Mirth Corporation. Jon Teichrow of Mirth told me how a typical CONNECT setup at a rural hospital took just a week to complete, and can run for the cost of just a couple hours of support time per week. The complexities of handling CONNECT that make so many people tremulous, he said, were actually much easier for Mirth than the more typical problem of interpreting the hospital’s idiosyncratic data formats.
Just last week, the government announced a simpler interface to the NHIN called NHIN Direct. Hopefully, this will bring in a new level of providers who couldn’t afford the costs of negotiating with CONNECT.
CONNECT has certainly built up an active community. One participant, who is responsible for a good deal of the testing of CONNECT, tells me that participation in development, testing, and online discussion is intense, and that two people were recently approved as committers without being associated with any company or government agency officially affiliated with CONNECT.
Jennifer Stoddart, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, recently gave a must-read speech on “The Future of Privacy Regulation” at the 11th Annual Privacy and Security Conference.
Of the many challenges we face, none is more dramatic than the impact of technology.
First and foremost, there is the sheer scope of the Internet, and the myriad ways in which we can now interact, shop, learn, and pretty much live online.
There’s also the staggering growth of computer capacity, which allows massive amounts of personal information to be collected, manipulated and shared.
Much of the content swirling through this Web 2.0 world is also generated by individuals, which poses new challenges for regulators.
From a privacy perspective, one consequence of these developments is that personal information can live on in cyberspace, pretty much in perpetuity. And so a typical data breach may no longer affect just a handful of people, but potentially hundreds of thousands of them.
Another consequence is that our lives have become open books. Even if we don’t advertise our whereabouts on Google Latitude, surveillance cameras and GPS-enabled cellphones are able to capture our movements.
Even if we don’t broadcast our latest purchases on Blippy.com, our online browsing habits are being quietly monitored and mined for their value to merchants and marketers.
And concepts of consumer knowledge – never mind consent – are become increasingly strained.
