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Advice for an Open Source Development Grant?
IgD asks: "My colleagues and I are developing an open source medical records system. A senior supervisor approached us and let us know a third party is offering a decent amount of money in the form of a grant for any legitimate medical research project. We were all but promised the money if we could come up with a proposal. Has anyone in the Slashdot community received a grant for open source software development? Are there any good examples of such a grant available? How could one measure the results of open source development for publication?"
Is your goal ge get the job done, or to open source your code, or to get money? Imho they are very different goals.
Less is more !
Refer to other medical research proposals. I'm assuming that you're not trying to get this grant on the sole basis of this being open source, right? The open v/s closed source nature of your project should be pretty irrelevant to your research proposal.
Mmmm.. Donuts
for someone with the time to do so, would be to make a portal with as much info on this subject, and links to sites that may be able to help you get started / funded for such a project. I'm sure the OSS community would appreciate a site with such information. Just a thought...
Have you checked around Source Forge for similar projects?
Have you check www.linuxmednews.com?
There are lots of projects in progress currently, perhaps you could work with one of those and help them out?
Alric
At one time, fairly recently, we wrote a grant proposal for the Soros foundation, which was running a special program to help "disadvantaged communities and citizens" in the New York City area. Our proposal was considered one the better ones they received, for it was to enable accessibility for the blind. However, they rejected it primarly because this was something that could also be useful to helping blind people outside of NYC as well! I kid you not!
There already is an open-source EMR (gnumed.org), but no doctors are using them, because the switchover is just too hard. My dad's a doctor, and he was promiced a free EMR, just pay for the hardware. In fact, it was the FIRST EMR ever made, but he would have to hire extra people to load the rooms of files he had into the computer. It was just too hard.
My guess would be that writing this grant would be like writing any other grant. The idea is to propose an idea, outline your thesis (in this case, why you are making a case for this software and why open source), talk about the background of this project, why it is important what the implications are if this were to succeed and how you plan on going about completing this project. Outline the costs and give a timeline, clearly state your goals and wrap it up.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Up in Canada, the federal Science and Research Council of Canada looks fondly on open source projects, at least the agent i dealt with. They (he) felt that the 'openness' of a project such as this would in some ways achieve what a patent in the field was meant to do, and the dole out generous tax and research grants, even on the likely failure of a project, and (better yet) with little consideration for the commercial viability of the project.
... plus Quebec IIRC) offer substantial tax grants on your revenues, which i always thought was a stupid as you likely won't have much revenue during your strictly research years, but for anyone who's ever paid Canadian taxes any little bit helps.
As far as know, the company has to be incorporated in Canada, but typically for Canada doesn't have to be entirely Canadian.
Additionally, many provinces, (BC, AB and Ontario
I've received sponsorship money from some pretty big companies for the development (or augmentation) of an open-source project I wrote.
Now, this wasn't a "here is some money, go write something useful" type of sponsorship, but more along the lines of "we like your work but need a certain feature added. Here is the money, add the feature".
It probably doesn't help you though, since they (the money) came to me...
Ron Gage - Westland, MI
As can be witnessed by the comments section on the recent /. article, apparently lots of people are bailing because they're "consciencous objectors." ;) Should be tons of cash available.
>How could one measure the results of open source >development for publication?"
.. Your reseach being opensource has no impact either positive or negative on the reviewers mind. Keep in mind the goals and make sure the job is well done .. Just because it is open source does not mean the results can be mediocre .. some of the best reseach is open source.
The Same way one measures other research results
Since you're doing medical research, the National Institute of Health's SBIR program seems most relevant. You can also find the application forms and guidelines if you look around.
May I ask you why you decided to open source it?
Unfortunetly despite of what Eric writes in "The Cathedral and the Baazar" Free Software developers are still most likely to recieve their reward in fame not $$. It may feel good but the Free Software community has so far failed to work out a way to consistently financially reward the actual developers (not hardware compnaies who bundle Linux with their servers!). Even if your project become popular all you'll get from users is bitching and moaning not meaningful bug reports. Just watch the burnout suffered by Fink, MPlayer and Router floppy authors.
US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil
If you want to make an open sourced system just for the sake of it being open then you're going to have a hard time. I firmly believe that some things should be open sourced, but it's not always prudent to do so. Every situation is different and open source isn't always the answer. Companies need to make money, even the open source friendly companies release software closed source.
If you can get grant money based on the finished product then open source is a good idea, but if you need to provide a product that will be sold, i think companies will be a little more frugal handing you money to create something open.
They're in the open source medical software biz as well.
This guy is way out there
Good luck. Medical records needs it. Of course, there are open, free records systems available already that are quite good -- CPRS from the VA, for example.
Hospitals, and medicine in general, are conservative institutions that have only lumbered like brontosaurs into the information age. Pubmed and medical research being exceptions, of course.
Then, talk about the benefits of an open source application, and talk about it's longevity and low cost of future manipulation. But only briefly, don't get too technical on them. Instead, attack the human aspect. Do some research and find out what the doctors and medical staffers themselves really hate, not their bosses/directors.
How could one measure the results of open source development for publication?
You haven't been in academia long -- the answer is you make up the results like everyone else!
But seriously, I'm not sure what is unusual about this situation. You apply for the grant, saying you want to research and develop XYZ system. At the end of the time period for the grant, you'll have to show that something happened, whether it is getting 1,000 developers working on it (this is good because you can clam the investment was matched 1,000 times in donations!) or having 12 private clinics and 2 hospital systems evaluating it and participating in system testing.
Whatever, you make up everything you can think of to measure (lines of code, contributors, patients tracked, data points, countries involved, languages ported to, web site hits, days of uptime, number of compatible legacy systems), keep track of it all, and at the end of the grant you write a paper saying how fantastic all the good stuff was, or why the whole thing failed and should never be attempted again.
If you really look into currently published stuff, you'll see that 98% of it is just proving and restating the obvious in a way that people can reference for future publications, so that they don't have to waste time on the obvious when the 2% of real research takes place.
I do applaud you and encourage you (and anyone else with the stomach for grant-writing) to pursue it, you'd be surprised how easy money is to get for useful projects if you can just keep up on the paperwork and wait months and months for every step to happen.
Get a half-dozen ongoing grants and you can basically have a small company that does pure non-profit open-source development year-round (and one full-time MBA to manage the grants!).
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Why use open source as a medical record system? Why use the open source model? As one of the replying pundits put it "move out of mom's house and get a real job".
... actually the SCO model for those of you who remember SCO in its heyday before barritry became popular ... a place to find some security. More important is that from a physician standpoint what could be better than CQI, continuous quality improvement. The open source channel makes that not only possible, but nearly mandatory.
The reason for using open source software is that it is indeed a collaborative effort. For those of you that think that this is one setup shopping, its time to look at the serious projects that have made some inroads and continue to develop.
The business model for open source, indeed for those of us who remember a time before the internet (yes there WAS that time), when software started to be packaged with machines. Why, one might ask should one pay for software when it comes for free? Today $450 but tomrrow it's packaged. For those of us who watched carefully we knew that the real money to be made in the world of software would be in support and support applications. To a certain extent those who continue with proprietary and exculsionary sorts of software may well find themselves moved over because of freely available and very robust software.
The advance of linux and linux clones is such an example of the incursion of open source software. Free? Hardly. Freely available? Always.
From a standpoint of software design and development, the open source model gives those of us who wish not to be constantly hit up for nickles and dimes
So, those of you who have regarded the only path to enlightenment that of the Gates family or Big Blue, look again at some of the companies doing open source development.
As for the question about grant seeking; The FreeMED Software Foundation is seeking grants to employ coders and others to better the software. Since the Foundation is a non profit, seeking the development, promulgation and distribution of opensource software, people who are motivated to see better software development can contribute to the making of better software. In a way, donated dollars dictate direction.
There is much more about the open source movement and the intellectual freedoms that such development permits. Check them out. Check out the FreeMED Software Foundation (www.freemedsoftware.com) or the open source news list at LinuxMedNews (www.linnuxmednews.org).
Freely Submitted:
Irving J. Buchbinder aka DrGnu
FreeMED Software Foundation
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
But if I had to wager a guess, I'd say Modelbob has some of the best content around.
Now we have some funds to further the distribution. I will tell this guy it DOES pay to make Open Source Software.
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
You're not even trying! Come on people, troll a little better than that.
Speaking as a Grad student, almost all work done within the Academic realm is open source. Professors get funding from various sources, and they are able to publish their work, and then make the source available.
What you are proposing should work, but it all depends on the source of the funding. Would they be happy with an open source solution, do they even know what open source is? You need to discuss and evaluate this with them, but in theory it should work.
-"Those who fought today will die tommorow."-
My most successful string of open source solutions involved a small break with an audio-video company. I set up a small Linux network, with a small CRM that was based on, believe it or not, a web based PHP driven "application" that I designed to catalogue my DVDs, VHS tapes, CDs, games, books, and comic books. mySQL is the backend, Apache its "OS". I added a few useful modules from popular CRMs that I found on Sourceforge. All of this meant nothing to my client, they were only happy that it fit their every need (they were managing customer data, billing, scheduling, and reports across a series of applications like Excel and Quick Books Pro, and good old pen and paper). Needless to say, not only was my solution extremely scalable and cheap, but it removed the hassle of having to have a file cabinet handy and three or four programs. All they did was click a little link on their KDE panel, and up came Mozilla and their portal to my program.
They quickly refferred me to their lawyer's office, my own dentist, and another small business that specialized in boat repair. I quickly made about $12,000 in my spare time, and not one bit of the software I used cost anything. I have yet to return to any of their sites to fix anything since, and this was over a year ago. The only thing I did was give them each a call when Redhat made RHN available so that they could sign up and have their systems updated for them remotely, for very little $$$. The circle of Linux business life eventually brought money back to Red Hat, whom's OS I used for free as an ISO download, at all of these sites.
You gotta love it.
The idea of a proposal is to say why you need the money.
If your project is open source then I assume you intend that other people will work on it for you. In which case, how do you intend to divide up the money?
Are you intending to take a chunk as salary? How large of a base team do you have? How much do you intend to give them?
Basically, where is all the money going and how does "Open Source" fit into it?
Ben
Work Safe Porn
The important part to open source is the record format. After that, I can live with open or closed source software to access it. An open file format is imperative though, for any useful portability of records for patients.
I'm not convinved that open source development model has any real advantages over the established one. Honestly, I dont see a lot of innovation and creaivity coming from OSS developers. Beside a few high profile server apps and dev tools with a longtime Unix heritage its mostly K[windows app] or Gno[windows app]. Granted MS itself isnt very innovative but 3rd party windopws developers really shine. In every groupd from individual shareware developers to small dev houses to megacorps you can see examples of applications that have nor rivals in the OSS world.
US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil
BTW: Communism is where the government evenly distributes wealth, not when alot of people work together on a project. Might be helpful if you have to go through a high-school history course again ;)
A very good person to ask about this kind of thing would be Jon Hall (Maddog) at Linux International.
I believe he has been involved with Open Source Development grants and LI might even have such a program.
Bill
3rd party windopws developers really shine
Now c'mon, I don't think Gator's that good!
I don't know if anyone could even use it. Under HIPAA law you have to have a business associate's agreement with all vendors, and ALL vendors must supply support for the products or they aren't compliant. That's not even about the actual security or code flow of the program, but the whole project itself.
I do HIPAA audits, and I couldn't give them a a good rating on the risk analysis if they used it, because of that. No support==non-compliant. I could suggest they buy it from your company if your selling it, I don't see it being used by an IT staff somewhere without a vendor.
Maybe we DID take the blue pill. You wouldn't remember anyway.
Not sure if the directly answer your question, but: "The Nonprofit Open Source Initiative (NOSI) was begun in June 2001 to bridge this gap between the nonprofit and open source communities."
Seems like a good place to start, or at least to be in contact people who might be able to point you in the right direction.
You certainly sound like you're at one, or a teaching hospital. Most universities (& hospitals) have research offices to help professors & other researchers apply for and get grants. Many of them are quite good at it. Why?
Most US (& Canadian) universities make a pile of money by charging "overhead" on grants. This is supposed to cover the costs of physical plant, the library usage related to research, etc. etc.
There is no relation between the costs of overhead and the value of the services provided. Despite millions being collected from my Prof's research grants in overhead, it takes forever to get light bulbs fixed. We started referring to metaphysical plant.
LinuxFund.org has been kind enough to supply two of my projects (GNUpdate and Gaim for Qtopia) with funding and hardware. It may not directly relate to your question, since it sounds like you already have someone that may be giving you the money, but you can look at their policies and requirements, and request more information.
I don't see any reason why you shouldn't be able to get NIH funding and/or grants from other sources to build a low-cost or freeware EMR system with a well-written proposal and a knowledgeable Principle Investigator directing the project (you probably need someone with a PhD in Medical Informatics or an M.D./D.O. to be your PI). If you don't have a qualified PI to head the project yet, find one. You don't want to be perceived as a novice. The people you contact will likely be far more helpful the more you sound like you know what you're doing.
My advice to you (I have received several grants and fellowships) is to really be tight on the proposal. If the grant application asks you to write it in blood, write it in blood. I have also been on committees that review grant proposals. We would kick proposals, unread, for not having the correct format on the TITLE PAGE! When I complained that this was a minor thing, the committee chair looked over her glasses and said, "If it isn't perfect, then it doesn't deserve our consideration or our money." Be tight. That is my advice.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
Grant proposal writing can be very esoteric and specialized. I suggest that you ask the agency offering the money for suggestions as to where you could get help writing your proposal.
Good luck. This is a field that desperately needs Free Software.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Not that I want to know, but the goals and interests of the funding agency should be reflected in your proposal. For example, if the funding agency is interested in third-world health, then play up the low cost of the software for impoverished/disadvantaged clinics. If the donor is a big pharma company, then play up how they could "give this away" to potential customers or use it in clinical research. If the third party is more interested in academic research, then show how the system can support data collection, double-blind studies, etc. I'm not sure that the "open source" angle will have much traction unless you can show that the open source process multiplies the impact of the donor's money.
The more you know who the donor is, the better your proposal will sound to them.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
that this shouldn't be open source? Do you not remember what RMS has said about proprietary software?
A non-free program is a predatory social system that keeps people in a state of domination and division, and uses the spoils to dominate more. It may seem like a profitable option to become one of the emperor's lieutenants, but ultimately the ethical thing to do is to resist the system and put an end to it.
The last thing we need is to have a predatory social system injected into our medical profession. Hospitals and other entities should collaborate to create software to be used by all; it would be the inexpensive, ethical thing to do.
PS I predict most of the negative responses to this post will be proprietary software developers suffering cognative dissonance, who feel the need to write knee-jerk responses to anybody suggesting even for a millisecond that non-free software is somehow wrong.
I once developed a Callcenter Training Utility for our company in the early 90's using such a grant scheme. It used genetic algorithms to generate simulated customer complaints that were _very_ realistic, even to the point of using sample voices to "whine". Of course, the helpdesk trainees hated it...
But hey, the mewling was featureful.
I have worked at a company (for a short time) who's most of its software was BASED on GPL'ed free open source software, one of their software packages is a CMS based off phpnuke ( http://www.phpnuke.org ) They Make about $35,000 a MONTH from their commercial PHP based CMS system which was just ripped off from phpnuke my boss just paid a out of school programmer to just change it as much as possible. But its suffered from the same security exploits as nuke even after 1 year of selling and working on it.. Interestingly it seems to be bought by people who know there are free ones but want commercial support they want to know they can get help setting it up but of course there are others who just don't like about the free ones such as PHP nuke. Do I feel sorry for the GPL lovers who create these problems? No there just fools, theres no other way around it, this is what happens , if your not willing to BSD your licence then dont open source it at all because at the end of the day your living in a dream world. Instead of falling into the foolish trap of so many others why don't you just sell your softare? Open source grants might work but why do that when you could do things like provide real support and the like.
1.) Get a job doing whatever. 2.) Buy caffeine and computer parts with money from job 3.) Use caffeine to stay up late working on the OSS Project
First of all, HIPAA is only in the US. It wouldn't apply outside US borders (though, other countries may have similar laws, I don't know).
My guess, however, whoever is funding it will probably try to make some money off of it --> installing and servicing systems (hardware/software), that means they are a vendor, and can come under the Business Associate Agreements.
I would see problems if the IT staff of the hospital tried to make their owns changes to the source code without consulting the vendor. In open source it would be their right, but it would probably invalidate a service contract.
Some time ago, one of our clients had a need for medical software for a very small business. Since they did not have a lot of income to purchase expensive software, I had researched into the medical field briefly. You might find a couple of the links below may lead you to some people that can help you find the information you need to get yourself on your way. Some may even be willing to lend you a hand.
r at ing_Systems/Linux/Projects/Industry_Specific/Healt h_Care/
t m
http://www.hardhats.org/
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med/his
directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Software/Ope
www.hi-europe.info/library/opensource/default.h
Don't make any anti-military comments or your funding could get pulled.
HIPPA is a non-issue if you have the right business practices in place. It would most certainly not matter if your application was home grown, open source or from a vendor. You must have some framework for privacy, adhere to standards (that is what the law was intended for in the first place!) and some means of support, whether thru vendors, consultants or in house. Some of the best EMRs in use are home grown and self supported with occasional use of 3rd party components.
As for use by IT departments without a vendor....this is exactly the problem. IT should have nothing to do with record systems, they have neither the aptitude nor the ability to run these extraordinarily complex, yet crucial systems. IT departments and the informatics departments should be separate (but close friends). IT can provide the network, run the servers, maybe even manage the RDBMS, but beyond that they need to call for expert (i.e. informatics specialists) help.
Providing the software open source is a perfectly reasonable option. There is no such thing as a complete, effective, turn-key system that will meet the needs of anything other than a small community hospital (and even that is dubious and will require considerable time w/ integration and installation support from the vendor as they try to tie together the dozens of existing systems). Every system needs tremendous efforts to write new interfaces, match workflow to the local environment, adjust CPOE, write/implement CPGs and other decision support tools.
Modular? The UMLS is rather complex to be called "modular". From their web site (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/umlsmeta.h tml) :
"The July 2003AB edition includes 900,551 concepts and 2.5 million concept names in over 100 biomedical source vocabularies, some in multiple languages'
Given the complexity of the UMLS (which serves to map different medical vocabularies to each other) it is far from modular. Obviously needing such an instrument to translate codes between systems suggests that modular is the *least* accurate term to describe controlled medical vocabularies (e.g. SNOMED-CT, LOINC, Read Codes).
If you are thinking about using IDC 9/10 codes...they are made by the WHO and translations are available in English and French. However, it is well documented that they are inadequate for clinical record keeping. SNOMED-CT is available in English, Spanish, as well as several other languages.
Seriously, have you tried the American Medical Association?
The AMA awards grants for all kinds of things -- sometimes even worthwhile things -- sometimes even productive things!
Surely the prospect of funding a productive piece of medical software would be in their best interests!
A word of advice: make sure it's DOS so it will work on most doctors' computers.
There are many examples of this available. My group (at a medical school) has collaborated on a number of grant projects (government and private granting agencies) where money was awarded for the development of open source software. In fact, the grants we have worked on require that the software be made publicly available (although most of what we do is of little interest outside of clinical/educational medicine).
If you want another great example, contact the IT group at the University of Delaware. They developed (under a grant and collaboration with a few other schools) uPortal. This is an open source portal system which is packaged and serviced by several different vendors (RedHat style) like SCT and Campus Pipeline. Since the development they have found they get a better response from other granting organizations as well as vendors (like Blackboard and WebCT to develop modules for it). So not only do you get the immediate benefit of money to assist in the development (to pay salaries, buy computers, buy software, etc.) but you get many continuing benefits from it as well.
I don't know if anyone could even use it. Under HIPAA law you have to have a business associate's agreement with all vendors, and ALL vendors must supply support for the products or they aren't compliant. That's not even about the actual security or code flow of the program, but the whole project itself. I do HIPAA audits, and I couldn't give them a a good rating on the risk analysis if they used it, because of that. No support==non-compliant. I could suggest they buy it from your company if your selling it, I don't see it being used by an IT staff somewhere without a vendor.
The underlying assumptions you are making are:
But all four of these assumptions are not necessarily so. Remember those little logic problems you had to solve to pass your GMAT? If some Snickers are Doodles and Some Snorkers are Doodles, is the statement "All Snickers are Snorkers" (a) True (b) False (c) Indeterminate? (hint: the answer is (c) Indeterminate).
I will disprove each of your assumptions by giving a counterexample.
1. open source == no vendor
The IBM Corporation develops open source software. But maybe you'll need to give them a call to determine if they're "real company" . You could just check their SEC filings, or perhaps their current stock price. But perhaps you will call IBM Coporation's CEO -- y'know, just to make sure that The IBM Corporation isn't just some kid working out of his mom's basement? D'ya think?
Therefore, the statement "open source == no vendor" is...(c'mon, I know you can figure it out...trying, trying) FALSE! correct.
.
2. open source == no support
I use SuSE Linux, which, when you register, gives you a free installation support contract. I've used it twice, and gotten the solution to the problem back within a couple of days. I therefore conclude that their support is good. If you need corporate-level instant-turnaround support, SuSE will happily sell you a support contract. Their terms are very good, and their reputation for honoring their support contracts is sterling .
Therefore, the statement "open source == no support" is... FALSE! Right again.
3. open source == pay no money to the vendor ... FALSE! Hey, we're batting a thousand today.
Read the GPL. Open source means that you must distribute the source code with the executable, and that all derivative works must also distribute the source code. It does not prohibit you from accepting money for the executable, it does not prohibit you from supporting the code, and it does not prohibit you from providing the support, as a company, in exchange for money. Even the "Free" in "Free software" means "Free as in speech" not "Free as in Beer."
Therefore, the statement "open source == pay no money to the vendor" is
4. open source == unknown parties are modifying the code in an uncontrolled manner
I think that Linus would be extremely surprised to hear this. Quite frankly, I have never seen an SDLC as tight, in any proprietary software house I've worked in, as tight as that applied to the development of the Linux kernel. Although I hear that *BSD is even harder to get code committed to than to Linux. In many open source projects, there is one person who decides whether each individual mod will be accepted or rejected. Insitituting tight SDLC, including source code version control, unit testing, conformance testing, integration testing and user acceptance testing -- is up to the manager, whether it's open source or proprietary code that's under development. Under open source, the customer actually has a far better guarantee that these tests are being completed than in a closed source environment, because the customer
You might want to do some investigation with the Veterans Administration also. They have done alot with Medical systems for the government both public and private system. I worked with one that used to be called Veterans File Manager.
One example I'm familiar with is the NIH Office on Neuroinformatics (no link provided, I don't want to Slashdot my funding agency!) supports the development of software for things like brain imaging and databasing. Their funded projects include lots of open source and GPLed projects, some directed by Slashdot readers (well, at least one). I don't know of any place where you can find successful applications, but you can at least browse some project descriptions.
This is just one example, I'm sure there are many others even just at the NIH (incl. at the new NIBIB).
This probably isn't the answer you're looking for, but there is work being done on an open currency for the open source movement. Check out: http://www.futureofmoneysummit.com/open-source-cur rency.php
1. Form a small business
2. Write Phase I proposal
3. Receive Phase I award
4. Write Phase II proposal
5. Recieve Phase II award
6. $$$
Check out the NIH SBIR page. You might be interested in the "Clinical Technology Applications" topic for the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR).
Logic is not Divine.
Open Mash was funded for a while by the NSF, a common source of academic funding. I'm not sure if you and your colleagues are in an academic setting, but the Open Mash web site does have the proposals and reviews of those proposals available on the site. Check out the Papers and Publications area.
I'm not exactly sure what you're asking when you talk about measuring the results of an open source project for publication. But any proposal would have to talk about why the project you are proposing has value in-line with the goals of the committee or group you are submitting the proposal to. Knowing exactly what those goals are can be difficult. This is one of those situations where you really have to tailor your writing to the specific reader(s).
Many university hospitals and other large hospitals all have some sort of electronic record system, and many are converting to an all electronic system.
I am not aware of any that are open source, Most I imagine, as everything is in medicine, has to be tested relentlessly and thus is costly and a real pain in the butt to get certified for new security regulations.
From a doctors viewpoint (mine), they are a pain to use - they slow you down, patients wait LONGER!. It's much easier to dictate and have the secretary slip the note into the chart. A positive aspect of the EMRs is that charts don't get lost (yah, but computers crash).
Many of the younger doctors are used to EMRs and will probably goto that in their private offices, 'cause they're used to it. I could go on for hours, but I'll stop here.
..........FULL STOP.
No seriously, people will pay to have their software improved, even if they believe that you have to use open source to do it, and that therefore your software must be open source. So go ahead, feel free to accept the money, it is an honor and it is in the public service. Should you ask, I am sure I could name many who've had that particular honor. Does anyone care about that?
Thinkingman.com New Media
I dig what you say but I can't help but feel that the statement:
...is pure conjecture and weakens the rest of your argument significantly. There are a very many number of companies who make "real" money through the sale of software, including the 800 pound gorilla from Redmond. It doesn't seem right to me to assert that a relatively untested business model is where the real money is when current evidence is in fact to the contrary.
For those of us who watched carefully we knew that the real money to be made in the world of software would be in support and support applications.
Googling on relevant keywords like: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22open+source%22+n ih+grant+proposal&btnG=Google+Search&hl=en&lr=&ie= UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
Turns up nice things. Here's the first hit:
http://era.nih.gov/areas/com/SBIR_Awarded.pdf
And there are other interesting pages like:
http://informatics.regenstrief.org/funding
Happy fund hunting!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
writing a good grant! focus on this.
don't worry about the open source thing, publishing under an open source license is very compatible with the spirit of doing science. after all, your peers should be able to use the outcome of your research, and follow up on it, right?
but: who will own the copyright to the software? this is the only thing you need to figure out. all the research i do belongs to my employer (university), which becomes especially important when i would like to make money with it. check whether your institute likes the idea of opensourcing the application. but, judged by the way you asked your question, it appears that you are already developing it, so there's likely no problem there.
so: just write like any other grant application, make it good, and get the money. good luck!
There is already FreeMed (www.freemed.org). Check them out. You might join forces. They are very nice people and need all the help they can get.
You MUST go to the people who will JUDGE the grant proposal and obtain an EXAMPLE of a SUCCESSFUL grant proposal.
In my experience with US military grant proposals, a successful proposal for a software project was as big and expensive as the code it was proposing. In fact, we always wrote the code first and the proposal second and used the money given for writing the code to actually write the follow up code and it's proposal.
Medical records NEED to be open source precisely because of the nature of the business of keeping medical records. No one wants to share. I dont care if you can't read mine. Without an industry push possibly backed by big players the medical records will remain on islands, lost, inefficient and ineffective.
my other sig sucks less
The licencing of your cell project is inconsistent:
doc/licence says LGPL.
But it also has a vague preamble that adds additional terms to the LGPL, namely that derivative works authors must distribute the work back to you ( and thereby release the source to you too.) The plain LGPL does not require this.
readme says that it is a "commercial open-source" project that can be licenced for $99. This is confusing.
It would be good if this could be cleared up. I would recommend that you make it LGPL. Ask a lawyer how to add your extra restriction if you really want it. Be aware that this will make it incompatible with the GPL, and the plain LGPL.
If you also want to offer commercial licencing under different terms, make the dual licence nature clear. However, going this route, the GPL is a better bet as the free licence to get commercial users to cough up. There is very little that a commercial project can't do with an LGPL'ed library.
The Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK at itk.org) was funded by NIH/National Library of Medicine. From the beginning of the $10 million project, the contract required all code and data to be delivered in open-source form. It defined a consortium of 6 prime contractors (3 academic, 3 commercial) each of whom had a particular role (e.g., architecture, algorithms, software process). It has been a great experience (version 1.4 will be released in two weeks).
It should be all right as long as you avoid the GPL.
If you look at most open source software, its development was not the prime objective of the research project.
Rather, the objective is to do something new, interesting and different from what has been done before.
Your proposal should combine some ingredients that would make the medical records system better in a signficant way. It doesn't have to be rocket science, but it can include some ideas that you have to make it a different project than just wrapping up a SQL engine with a GUI.
My own suggestion is wrapping in some traceability mechanism, so that everyone that reads or writes the record leaves a signature with the records.
These days a lot of people are concerned about their sensitive data becoming compromised, spied upon, etc. A medical records system with a well-designed access system could become popular if it is also easy to use and has flexible interfaces (XML).
"Provided by the management for your protection."
There are people who are paid to write grants. They have experience writing the grants, in the form, and including the infomation, that is likely to get them approved. I would start looking for one at a local university. Perhaps one with a medical school. Instructors usually know a of a colleague who writes grants.
Isn't that what the "Paypal Donate" button is for (the one that never gets clicked...once) ?
But when I receive medical care in small towns, or small cities for that matter, this is not the case. They have me sign all sorts of "HIPPA Compliance" forms, but I can clearly see from the way they process charts, records, etc. that they are in no way shape or form complying with the spirit or even the form of HIPPA as I understand it.
So what gives? Is HIPPA just another make-work program honored by the honest or in the breech? Or are these smaller medical providers going to be in big trouble soon?
sPh
You are a bit late. The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has been developing a fully integrated suite of applications to run its entire system of hospitals for years, and since it was done by public employees, it is available for free to anyone. It is written in M (or MUMPS) so you always get the source code. This package, called VISTA (used to be called DHCP) runs every aspect of their hospital system, from counting calories in your breakfast to full reporting to Washington, DC, and includes a true paperless medical record. The package has had HIPPA in mind for several years, long before the private sector started becoming concerned with it. And yes, it can bill Medicare as well as insurance companies using DRG's, CPT, etc. In fact, SAIC got a full copy of everything from the VA a few years ago and sold it back to the Department of Defense for $2B (two Billion dollars) and called it CHCS (Composite Health Care System.) If you want to find out more about it go to http://www.hardhats.org/ and all the info is there, including links to get the software from the VA. The package is so good, there are other countries which use it for their national health care system. This suite was driven from the bottom up by the users in each area of the hospital, so the Nurses decided what the Nursing package needed, the Psychiatrists decided what the Psychiatry package needed, etc. Read the site - it is impressive!
Don't even waste your mod points. This is only a test.
What rock have I been living under that I've never heard of it before? If I can't find an O'reilly book on it, how real can it be? I did find two books on it on Amazon though: The Complete Mumps (John Lefkowitz) and M Programming: A Comprehensive Guide (Richard Walters).
So how popular is this language? Which industries is it in? What's its penetration?
Salaam.
some pretty powerful, yet inexpensive software like Web Objects
.NET, Befunge och Commodore 64 BASIC - just don't let it be WebObjects. It is one of the crappiest systems in the business and will only drive you mad and poor.
Whoooaaaa there, boy! Whatever, and I do mean whatever you choose as your platform, let it be
Not because the idea as such isn't a good one. The philosophy behind WO is really nice (basically, imitate an application even when developing), after all, it was the NeXt guys that came up with it, so that is to be expected.
It is reasonably effective to develop in, that is also true. No worse than any other java platform at least.
But. Big buts:
It is very buggy - and always waaay deep down in the frameworks, so it will bite you a month after you wrote the code, or after you've deployed it. The basic stuff works, but there are sooo many edge cases that suddenly break.
It is very slow - all those layers of abstractions - and they are MANY - slows the applications down by a LOT, and often unnecessarily. Pull a simple list from a database should be an easy and fast task. 80 objects and 200 SQL queries later with EOF... 10 lines of code and 1 SQL query with some other system. And it gets exponentially worse.
It doesn't scale. At all. Concurrency is a joke, or at worst it is a bluff. WO has no real concurrency, because the worker threads does not work with the whole response, just the delivery. So you are basically stuck with 1 request at the time, per machine. Wooohooo. It is possible to make these threads do a bit more work, but then thread safety in EOF and WO libraries are no more. You will have to handle ALL thread safety and locking yourself.
There are tons of other problems, but those are the most important. It doesn't matter that it is somewhat inexpensive (I don't really aggree.. the hardware required for *anything* becomes very expensive quickly, esp. since it wants Macs) when it simply doesn't work.
Just check out the mailing lists. Don't listen to what Apple says, listen to what the people using it are saying. You will quickly find that just about nothing works when you go beyond the test-it-out apps.
Word of warning dude. This product ran a company I used to work for into the ground. Hard. And Apple just ignored us, even though we paid for support!
They usually have a proposal information booklet.
You need to do a spreadsheet with a budget, but list only the Principal Investigator by name, that way if someone quits, everything is still fine. List people by job name not real name.
Accounting requires someone capable of real math or experienced, preferably both, because you need to calculate indirect costs and read about what is unbillable, etc. Take the accounting very seriously, any carelessness or worse will get you into real trouble (including legal prosecution if it is more than carelessness), and the auditors tend to know just where you are likely to screw things up (after a few decades of auditing academics they become good at that). Supervise all timesheets carefully at the end of the month, people WILL bill time to the wrong project. The usual pattern is for them to switch activities but continue to bill to the same project for reasons of thought conservation.
Review your expenses every 30 days, this is usually required, and it is a good idea, because after 30 days things get harder to remember....
Be terse and concise in your proposal if you can, they like that. If your proposal is half the max length, they won't be complaining....
Working for DARPA was a very positive experience, except for the accounting (nobody's fault, proper accounting is a lot of work), and the clerks who are supposed to send the checks (they waste enormous amounts of senior management time, and Congress jerks the funding around also, make sure you are very conservative about your cash flow). Still, it was great to work for them, and we learned from them (they are rather expert in computer security).
Similar open projects include FreePM (I've used it in the past, but can't find links now) OpenEMR and FreeMed
Worth a look so you don't reinvent the wheel... Show that your project adds something significant that the others don't have and it'll help your grant proposal. Ask yourself "What makes mine unique?"
Best of luck.
I work in a teaching hospital affiliated with a University. I develop open source projects, and it seems I spend half my life writing grants. My three suggestions in increasing order of importance:
1)Follow the letter of the specifications when writing it. Reviewers are begging for excuses to shrink the list of proposals to review.
2)Start it months in advance if possible, to give you time to review, review, review and gather data/evidence to support your claims.
3)Think about ways to show how the money invested will have a multiplicative impact. Even non-profit funders or private philanthropists would like to see their money go as far as possible. For an open source project, that could be to show adoption/support at other institutions.
There is lots of work out there on open source med. records already. Have you investigated extending one of those to suit your needs, rather than rolling your own?
Last year I submitted a grant to NIH/National Library of Medicine to develop an open source progect, It happened to work pretty well.
http://biomail.org
We're actually funded by 'norsk forskningsrad' (norwegian councel of science), and we're situated at my uni. If you're going to take money, there are a couple of questions you're going to have to ask yourself:
1. What does the grant-giver want in return? While some grants are nearly no-strings attached, in the end there's strings on everything; and no exceptions made..
2. How much more time will you spend writing documentation/progress reports/other stuff purely for whoever gave you money?
3. And more importantly, how will taking a grant change the pace of the project? Will taking money for making something mean you're taking on responsibility you'll not be able to meet with your other responsibilites? When you're taking money for doing something, its going to be *alot* harder putting it away for a month because your wife/gf/dog/actionman turns sick, and your female boss at work gets her period.
"" How about taking the safety labels off everything, and let the stupidity-problem solve itself? """
I want to be paid to write more stuff like Tux Paint. :^)
But, I suppose that's mainly because I'm lacking a full-time job. (Stupid Worldcom)
First off, decide what you want to do. Then, find copies of every research paper you can find that is related. When you write your proposal, follow the standard format for an academic paper or proposal. This involves showing how your work relates to the work done by these other people.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
You should have a description on your project on www.rongage.org, or a README in your FTP at the very least.
:wq
Huh, learn something new every day. I've used that damn program so many times, and I never knew it was open source.
..........FULL STOP.
Complete text below:
How about I give you the finger and you give me my money...