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I’m still hard at work on FreeMED 0.9.0 ; it is turning out to be a very long and involved process. A ton of new functionality is making its way in, along with architectural improvements and porting old functionality. The majority of the codebase has been torn out and rewritten, mostly to allow for complete separation between UI and the data model.

This entire process has been very educational, and I think I have learned more than I ever *wanted* to learn about UI programming. Hopefully this will be worth the wait for everyone … it’s looking like the majority of the framework is in place, and porting old modules to the new framework is what is left to be done.

Latest FreeMED project has been trying to get graphing and trending working. Unfortunately I haven’t seen any GPL licensed graphing libraries that really fit the bill for doing this sort of work, so I started working on my own; pretty much all hand-rolled, with some tricks pulled from the PHP function guide.

Happy New Year, as well as happy whatever solstice holiday you choose to celebrate! Once again, I’m slacking in the “blogging” department. I recently made a few changes to the server, the most important of which will speed this up by fixing the memory map cache used to render pages, thereby removing the molasses from the page loading process. There are also a few new tracks under Artists and Projects on the site, so please feel free to take a listen. More development news coming soon, as I’m planning on a new FreeMED release (0.8.2), as soon as we’re done with QA testing.

I’m working on a new concept/feature in FreeMED to try to alleviate the persistent problem of providers not being able to create their own forms with custom data, without having an advanced degree in advanced something (besides being a provider, of course). This, coupled with the new packaging format for FreeMED modules that I’m working on, will probably be the next big features in the next non-bug release, which is currently scheduled to be version 0.8.2. We’ll see what happens …

I’m slacking in keeping up this weblog-thing, but in my defense, I have been a bit busy. FreeMED released version 0.8.1 to the world, and I have been working in the studio a lot lately as well, working on both the Heirs of Centack audiobook and musical projects. Hopefully the BCF-2000 that has been ordered will get here soon, to make mixing less of a pain. I’m also halfway through a platform change to use PlanetCCRMA as the new studio platform, since the latencies appear good with the 2.6 patched kernel they’re using. More updates as I have them…

I finally mustered up the spare time to move from the old system of FreeMED authentication to a pluggable system. I have only coded up two plugins for now: a “Password” plugin, which uses the old system of authentication and password checking, and a “Basic” plugin, supporting HTTP Basic Authentication. I’m also currently considering writing an LDAP plugin to allow FreeMED credentials and basic ACL information to be stored on an LDAP server, to really allow for enterprise deployments. On top of all this, I have been doing some “house cleaning” in the code so that FreeMED is more autonomous on startup.

My newest project with FreeMED has been to implement a way to securely warehouse medical data offsite. This relates to Dr Gnu’s article about disaster recovery. I have been using SSL + WebDAV with a slim C client built on neon to push gnupg-encrypted SQL dumps (both incremental and full) to the archive server, which is perhaps temporarily residing at https://archive.freemedsoftare.net/. In this way, whoever is hosting the archive cannot read the medical data without the gnupg keys held only by the provider who “owns” the medical records. HIPAA compliance, here we are …

I have been working on an interface with Quest Diagnostics to be able to automagically import HL7 v2.3 messages into FreeMED. They were nice enough to furnish me with some documentation, and I have an alpha-quality implementation ready for some beating in one of our alpha sites. Now that 0.8.0 is out, I’m working steadily on a 0.8.1 release, with mostly bugfixes, some rearchitecturing, and a few nice features like this one (hopefully).

I have released the FreeMED 0.8.0 and REMITT 0.3 combination, along with phpwebtools 0.4.5. I’ve found that Subversion rapidly decreases my development time, as it allows me to focus more on the programming and less on annoying problems. I have also been working on some of Irv’s ideas regarding secure data warehousing, and the next version of FreeMED should support that “out of the box”, without the need to configure anything complicated.

I’m currently finishing up the final touches on the FreeMED 0.8.0 release right now, as REMITT 0.3 and phpwebtools 0.4.5 are already “ready to ship”. I’m also touching up a nice FreeMED Live CD, based on the kubuntu “Hoary Hedgehog” live CD, so everyone will be able to try out FreeMED + REMITT without having to make the commitment of formatting a machine. Thanks to B-MAS, Inc for funding (and helping out with) the development of this live CD. As soon as the rest of the bugs are ironed out, it will be released on FreeMED’s sourceforge page. I look forward to hearing from everyone about this on the new FreeMED support list (support at freemedsoftware.org)!