Essays on Open Source Medical Information Management

  • Open Source: A New IT Management Paradigm. Or you can view the slides and notes of a talk presented March 18, 2003, at the George Washington University conference on eGovernment and Health. Free/Open Source releases vendor lock and also frees the programmer to be an independent professional. This has important implications for healthcare.
    The challenge, "Well, what's the business model?" is answered by this realization. The new business model is the professional model that is so well understood by physicians, attorneys, accountants, and financial managers.

  • Open Source: How the Management Paradigm Works. Why is Open Source important to IT management? How can this model be used most effectively? What experience has a healthcare system had with Open Source? This essay offers responses to these important questions.

  • The Origin of Open Source: A Fable. I was asked to explain what Open Source is, and this little story emerged during an airplane trip.

  • The Future of Open Source. At OSHCA 2002 at UCLA Healthcare, I gave a talk on the future of open source, emphasis healthcare. I posted the slides, here, right afterward, but they were forgettable, and have been taken down. This is the resource essay from which I drew my talk, buffed a bit to make it presentable. It's chiefly an annotated tour of the hindrances to open source progress and the movement's strength..

  • Medical Enterprises and Open Source:

    An essay written August, 2001, discussing the opportunities for medical institutions to take advantage of open source software and collaborative development. If you discover outdated or new url's that belong here, email me and I'll add the edits with attribution.

  • Open-Source Medical Information Management

    This was an essay written in October, 1999, as the resource document for an AMIA presentation. The list of open source medical software projects needs to be updated, but if you really need up to date lists, visit Linux Medical News or The Spirit Project or Minoru Development.

  • QuickQuack: A fantasy from 1986 of what an electronic medical record might be if it were designed to make the physician more efficient intellectually. Some of the proposals in this have yet to be implemented in commercial software...

    I agreed in November 2002 to work collaboratively with others to extend this as a simple specification for an EMR; the results of this collaboration will show up here as soon as there's something to show.

  • For a more professional specification, consult Thomas Beale's mapping of openEHR to the ISO/WD 18308.

    Some readers have suggested that I should "copyleft" these writings. I have chosen not to do so, after reading it and other open licenses carefully, because basically all such licenses give the reader the right to take this work and modify it as desired and redistribute it. I would do this if a "group" essay seemed worthwhile; but in the meantime, if you find bad spots, please email me about them and educate me; I'll change the essay if appropriate.

    Otherwise, "fair use" is always permitted: quotation with attribution.