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Last year I was on a mission to learn more about electronic medical records, specifically OpenEMR. During 2010 OLF, I met Fred Trotter, who while not a current contributor to the OpenEMR project; he introduced me to the Availity clearinghouse. He also gave me some helpful suggestions on how I might begin to contribute to the OpenEMR project. This year I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Sam Bowen, who is not only a Gentoo user but also an Internal Medicine Physician. That is remarkable indeed. He gave me some pointers on how to upgrade from a OpenEMR v2.9.0 experimental to latest stable release v4.1. Bowen gave me a full run down of the meaningful use effort for OpenEMR and some of the struggles associated to funding the effort. He also was gracious enough to help identify some of helpful third party companies that are available for hire to do additional development on OpenEMR. We exchanged business cards and I plan to drop him an email right away.
Another item of note was that I participated in my first GPG key signing party. I'll have to capture the finer details in another entry. GNU Privacy Guard (gpg) allows one to deploy publicly available cryptology (thanks to Phil Zimmerman) to encrypt email and other documents. Basically, key signing is the act of verifying that the signature indeed originates from the rightful owners. You physically verify the key fingerprint by having the owner read the fingerprint then you exchange picture identification with other key signing participants. Very cool indeed. I'll summarize some of the talks I attended in forthcoming entry. I learned much more at the 2011 OLF than I had at other previous OLFs.
Lastly, I ran into the urban camper named Klaatu. Who is also a fellow slackware user. We chatted briefly, but did not get a chance to exchange public GPG keys. Oh well, perhaps next time.
