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| Advocate Young Man/Woman, Advocate! |
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 Posted by Ignacio H. Valdes, MD, MS on Tuesday September 04, 2007 @ 02:49 PM
from the Linux Medical News dept.
Sit on the Electronic Medical Record (EMR) task force committee, write editorials, participate in government. These activities are of supreme importance for Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in medicine to succeed. If FOSS advocates are not present or do not speak up at the table when decisions are being made, guess what direction the decisions will go? The power of advocacy works only when exercised. Digg this article
Remarkably few decision makers and leaders in healthcare know about or understand Free and Open Source licensed Electronic Medical Record software and how it is vastly superior to proprietary licensed EMR software. If FOSS advocates worldwide are not sitting at the decision table the decisions will inevitably go against FOSS EMR's and for continuance of an unacceptable status-quo.
So get out from behind your computer and do some FOSS advocacy at the local, state or national level. It is important. Don't think that you have nothing to say or that the reception will be hostile or that you are not welcome. I'll include some talking points below. Most of these committees are too confused to be hostile. These committees are often boring and time consuming so they like people on them, even and especially 'private citizen' representation that will see the process through. Consider it a donation of your time and energy. Also, printed materials carry far more weight in committee meetings so things like this recent article and others on this website are helpful.
Things to say in committee:
FOSS licensed EMR's allow organizations to control their own destiny. Like the Bill of Rights, even though a organization may not want to work on its own software, it retains important rights.
FOSS licensed EMR's are far more resistant to buyouts, business failures, mismatched corporate agendas and monopoly pricing.
EMR software is probably a public good like a lighthouse or roads and bridges, not a private good like furniture or cars. FOSS licensed EMR's are essential to shifting the market towards a public good by removing proprietary barriers.
Traditional market forces are failing with proprietary EMR's because there is too much 'information asymmetry' between buyers and sellers as well as the 'noise effect' of hundreds of competitors for a relatively small market. FOSS licensed software reduces information asymmetry which is essential for the creation of a true market.
Choosing from the list of hundred's of non-certified and 70 or so proprietary CCHIT certified EMR's is nearly impossible to get right. It is worse than picking a stock. WorldVistA EHR/VOE 1.0 is CCHIT certified, proven, robust has billions in research and development, 8 or so vendors that will support it and FOSS licensed so it has a nearly perpetual future.
Open standards are not enough. Medicine is remarkably difficult to standardize. Paper standards document's are simply inadequate. Free and Open Source licensed Electronic Medical Record is a functional and quite open standard. Why have a paper standard that needs implementation when you can have the functional software itself be the standard.
With a non-proprietary system, who gets called/fired if something goes wrong? Same as always, the company you signed a service contract with. With FOSS, you really can fire the company much more easily if you do not like their service. With proprietary company software you are stuck.
Code escrows are not enough. It's like saying: "the pilot died, here, fly this out of date plane with the design specs or a manual if there is one."
Please feel free to add to this list in the Reply section.
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Re: Advocate Young Man/Woman, Advocate!
by Ed Dodds on Tuesday September 04, 2007 @ 06:01 PM
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One Opportunity might be a public technical assistance meeting will be held on September 5, 2007, 9:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. Eastern, to answer detailed questions related to a Notice of Funding Availability (NoFA) to resource an entity designated to design and establish the AHIC successor by Spring 2008. More information will be provided about the concepts and illustrative model described in the NoFA, about the requirements for the applications, and about the evaluation criteria.
http://www.hhs.gov/healthit/community/background/PublicMeetingSeptember5.html
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Re: Advocate Young Man/Woman, Advocate!
by David Kennerson on Saturday September 15, 2007 @ 01:47 AM
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Excellent points! We in the FOSS community can't compete on mere price alone. It's much more than that. We need to convince people that FOSS is a good, sensible, and just as reliable solution as the proprietary solutions they might be looking at.
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Re: Advocate Young Man/Woman, Advocate!
by Alesha R. Adamson on Sunday September 16, 2007 @ 03:22 AM
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| This woman advocates -- does she ever. I generally do a talk titled, "Free Open Source Software for the 7th Largest City in the Nation." Being associated with the San Antonio exchange project has afforded me some opportunities to discuss our work on a national platform . While there are all types of indicators and outcomes that we can tout, the crux of my talks have been around the community collaboration point.
RHIOs are all about collaboration, right? All manner of healthcare entity getting together to "do the RHIO thing". Well, FOSS is about collaboration too. We get together, talk about what's needed, build it, and then share it. I know of 3 RHIOs who presently employ developments paid for by my federal grant money. I count 2 RHIOs whose developments we've utilized to spring from, not to mention the NHIN round 1 grant money.
There are some unfortunate stereotypes that OSS is just garageWare. Let folks know that many of the developers involved in these FOSS projects are well respected, robust and mature organizations, like the RAND corporation or Fujitsu or see also Wikipedia on Open Source Development Lab.
One way to introduce the idea of FOSS is to start by using it as part of the proof of concept. We were able to put together a small demonstration project for much less than committing to a proprietary system. The agreement has always been that if we should decide that there is some other tool we would like to move to in the future, we can do that. The initial investment would be well worth the learning points and will allow us to better asses what we're looking for in a system that will cost hundred of thousands of dollars a year to maintain. That is of course, if the FOSS system doesn't work out for us. (so far we have decided to stay with the FOSS system).
In addition to talks, if you belong to one of those CIO colleges, or associations, don't be afraid to speak up on FOSS. I have a CIO from one of my hospital systems who didn't want to go the OSS route because the fellows from his CIO group-of-choice insisted that OSS [insert antiquated notions here].
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