Gosh its all happening around Open Source in Healthcare

Posted by Martin P in Open Source      No comments

Feb
29

Of course a flurry of announcements might have something to do with a few folk getting together to chat in Orlando but the contents of said announcements is particularly interesting. A trio of vendors have got together to form the Open eHealth Foundation. The objectives?

Create a worldwide community-driven software development platform to speed up the digitization of the healthcare industry.

And by God it needs speeding up.

Enable members and healthcare organizations to create compelling solutions based on existing global clinical and administrative standards, and increase interoperability with a wide array of third-party components and platforms

The key phrase here? Increase interoperability. IHE is slow, cumbersome, and laden with proprietary vendors. Perhaps an initiative such as this is what is needed to give it legs.

read more

Häagen-Dazs and Open Source?

Posted by Martin P in Open Source      No comments

Feb
26

I’ve mentioned before Pentaho’s James Dixon’s almost-perfect metaphor of commercial open source as the ecology around a Beekeeper:

James Dixon of Pentaho has a great vision  of commercial FOSS as a beekeeper, carefully encouraging bees (developers) to produce while at the same time encouraging customers (users) to consume (use) and feeding back into the ecosystem. Everybody wins. But some or all of the bees can fly away at any time (at least in theory) and the beekeeper has to compete with factory-bred honey (proprietary software).  Ok, maybe the metaphor breaks down a little there but it is a good illustration of how commercial OSS can offer value, and especially in the context of ‘Enterprise’ systems.

Now, the august International Herald Tribune has an article illustrating the point perfectly.

The berries, fruits and nuts that lend flavor to about 28 of Häagen-Dazs’ ice cream varieties depend on the insects for pollination.

read more

Optical trickery?

Posted by Martin P in PACS General      No comments

Feb
1

While the debate around CAD rages and there are a number of quantitative indicators particularly in CT and MR, and some in CR – I recall myself involved in some research [unfinished, alas] to assess potential quantitative indicators in the morphology of spinal trabecular in cases of osteoporosis (it seems the idea proved worthy of independent investigation later), the de facto standard remains the same – visual inspection of medical images for clinical content.

But the human visual system is a complex beast, and the reaction of the system to peripheral stimuli are not well understood even by the neuro-scientists fully immersed in it, let alone those who rely on the visual system to commit to important clinical decisions.

Without wanting to trivialise, consider this illusion (from Wikipedia):

A is significantly darker that B, no? Lets cut a piece out of B and overlay onto A to compare:

read more

What are the benefits of Open Source to the User?

Posted by Martin P in Open Source      1 comment

Feb
1

… or, in the case of commercially-oriented open source, to the customer?  Simple.  Money only changes hands for the REAL value a vendor provides to the customer.  In the proprietary world, no amount of demos, site visits and slick suits takes away the very real risk that the software isn’t going to do the job you expect it to.  That is what happened here. After spending €1.8M, the software is scrapped.

Anyone living in Ireland over the last few years would have gotten used to hearing about the Health Service discovering that software didn’t live up to expectations, but only after a big wad of money was handed over.

Would commercial OSS solve that? Not entirely.  The likelihood would be that some implementation consultancy would have been bought before the system gets binned.  But not €1.8M worth.  And certainly not €130M .

These examples get publicity because it happens to be public money and there is still (some) accountability in the system.  How many times do such blunders get covered up or glossed over to save face?