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Open Source: What's Stopping Open Source HealthCare?
At the 2005 JavaOne, both Scott McNeally and Jonathan Schwartz of Sun discussed their ambitious goal of rallying the Java community around solving tough software problems in the areas of education and eHealth. Their keynote addresses highlighted an Open Source initiative in the Brazil Health Care system. But two years later it doesn’t seem like much has happened in the US. What’s holding it up?
Overcoming the Health Care bureaucracy is part of the problem, and the huge size of the industry makes that difficult. It’s hard for any solution to gain any traction. One company, Medsphere, with Open Source licensing has made some headway by using a code base of software originally developed by the Veterans Administration, but infighting within the company has detracted from the project.
Other companies are trying too. Microsoft, in their own unique approach towards Open Source, has created an open source project called the Health Connection Engine. An Open Source project called Mirth enables HL7 protocol data exchange between different Health systems. And a joint Open Source project between IBM and the University of Florida is designed to enable doctors to remotely monitor data collected from patients. Eclipse also has an Open Healthcare Framework project.
So projects are out there, but it seems like it will take quite a bit more time before any of them can gain momentum. What can help? Probably more funding and better collaboration among insurance, hospitals and doctors. It’s not something that looks like it will happen overnight. Open Source HealthCare should be a perfect target to get boot-strap funding from government, but special interests may oppose that from happening. Will the US ever be able to get it’s HealthCare IT act together?
