A FOSS Project underway – PACS

Posted by Martin P in Project matters      1 comment

Oct
20

I would like to take this opportunity to introduce the beginnings of an Open Source PACS aimed squarely at challenging those proprietary vendors currently enjoying a joke at the expense of Healthcare providers, and specifically, those who provide the funding. I hold the opinion that the elitist, proprietary nature of the PACS market is fundamentally inequitable despite the fact that 95% of the technology behind PACS is “yesterday’s news”.  It is time for those left behind in the technology race to have a bite at the cherry, and “Open Source”, as a development and product model is very good at enabling just that.
I personally have strong views on the direction that the PACS industry has taken since the mid-90s or so. I feel that for the amount of money changing hands (both up front, and recurring -usually in the form of service fees), the healthcare providers that have been taken to the cleaners can look forward to:

• Quality that is no better than any other half-decent software in the Healthcare arena.
• Bundled hardware that is 5 years out of date and not supported by anybody other than that PACS vendor and certainly not by the original hardware vendor.
• Interoperability that has a laugh at the DICOM standard – one of the the first true interoperability standards in any industry. DICOM implementations do little to encourage a diverse vendor ecology and why should they – that is not how proprietary vendors work in any industry! Is anybody else frustrated with the IHE process which has rumbled on for years while vendors come to agreement on a “least common denominator” view of the world when in reality, every hospital/practice has a slightly different perspective of how to do things?
• Service that starts with “well of course if you’d bought all of your equipment from us……”
• First-line engineers that are expected to be experts in Hardware, databases, web servers, specialist monitors and who are often discouraged from escalating to 2d and 3rd level support groups.
• The prospect that all of your data now belongs to somebody else. The hardware may well be in your physical possession, but if you can’t get to your data without the goodwill of the vendor, you have a problem (contractual agreements are not a good way to protect oneself – no amount of contractual verbiage can transfer the duty of care).

I know, from my own experience in this industry as well as others, that it is possible to create quality systems where everybody takes benefit from the process and it is my own conviction that to do so in a way that allows Healthcare Providers the freedom to manage, and utilise, the digital images that have been around for decades, is only a rational thing to do.

So I, along with a couple of friends, am putting my coding fingers where my mouth is.

This is very much a beginning. Call it a ‘gestation’. There will be some time before even a ’0.1′ release (when we’ll release the first core code), and we’re not at a point to even lay a schedule. There will be standalone components that may be of value in their own right, and those may well be released independently (watch for a coming post on inter-process communication).

However, there are decisions to be made – technical, organisational and even, down the line (hopefully), governance. I and my colleagues can make a stab at most but I’m a big fan of openness and I firmly believe that with the help of those very many people who know more and different things and have different experience to me, this project can start in the right direction.

There are of course a number of very good open source projects in and around the area of medical imaging, from toolkits and APIs, the impressive OsiriX (which alas is targeted only at Macs), to the complete WorldVista package. Some of those we’ll be able to include (and contribute back as much as possible), but some not – for a number of reasons. The one common factor (the one ring to bind them?) will be the Open Source Definition. It is our intention that the entire code base will be licensed under the GPL. GPL2 or GPL3? Don’t know, and thankfully its a little (i.e. a lot) too early to make that decision.

Eric Raymond has written that “Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch”. Well this itch has become annoying.