Although I don’t normally do IT for healthcare orgs, I have been called up a few times to help deal with software emergencies and wow those were eye-opening.
I look forward to helping.
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Welcome!! Healthcare IT is a totally different world, isn’t it? 
Care to share a story or anecdote about what left an impression from those experiences?
I’m in, see ya on the git
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Oh I would love to. We should schedule some Google Hangouts to get the storytelling juices flowing.
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Please count me in! I’ve got a HIPAA compliant meteor app in production. And thank you Abigail for being such a help to the community!
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Anyone going to Meteor Space Camp? http://meteorspace.camp/
Trying to decide if I should go. If there’s going to be health care hackery going on, then it’ll definitely be worth it.
We’ve been talking about doing a semi-regular video conference call for the Healthcare Working Group, and the Meteor Atlanta Meetup has tentatively scheduled to do a Clinical Meteor Q/A call on the 3rd week of September.
Maybe we should go ahead and do a technical prep call this week, and figure out exactly which communication channels we’re going to use to have those conference calls. Google Hangouts seems like the best solution for a public video conference.
Maybe something short, like 30 minutes, on Friday morning?
@mattjmorris - That’s fantastic, Matt. Would love to hear more about it! People have been coming out of the woodwork recently, and it just amazes me at how many people are doing healthcare apps with Meteor!
@eterps - I doubt I’ll be able to make it; but please feel free to organize a healthcare subgroup if you do decide to go!
Thanks for putting this together @awatson1978, i’ve been lurking on this thread for a while now and wanted to say that its great to hear others have also concluded that Meteor can play a major role in bringing the healthcare industry into the modern era.
I’m working on 2 projects targetting clinicians. I can’t divulge too much in the way of details at the moment, but we’re hoping to beta our first app by mid September.
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Sure. I can do Friday morning. I’m on the west coast.
@awatson1978 - it is a web app for helping care staff in long-term and psychiatric care settings better record and respond to patient behavioral issues, and provides supervisory staff with analytics for determining the effects of interventions (www.visiblehand.io). I’m definitely interested in participating in the Hangout.
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Unfortunately my morning is shot for the Hangout. What if we could combine video conferencing with a #Slack-like functionality for this future Meteor medical+health forum. In other words, something like https://demo.rocket.chat combined with something robust like https://tokbox.com/platform/video. With the ability to mark whether a thread should be public, private, or only accessible to specific users. A HIPAA compliant realtime forum for medical research groups and organizations. Does #Slack already have something like OpenTok gracefull fallback of WebRTC capabilities with their video conferencing solution? Even if they do, they probably won’t qualify as HIPAA compliant.
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It’s funny you mention Slack-like functionality. This has come up in a couple different conversations.
Also, there’s actually an opentok telemedicine demo available that we did two years ago. It’s based on having different topic rooms, and is very hacky. We don’t advertise it on the Clinical Meteor page; but we do have the opentok pattern implemented:
http://clinical-telemedicine.meteor.com/
Oh, btw… my apologies. I had a client approach me with an emergency HIPAA document review rush-job two days ago; and it’s completely borked my schedule this week.
I believe OpenTok API has been beefed up with a more robust multi-plexing since that time. One of the goals would be to be seemless handoffs between moderators for what/who is broadcasting from their camera. In other words, want to be inclusive of everyone who wants to join the conference, but only a small, reactive moderator group for camera/screensharing. The analogy would be a Hangout-on-Air (limit of 10 people concurrently sharing their camera/mic?) that is also broadcasting live on YouTube.
Or, the audio conferencing could be a separate integration that would allow handoffs from anyone who wants to talk, and then people without cameras on their computer could just call in from their phones.
And whoever misses the conference could access a recording of it later, just like YouTube live broadcasting or Ustream.
There are lots of web-conferencing tools that already do this, but they can get pretty expensive with a ton of users, and they don’t have the Slack-like functionality.
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Hello everyone,
The way I see it, the best way to approach this should be via a full-blown international open source project, mainly promoted through a comprehensive website, to catch the attention of developers around the world, and therefore, have a lot of highly motivated people diligently working together towards achieving one of the highest and noblest human goals: a universal healthcare system. The main product should be a free platform service for every citizen of the world to keep their health records and support their health. To lead the project and coordinate all efforts, most probably an organization should be formed, a foundation, like Mozilla, Linux, etc. It could then collect donations to pay full and part-time collaborators, and have a real organization that will guarantee that the goal will be pursued and reached.
By being an open platform, it would allow for anyone to build apps and systems around it, for public or private use. Eventually, the project can perfectly generate income from several sources, and hence finance itself and generate funds to finance all sorts of related endeavours.
Because of how it’s formed from the beginning, as a “FB for health”, with the power to attract the attention of many people around the world, it could certainly become the main hub for the IT health sector, and motivate many other related efforts to join and collaborate.
When developers around the world realize that this could easily help everyone on their country, they will get highly motivated to cooperate and promote its adoption in their respective countries. Just imagine coders in India, Brazil, Ukraine, Russia, etc., diving into the project to get every part completed.
As one can easily imagine, it could then be used in all sorts of ways, like in hospitals around the world as their EHR platform, for private practices, ‘AI doctors’, national health systems, etc, with the individual at the core.
All the analysis, discussion, debates, etc, around many important topics can eventually take place on the site forums and related spaces. But certainly an initial system can easily start to be built soon and quickly, and later all its flavors, colors and forms could continue to evolve. The world certainly likes to discuss a lot and long about things, but more action is needed. Developers with tools like Meteor and the cloud, can make happen what others haven’t or are taking too long.
There are some great similar projects that are already successful, like GNU Health or OpenMRS, and many other record systems, but they are mostly standalone. I’m not sure if there’s already the exact same concept, a powerful cloud site opened for everyone to immediately create an account and start using, with access to a lot of highly useful apps and features, not just a health record or a social network.
With today’s technology, just imagine how everyone could benefit from this. This human body API just got launched by BioDigital, for example. There are already plenty of apps, services, devices, databases, APIs, etc., and a lot more are coming, that just need to be integrated into one system, and the world will never be the same.
The great efforts by Abigail, Dave, and many others are absolutely fantastic! Thank you guys!!
Hopefully by 2020 (or sooner), the 21st century could finally reach many places around the world. Let’s make it happen!
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This is something I am very very interested in as well. Thank you for organizing this. I am a medical student, and I use meteor quite a bit to develop small apps to assist in medical education.
I wanted to share one project that I am just beginning in meteor to see if there is any other interest in contributing to. I want to develop a program to make it easier for medical professionals and students to edit wikipedia and update it with current medical information, as I find that the pages could be much more pedagogically-oriented. The idea is for the app to allow the user to select a few interests and then the app will generate a topic related to one of those interests, or list of topics, for the user to review and edit (the selling-feature being WYSIWYG on-page edits, which is pretty much the easiest part of this project). They will login or create a wikipedia account through the app, and make edits in the app.
There are two options for the direction afterwords. The edits could be pushed to wikipedia, but many pages do not permit wholesale edits without prior approval. Another option is to push them to an alternative wiki hosting so as to not interfere with wikipedia rules. However, this option creates a problem with version tracking.
The backend is relatively straight forward: using mediaWiki API to subscribe to medically-related wikipedia pages and keep track of which pages have been edited and which need edits, user data, etc.
The overarching goal is to greatly improve the reference information on wikipedia by making it easier for medical professionals to edit the pages and make them more readable and up to date.
Clearly this is a big project with some fundamental concepts that need to be worked out before it is anywhere close to production. I had intended to work on it alone, but after reading this thread it occurred to me that there might be others who are interested. I am particularly weak on really sexy UI design, but if anyone was interested in developing on this project i’d be happy to hash out a more concrete schema for the project.
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You’re not the first person who’s discussed such an international open-source project, @davidvm! Some folks have already been thinking of Clinical Meteor along the lines of an open-source service provider, similar to RedHat, and are trying to tentatively line up support contracts already. There’s definitely a need and interest in such an endeavor, and I’m in full support of such a project being started!
Regarding visions of project structure; there’s a few different business models that have been tossed around:
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Yes, there is the international open-source foundation project you describe… the RedHat or OpenMRS sort of thing. I tend to think of it less in terms of hosting the actual system, and more of a ‘technical coop’ that develops the software.
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There’s also a need for a sort of franchise model, for things like nursing homes and medical homes and clinics, which uses Clinical Meteor based application templates (more of a Wordpress model than a Facebook model). There is liability and regulatory compliance involved for such things; and there needs to be opportunity for people to support themselves. So that’s could wind up as either a for-profit or not-for-profit. Or both. There’s room in the healthcare market for both low cost solutions and premium solutions.
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There’s also a need for a sort of peer-to-peer network of health records. Again, we’re looking at the distributed Wordpress model a bit more than the Facebook model.
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Also, there’s talk in some circles about the applicability of Clinical Meteor to lifesupport systems, and doing industrial contractor work… installing video walls in hospitals, and the like. That would likely be a for-profit endeavor.
Just so people know where I stand on issues, I’m a realist and am approaching this project with the assumption that there will a) be a not-for-profit entity involved, b) there will be a for-profit entity, and c) there will be an ecosystem of people who’s careers and livelihoods will either rely on or be impacted by this software… and they will have different interests and needs regarding for-profit and not-for-profit.
So, many of the business boundaries will probably reflect boundaries of liability and/or hardware and resource scarcity usage. Inventory management will be open source; and people will be able to run personal free copies of the software. But if they want to run a nursing home or clinic, and inventory management needs to track restricted narcotics or biologicals, then people will need the paid version that includes liability insurance, certification and credentialing, etc.
That’s the overall approach I’m taking. And if you’d like to continue discussing an international open-source project, I’m all for it! 
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@fridag… have you taken a look at the reductionism.pentasyllabic.com demo app? If not, you should take a quick look, as it has some basic Wikipedia integration via a two-panel display and an iframe.
(Just be sure to look at it on a really high-resolution monitor; it was designed for a Thunderbolt monitor).
The code is reaaaally old, and might still be running on Meteor 0.6.5. Maybe even 0.5. But you can take a look at it here.
The Clinical Meteor track is going to include a Card UI (codename Photonic), and will be able to handle 2 page layouts across different media devices (mobile, tablets, thunderbolt, video walls). So, if you design your app with Bootstrap and a minimal styling/layout, we should be able to drop it into a Card to be used with the rest of the system.
Hi,
I am Kaiyes. I studied aerospace engineering in UK and worked as a logic controller programmer there. Recently I have moved to meteor full time and having a blast 
.I am really interested in the clinical meteor track you have.
Just as a bit of background:
I have 6 doctors in my family and my father is a director of a hospital. My best friend ( Also a Doctor, MRCP uk) and me have been trying to venture into medical software sector and we have set up a small 2 man operation. Currently we have a (hybrid-jquery-mobile) android drug compendium app for a specific country which we plan to extend to more countries. We started small and would want to venture into more enterprise solutions like these:
Would love to be a part of these.
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Awesome, thanks for the link, definitely a good starting point. My intention will involve a bit more interacting with wikipedia than displaying content in an iframe, but it does give me a bit of inspiration. I’ll be sure to develop in bootstrap for compatibility.
Just finished reading all the the topics in this thread. 
@awatson1978 you should stress the business side of this more. This is a billion dollar–stock exchange level industry. And I believe what you have said here is right,
I think meteor can compete with these big boys. Question is, will the industry accept us? using web dev tech for hardcore mission critical apps that are made by traditional languages like python and such? I am optimistic by the way, just wanted to what you guys think.
@awatson1978 do you reckon it will be in model like this link below?
they are the framework for ERP. Different industry, but kinda the same business model we are talking about. Free for some users who can take this and tweak it. Paid version for some enterprise users.
But I am more interested in competing with the big boys by making a cheaper version using this clinical meteor. We can always let single users use it for free. However, to be able to make it into a product don’t you think we need to be more organised? Project lead, Finance & marketing, devs etc . Could we use a business model canvas ? That will clear up a lot of confusion about where is clinical meteor is headed in terms of management, whether for profit or non-profit.
I believe @davidvm has spoken the truth, we need a more robust pro looking Home where we can do everything. Forum, apps showcase and design draft place is most important imho.
For example, I am in dire need of this. I want to port my current med app to meteor & would like to make design changes right now. It would be great if I could talk about that by uploading some screenshot somewhere