The Health and Human Services Department plans an open-source set-aside for one of the six contracts it wants to award for prototypes of a Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN). Details here.
Update: Note that Dr. Pico’s statements are misleading. The actual amendment PDF text can be found here.
The Health and Human Services Department plans an open-source set-aside for one of the six contracts it wants to award for prototypes of a Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN).
This (long) e-Week interview with Eric S. Raymond I think summarizes the Alchemist position prevalent in much of clinical medicine with regard to its software today: ‘Page 8:…The occult school of alchemy didn’t turn into the science of chemistry until alchemists abandoned the practice of secrecy and instead started sharing results with each other and checking each other’s experiments. And that was a very early stage in the development of modern science and engineering. It happened about 400 years ago. And the thing that we’ve discovered over the last 400 years, as we’ve pursued experimental science and developed engineering from an art into a craft into a repeatable discipline, is that human beings doing complex, creative work, doing design work, make mistakes. There is no way to mechanically check the results of creative work. If you could do that, it wouldn’t be creative work; it would be something you could do with a machine. So the only way to check complex, creative work for correctness is by the critical judgment of peer experts…’
The EHR Collaborative Final Report is out. Free and Open Source are mentioned on page 16 ‘The two things that will kill implementation of this standard are cost and user interface, neigher of which were addressed today. The cost issue can be addressed by making these standards completely free, transparent, down to the nth degree of granularity, and then supporting free open source development of the functional components. This can work with the vendors, not against them.’ and 48 ‘Implement quality issues with free and open source public domain software or database.’ I think I can take credit for the comment on page 48, but it bears only a little resemblence to what I actually said. Oh well. Would anyone like to take credit for page 16?