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Open Source: OS Stimulus for eHealth Records — Still a Ways to Go
Estimates are that electronic Health Record management is currently a $575 million business and that it will grow to a size of $1.6 billion by 2013. Electronic health records are expected to greatly improve accuracy of records and also to speed the steps in the work flow of the health care process.
The Obama administration is funneling billions into the creation of a universal electronic health record system. Black Duck Software suggests that Open Source is ad added stimulus to help move towards this vision. BlackDuck looked at existing Open Source projects that currently target aspects of health care and health records and found that there are more than 800 open source software projects of that category.
Black Duck estimates that the cost to commercially replicate the 800 projects would be 31,000 staff years of development at a cost of $6 billion. An interesting set of numbers, but would anyone really want to replicate all 800 of these software projects? Do the 800 projects have enough value to even want to be able to replicate them? An important thing to note is that these are projects and not necessarily products that could not be used without considerable customization. There is also undoubted overlap in common features among the many projects.
Perhaps a better measure of value provided by existing Open Source health-care projects is to determine how many can meet criteria around usability, quality, completeness and relevance to eHealth records. After applying those criteria, the number of open source projects that remain is likely fairly small. Open Source is an excellent vehicle for cost-effectively attacking the eHealth Care problem, but we shouldn’t overestimate the current state of Open Source software in this area.
