[ Thanks to Saint
for this link. ]
“Andrew Ho, MD has the unlikely combination of being an
assistant clinical professor in the department of Psychiatry,
Harbor-UCLA MedicalCenter and the leader of one of the many open
source medical projects currently in existence. The Open
Infrastructure for Outcomes (OIO) project is his brain child. Ho’s
comments and guidance on topics as diverse as meta-data, forms
libraries and project convergence can be frequently found on many
of open source medical computing’s discussion lists.
LinuxMedNews caught up with Dr. Ho to learn more about him and his
views on medical open source, the OIO, his competition, HIPAA and
what he does for fun.”
“LMN: When did OIO start and what prompted you
to begin the OIO?
Ho: As an undergraduate I began looking at
improving the practice of medicine through improved tools mostly
from artificial intelligence. It has been a long term interest as
to how these tools can be applied. … Between 1996 and 1997, I was
studying treatment outcomes at the VA in West LA and it took a year
to organize and analyze the data. I realized that data management
was a big task and there were no tools for it. That’s when I
started planning the OIO. Nobody was or is writing software for
this type of application…”
“LMN: What is OIO’s target audience?
Ho: Clinical settings that want to have an
outcome management tool that they could potentially use as an EMR.
Alternatively, a paper-based practice could also collect data in
order to analyze outcomes. For the research setting, it can be used
as a research datamanagement system, for managing study work flow
and running clinical trials. Research applications are basically
wide open since the OIO can host arbitrary data collection
forms.”