Open Source for Healthcare Potential and Caveats

1
Open Source for HealthcarePotential and Caveats

• John D. Halamka MD

2
Open source is everywhere
Source Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, Fall 2007, Open
Source and Open Standards Taking a Closer Look,
Andrea DiMaio
3
Open Source for Healthcare

• Open Source Operating Systems
• Open Source Devices
• Open Source Browsers
• Open Source Development Techniques
• Open Source Databases
• Open Source Applications
• Open Source Standards and Interoperability

4
Harvard and CareGroups Experience

• RHEL migration for all mission critical systems
• Star Office/Open Office implementation
• Widespread use of Firefox
• Lenya for content management
• Lucene for search
• Apache for web hosting
• Community Health Information Exchange shared
  development

5
The National Experience

• Open Standards harmonization
• NHIN Code sharing
• Social Security Administration project
• And of course, VISTA

6
Doc Searls and the Patient as Platform

• Google Health, Microsoft Healthvault and Dossia
• Transforming healthcare in a more open
  environment
• The balance of open source and proprietary
  products

7
Potential

• Intellectual property sharing
• A community of developers
• Lower cost
• Rapid identification of security issues
• Testing and patching of bugs

8
Security

• ...opening the source allows independent
  assessment of the exposure of a system and the
  risk associated with using the system, making
  patching bugs easier and more likely, and forces
  software developers to spend more effort on the
  quality of the code.
• Japp Henk Hoepman, senior researcher, Security of
  Systems Group, Radboud University
• Bart Jacobs, professor of software security,
  Security of Systems Group, Radboud University
• Communications of the ACM, January 2007

9
Critical flaws days of risk

• Time from an issue being known to the public
  until the day that a fix is available via Red Hat
  Network

10
Caveats

• The lone genius effect
• The need for critical mass
• The need for capital i.e. trade shows,
  participate in standards activities,
  certification
• Change control
• Innovation v. stability

11
Questions?

• jhalamka_at_hms.harvard.edu
• http//geekdoctor.blogspot.com