Here is a series of crucial but un-answered questions in the Health IT provisions of the recent American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009:
What if Mark could be convinced to literally fund open source (CCHIT ceritifcation fees, for example)? – Ed Dodds
Its easy to write about what the government or other people should do with our/their money. It’s harder to come up with a course of action that I can undertake on my own that possibly, somehow could make a difference. My first inclination is always to try to look “for the next big thing”. But the next big thing is just that, next. Its not now. Its Venture Capital. Its not self funding, renewal capital.
Jeff Soble, Neil Cowles, and Edmund Billings have a response reproduced after the break to HIMSS “Call to Action”. This is a sobering look at the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 which looks poised to result in the demise of real competition, medical data in the hands of a cartel or monopoly for a few wealthy corporations, loss of privacy and the loss of the physician as the traditional custodian of medical data. Item 3 is salient: “CCHIT works to the benefit of a small number of large EMR vendors that can command a high price from the relatively small segment of the market able to currently afford their products. It is essentially anti-competitive, and establishes a major barrier to entry by new vendors and open source projects (where the majority of innovation will take place).”
After reading the parts of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 that relate to health IT, here are my conclusions: 1) More of the same. The current plans and all the same players for Health IT as before only now there is a lot more money involved and a brief time to accomplish all of this in terms of health care time: 2014. 2) A chicken in every pot approach, everyone gets money: education, Health IT schools, some physicians get money for implementation on a descending rate. Some talk of free/open source but the usual political favorites AHIC, etc. are all still there as well only they get a lot more money now. 3) No clear plan as to how to do all this. No clear plan for dealing with issues such as 20 year veteran clinicians and nurses with no computer experience. No plan for enabling the proliferation of innovative software with existing systems. No penalty or plans for dealing with proprietary software stonewalling.
OMG™, Health Level Seven® (HL7), and the SOA Consortium™ announce the “SOA in Healthcare: Value in a Time of Change,” conference held June 2-4, 2009 at the Hyatt Regency O’Hare in Chicago, IL. Registration details may be found online at http://www.omg.org/hc-std
Gold Sponsor: EDS
Silver Sponsors: Appian, Intel
About page 701 of the stimulus bill is a provision for studying Open Source: “…(A) the current availability of open source
6 health information technology systems to Fed7
eral safety net providers (including small, rural
8 providers);
9 (B) the total cost of ownership of such sys10
tems in comparison to the cost of proprietary
11 commercial products available;
12 (C) the ability of such systems to respond
13 to the needs of, and be applied to, various pop14
ulations (including children and disabled indi15
viduals); and
16 (D) the capacity of such systems to facili17
tate interoperability…’
“The US Department of Defense, which has been flirting with open source for years as a way to improve software quality and cut costs, has finally burst the dam on Defense-related open-source adoption with Forge.mil, an open-source code repository based on Sourceforge.
The secret to a more secure and cost effective government is through open source technologies and products.
The claim comes from one of Silicon Valley’s most respected business leaders Scott McNealy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems.
He revealed he has been asked to prepare a paper on the subject for the new administration.
Healthcare IT News reports that it is now on a Free/Open Source CMS: NEW GLOUCESTER, ME – Pop the hood on our new Web site and you’ll find one very powerful engine. It’s called Drupal, a free, open-source platform that powers all of our content entry. As many healthcare IT workers know, the value of open-source solutions isn’t just the (lack of) price tag: it’s the fact that the products are user-developed, community-tested and constantly improved.
Congressman Pete Stark (D-Calif) has introduced H.R. 6898 full text of the bill here
which takes a strong stance on Open Source and VistA, calling specifically for an Open Source health information network if possible based upon existing systems such as Veterans Affairs VistA.