Open Source Participation

Posted by Martin P in Open Source      1 comment

Jun
16

One of the key benefits in Open Source Software is in its community. Outside of the warm, fuzzy feeling, there are very real, tangible benefits like support and diversity, amongst others. Smarter people than me have waxed lyrical on those benefits so I won’t here. But I will comment on a common misconception around Open Source – and that is that the ‘community’ is about developers.

It is true that successful OSS projects have a large proportion of developers at the core – lets face it – it’s about producing software after all, but there is much that gets done which isn’t ‘developing’ (even though it often gets ‘done’ by developers). The REALLY successful projects boast a variety of skills in their community – from web design professionals to marketing professionals to legal professionals and a rake of other skills that all make the project what it is.

But if you’re not one of those – what if you’d like to feed back into ‘the community’ but all you can offer is an occassional bug report – only to be told it’s been reported, fixed, and ready for the next stable release?

Well, there may be a way you can contribute a little time to make the world a freer place. This blog is about open source PACS and RIS – although it hasn’t considered the challenges in RIS very much (so far). Well here is one. One of the features virtually anybody would expect to see in a RIS is some level of integration with a dictation/speech recognition (SR) system. The problem is, Open Source SR is still in very much a developmental stage. That’s OK, the SR vendors will cooperate with anyone who may bring in sales, surely. Yes, but then is it really Open Source – especially when OSS SR is beginning to bubble.

Open Source SR has no lack of recognition engine – in fact there are 2 or 3 pretty good engines. What it is lacking is language acoustic models . That is a large collection on speech samples for the engines to match patterns against. This is where virtually anybody can offer value to a worthy OSS project.

Voxforge is an Open Source project to collect vox samples to fill exactly that gap. They’ve gone out of their way to make it really, really easy to submit even a few seconds of sample. Your community needs you.

Who owns PACS — Radiology or IT?

Posted by Martin P in PACS General      1 comment

Jun
4

Now this question annoys me, particularly in the form it is raised in Aunt Minnie, which as far as I can see, is just about the most effective way of stirring up so-called ‘turf wars’ that have resulted in so many failed PACS implementations in the past. Lets re-form the question a little: Who owns the Finance system? Finance of course.  Who owns the HR system?  HR Doh! So why does a hospital have an IT department at all?  Simple, because there folks in IT who understand different things than folks in Finance, HR, and yes, (Gasp) Radiology, and can (generally, and to varying degrees, admittedly) apply that understanding to domain solutions that give value to the department as a whole, and to the wider organisation.

“If you don’t have budgetary control of your bucket of allocated capital dollars, you have lost control”

Is that it?  Is it really about who holds the money?  I have seen, in a major hospital, a clinical department ‘with the money’ base their clinical workflow on a system built on an Access database.  I’ll repeat that.  An ACCESS database.  Any IT professional would offer good reasons why that isn’t a good idea – for the department or for the hospital, but the ‘in control’ department went ahead anyway, and then replaced the system 2 years later.  If being ‘in control’ means locking out other perspectives to one’s own detriment, then ‘in control’ is paranoia (I think, I’m not a psych).

“Your critically needed PACS upgrade will be competing with acquisition of a new laser doodad for OR”

That may indeed be true.  But lets face reality – IT doesn’t  make that decision – the prioritisation of PACS upgrade vs laser doodad is one for hospital management, usually in the form of a ‘medical council’ of some form.  It that perfect? No.  Does that make it political? Yes. But its the way the rest of the world works, and in the context of the impact of informatics technology, the rest of the world works better than most healthcare systems.
To answer the question – who owns PACS – Radiology or IT? The hospital does.