FreeB 2.0

emilykillian wrote on Tuesday, April 05, 2005:

I did a search for OpenEMR on Sourceforge to see who else had projects… an interesting one came up on the list.

ClearHealth.

It looks like it’s using FreeB 2.0.

http://www.uversainc.com/site/software/clearhealth.html
http://sourceforge.net/projects/clearhealth/

sunsetsystems wrote on Wednesday, April 06, 2005:

As far as I can see there are no details and no documentation.  The freeb.org web site doesn’t have any useful info either.  I can only guess that it’s vaporware at this point.

– Rod <rod at sunsetsystems dot com>

ajperezcrespo wrote on Wednesday, April 06, 2005:

On a google search I came up up with this.
http://uversaconsulting.net/download/freeb_api/com.uversainc.clearhealth.freeb/FreeBGateway.html

andres_paglayan wrote on Wednesday, April 06, 2005:

Not 100% accurate,
David Uhlman  (spelling?) who was working for Pennfirm, took over FreeB to re-write it, not sure if in python or PHP.
There is a consurtium compound by clinics with federal support in California sort of sponsoring this, the whole story is long to post it here.

drbowen wrote on Wednesday, April 06, 2005:

Fred Trotter was the project owner for the FreeB project and has turned development over to David Uhlman (formerly with Walt Pennington) to continue development of FreeB.  This occurred after Fred Trotter joined the United States Marine Corps.

David Uhlman has considerable experience developing OpenEMR and is porting FreeB from PERL to PHP.  The code is already working and includes a number of the billing features that the billing office needs to try to collect on claims.

It is a code base outside of SQL-Ledger similar to Rod Roarks suggestion to try not to have to maintain a separate version of SQL-Ledger.

Prior to the migration of OpenEMR from Pennington Firm to SourcForge, David Uhlman posted frequently to the forums and gave the best technical answers to coding questions.

FreeB.org has recently been "revamped" with the change in leadership.  FreeB 2.0 has been ported to PHP and would seem to be a better fit OpenEMR.  I imagine development of our version of FreeB is a dead fork.

drbowen wrote on Wednesday, April 06, 2005:

I’m not actually sure what the relationship is between David Uhlman and Walt Pennington at this time.

emilykillian wrote on Wednesday, April 06, 2005:

My guess is that the relationship is still pretty tight. From my conversation yesterday with one of their developers, they are interested in merging with OpenEMR.

ajperezcrespo wrote on Wednesday, April 06, 2005:

What is that status of the new billing engine? The original post under billing in the openemr site.
http://www.openemr.net/index.php?name=PNphpBB2&file=viewtopic&t=221

drroller wrote on Wednesday, April 06, 2005:

Yes! Merge please…the more effort we put in to ONE open source EMR the better off everyone will be, right now there are just too many that are just on the brink of being good and usable, but none that really stand out that I have noticed.

If everyone put their effort in to one EMR(you could select what features you wanted to customize to your practice) everyone would be better off I feel.

sunsetsystems wrote on Wednesday, April 06, 2005:

I just got off the phone with Fred Trotter, who told me it’s OK to share the following with you:

FreeB 2.0 is indeed real, I saw a demo.  Fred is now working for Uversa full time (yes he had joined the Marines but is now on reserve status).

They claim to have a clinic coming online with it (and Clearhealth) in the next 30 days or so.  So it may soon be desirable to integrate OpenEMR with this new billing engine.

Some improvements over the old FreeB are reported to be:

1. It’s written in PHP, not Perl.
2. It’s easier to create new target formats (x12 and paper), using Smarty as the templating language.
3. It includes the user interface for claims management.
4. It has its own MySQL database, to keep track of claim status.
5. It maintains multiple versions of claims to keep track of their change history.

Also they are indeed interested in merging Clearhealth with OpenEMR.  One way or another, we will be hearing more about that.

They also claim to be fully funded by grants and other contributors who want to see the development done; they’re not needing more money at this stage, and they plan to leave the support business to others for now.  It’s all open source and they do not plan to discriminate in the way that information is shared.

I think that’s the important stuff… if anyone has more info, feel free to share.

– Rod <rod at sunsetsystems dot com>

emilykillian wrote on Wednesday, April 06, 2005:

Ialso talked to Fred last night and have been in an e-mail dialog with him today about what direction things are going. I have asked his permission to share some answers to questions I posed. I am awaiting his response, but when he gives me an OK, I’ll post that here.

tekknogenius wrote on Thursday, April 07, 2005:

Great News! That’s what I like about open source software. I hope whatever version/hybrid of OpenEMR will emerge soon because I just implemented one and it would be better for me to change now than when I have a bunch of data to convert :slight_smile:

emilykillian wrote on Thursday, April 07, 2005:

I posed a series of questions to Fred Trotter via e-mail. He said it would be OK to share them with the community.
His responses follow my questions (which are denoted with an asterisk):

* I am quite curious about your business model and intentions with respect to FreeB and OpenEMR. Could you explain further?

Yes. We plan on focusing our profit model exclusively on developing ClearHealth. We feel that this will encourage other groups to provide support. We will support ClearHealth but it will only be to enable large development deals, we would even consider outsourcing this support some day. We are a development shop and alot of the answers to the following questions reflect that bias.

* Hypothetically speaking, if the two projects were merged, who would control the project?

I would and I know that is a problem. It is a problem because you have little reason to trust me, and to have me as a project manager you would have to be able to. But there is no alternative. Here is why…

Successful open source projects have one of two control
models. 1. A benevolent dictator or 2.  A council of some kind. The best kind of benevolent dictator is like Linus. Linus is guaranteed to be impratial because he does not take money directly from those who make money on linux. That means that no one ever questions his motivation for technical decisions. Unfortunatley that only works because OSDL is funding him, and they are not likely to fund me any time soon.
      
The other is control shared with several people, like the
Apache foundation. The problem there is that there are very few people who have established themselves as trustworthy in the industry. I feel I have (but dont trust me, talk to Ignacio from LMN. He is the journalist from our industry).

* Is the project manager going to be open to outside developers adding to the code (without financial contributions)?

Absolutley, we want this very much. I can promise you that
if you write good code (a big if) that also does useful things
(another big if) I WILL include it in ClearHealth. We are already
scavenging all of the good code from FreeMED and OpenEMR as it is.

* To whom will developers assign intellectual property rights?

They won’t. They will retain full copyright to the code they write and contribute back under the GPL. The only thing that we might ask for is enforcement rights, so that if we ever have to sue someone for trying to close source ClearHealth we can take the position of the copyright representative.

* On a scale ranging between "wide open" and "totally closed," how open is the project going to be?

Wide open to good ideas and good code. Very closed to bad code. Please understand that Uversa has rewritten 100% of the code that I personally wrote. They did this because it was not up to thier standards. I am having to learn to write code to this high standard, everyone else will too.

* Is this going to be what some have called a "new, from-scratch" billing engine for OpenEMR?

Yes and no. Yes, there is a brand new from scratch billing engine. There will be a migration path from OpenEMR. We are
writting those scripts now. We will not support or code in OpenEMR. The code is not good enough. If you are in love with OpenEMR, you are welcome to port FreeB2 to it. It is designed for that. I will provide all the encouragement, advice and documentation that I can. But I will not contribute a single line of code to that effort, b/c I think it is a waste of time.

*I’m trying to make mental connections between things and any background Information you could give me would be helpful.

Sure. Here is what it boils down to.

1. There has to be a benovelent dictator, because there is no other way right now. There just is not a group with the working dynamics to make a council and there is no money to support a benevolent dictator seperate from commercial interestes of some kind.
2. David and I are the only two people who are qualified to do it. David is the best technically but he wants to bigger things than just this, I am the only person that has successfully developed good relationships with other projects than my home project. So far FreeB is the single most ported piece of code in our community. TkFP uses it, OpenEMR uses it, ClearHealth and FreeMED built their systems on it, and VistA and TORCH have it included in thier project plans. No one else has made provable progress at collaborating between projects, no one else has actually done anything to unify the community.
3. Uversa is commited to "separation between church and state." There will be two Web sites, a .org that points to a community development system that everyone will have access to, and a .com version that will focus on the services that Uversa offers. The .com site will be only one of the sites that the .org points to for services.
4. To further that end, we wil be having community developed free documentation available for everyone. Our goal is to make the project the best it can be, and that means sometimes sacrificing cash, we are OK with that. The project will be run with the goal of being the best technically, not what makes the most money for Uversa. The irony is that this policy will eventually make us the most money anyway.
5. Make no mistake we are in this to make money. But we will be using both the GPL license AND the Open Source development model. We understand how valuable a community is and we dont intend to screw anyone.
6. I am not going to ask you to "trust me". Rather, examine my past record and watch my future behavior. You will find that you may not agree with my stands on issues, but you can trust me to be consistent on those issues.

sunsetsystems wrote on Thursday, April 07, 2005:

Thanks Emily, your questions and their answers were very much to the point.

Whatever happens, it’s good to know that Clearhealth and FreeB2 are to be genuine open source projects.  This is the ultimate safety net for the community, should the “benevolent dictators” become more of an obstacle than a benefit.

I see two possible scenarios from here:

(1) FreeB2 replaces FreeB in OpenEMR, and Clearhealth and OpenEMR otherwise proceed merrily along their separate ways; or

(2) Everyone abandons OpenEMR and flocks to Clearhealth.

A successful open source EMR/PM system requires a great deal of community participation and cooperation.  An attitude like "David and I are the only two people who are qualified to do it" is just not going to get there.

I understand this mentality as I have worked with many very talented software developers.  But it needs to be tempered with mature leadership and the realization that the world has many very smart people, some of whom you do not already know, and that failure to attract some of those people will be a very poor outcome.

That’s the primary reason that scenario #1 might occur.

– Rod <rod at sunsetsystems dot com>

andres_paglayan wrote on Thursday, April 07, 2005:

Thank you Emilly and thanks to Fred Trotter for sharing this.

I call it evolution, it might be possible that afer creating migration scripts, we all happily move to ClearHealth when it’s ready.

It also proves that momentum for health open source applications is launching as we all were expenting to happen some day.

I think a good contribution to those lines will be if Walt can answer to this support ticket recently posted at sf openemr:

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1176722&group_id=60081&atid=493002

which says:

Folks

What is the difference between the Pennington OPENEMR
and this project?

Why are there two separate projects?

Regards,

Nic Lowe

I do have an idea but I think Walt is the right person to write it down.

And also, based on Trotter’s guidelines, I’d like to suggest a conference call or round with current developers in this project. Topic, road map.

emilykillian wrote on Thursday, April 07, 2005:

I agree, Andres. If we all start out on the same page, we’ll work together better. In my mind, I see it like a huddle during a football game.

tekknogenius wrote on Friday, April 08, 2005:

Yes, we are at an important juncture it seems. I would be up for a conference call of sorts.

emilykillian wrote on Saturday, April 09, 2005:

I agree.

Those who want to particiate should send me an e-mail (emilykillian at charter.net) with their best dates and times (and their time zones) for the next two weeks. I will compile them and try to find the best time for the majority of people for the call.

Then I’ll post that “best” date and time and ask for objections.

I think there are about 6 people who are really active on here and it shouldn’t be a stretch to get everyone at the same time.

If someone else can be in charge of the actual phone call, that would be great. Any volunteers?

Are there any objections to this plan?

sunsetsystems wrote on Saturday, April 09, 2005:

I’d like to see an agenda.  Six people is a lot for a conference call, and it will be a mess if we don’t have an outline.

– Rod <rod at sunsetsystems dot com>

emilykillian wrote on Saturday, April 09, 2005:

Rod,
I will start another thread for that.

I’ll maintain a running list of items and go from there… I would think that the major focus is going to be getting together a broad plan for OpenEMR.

Any objections?