January 17th, 2008
Open source health care finally ready for take-off?
If you can get to LAX on February 8 David Uhlman can make it worth your while.
Uhlman’s title is customer happiness guru (and CEO) for ClearHealth, an open source software package for medical clinics. (I like that title.)
Uhlman called yesterday to describe his all-day conference on open source health care solutions, at the Westin LAX, scheduled for February 8.
It has the mouth-mangling title of “Demonstrating Open-Source Healthcare Solutions (DOHCS),” and it’s being held right before the Southern California Linux Expo.
This is your chance to meet “open source medical gurus” like Fred Trotter, Scott Shreeve, and Tim Elywell of Misys.
All the biggest open source health care outfits will be there. Medsphere. Misys. Clearhealth. Webreach. Along with folks from IBM and Google, among other companies. Misys is even bringing some news with them, Uhlman said.
This is not the first attempt to get a regular conference schedule going around open source in medicine.
The HIMSS conference, the largest show for the medical products industry, tried to launch an open source seminar a few years ago, but wated everyone to post their stuff on Microsoft Sharepoint, Uhlman said. Funny story.
“Linuxworld did a health care day two years ago. It missed the boat. Out of that I got a test conference last year. That turned out better than we expected. We exceeded our attendance expectations.
“The SCALE event is also focused on tech people, the health care event is aimed at providers and administrators. So this year we added a technical track, but the idea is to get the message of open source out to medical decision makers.”
Uhlman said the importance of open source in medicine goes well beyond the savings.
“In medicine, open standards have never been open. The entrenched interests and lobbies have motives to co-opt so-called ‘open standards’ for themselves. Without open source you can’t get people sharing data.”
Open standards, in turn, are vital in terms of collecting the data on which things like comparative effectiveness work, which can dramatically cut the costs of health care. (The link is to our Healthcare blog here at ZDNet. Visit often.)
“Open source is in the long term interest of funders like Medicare. It lets them share information in a way that improves care and reduces costs.
“Large practices can’t tell you how many of their patients have diabetes, how many are getting better and how many are getting worse, very basic things.” With open standards, pushed by open source, that data will become available.
So please try to drop by. I’m certain you can get a flight out if you don’t like it.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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