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Introducing Open Source to the Doctors

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the is-there-a-docter-in-the-house dept.

TCook writes "Dr. Daniel Johnson introduced the morals of open source to the American Medical Informatics Association. Read his presented paper. " Medical technologies are one of those areas that I think should be open-sourced for obvious reasons. The notion of bugs and flaws that no one can get at in medical technology gives me the willies. As well, if by applying the "thousands of eyes" we can save lives, I think that's good for all.

4 of 158 comments (clear)

  1. Nice article, but... by rde · · Score: 4

    I am not a GNU/Linux or free software / open source zealot; I simply recognize its genuine strengths and enormous potential.

    It's a bad sign that this sort of disclaimer has to go on top of articles about open source; I've done it myself on a couple of occasions.

    I'm not going to make the usual plea to the zealots to be polite when talking about OSS; I know by now that it's not going to work. What's needed is for those of us capable of pressing the point without being an asshole to do so when the opportunity presents itself.
    OSS' greatest enemy isn't Microsoft; it's its own zealots.

  2. Fair 'nuff by Christopher+B.+Brown · · Score: 3
    I certainly don't disagree but that you need some pretty serious design and testing, and some serious brains butting the ideas around, when working on applications where Blue Screen of Death could be an all too literal result.

    Consider:

    • "Attitude adjuster has crashed at altitude 2500m above sea level, estimated time to airplane crash, 14s. Retry, Abort, Cancel?
    • "Meltdown under way, graphite fire in reactor core causing current temperature of 4500K... Kernel OOPS!
    • "Your pacemaker has crashed. Cancel or Save ???
    • "Space shuttle off course; collision course with Sun imminent, and we're not talking Ultra Enterprise Server here.

      (Although, with relative velocity vectors of a goodly number of Km/s, a little Sun 3/60 could probably do a good number...)

    I have not the Real Time skills to deal with that; the absolutism of the comments were what offended me.

    Consider that:

    • Hospitals run accounting systems, and pay staff, mandating a payroll system (which is a pathological example of a "Real Time" system, as it involves time granularities measured in days rather than in milliseconds) just like any other sizable organization;
    • Hospitals do a whole lot of record tracking, where "low grade" automation can be quite useful;
    • They have telephones, elevators, HVAC, security, and all sorts of other such "soft real time" applications where they can pull technologies off the shelf.

    RT is not the only issue; free software has considerable things to offer in the non-hard-RT areas.

    --
    If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
  3. Maybe that's why you didn't get into med school by heroine · · Score: 4

    In 1996 if you even brought up the subject of computers in medicine at an interview they would have drawn and quartered you and used your remains to teach gross anatomy (personal experience). Now that they've opened that up, their next brick wall is allowing anyone but the most highly qualified MIT grads touch the source code used in medical applications. There's a reason why most of these medical technology companies are in the northeast. If you want to work on medical software professionally you need serious formal EE or CS degrees to the cieling. Managers in that area are more anal retentive about the formalities than Bill Gates is about using Windows. So maybe in 5 to 10 years if the medical profession becomes really really strapped for cash you'll be able to get an open source project running a patient information system but today it's more likely used as a web server, a mail transport agent, and the same drill.

  4. Re:What about the accountability issue? by dillon_rinker · · Score: 3

    Some things to consider...

    1. Software alone doesn't does nothing that could affect a patient. It generally has to be embedded in some sort of mechanical device. Whoever makes that device would get sued.

    2. Making source code freely available doesn't mean disclaiming liability for it. I can easily say "Here's the source, look at it fix it, DON'T YOU DARE DISTRIBUTE IT!" Releasing source code and permitting licensees to examine and modify it for their own use has NOTHING to do with ESR's version of "Open Source" software or RMS's vision of "free" software.

    3. If you want a guarantee, be prepared to pay huge sums of money for it.

    (offtopic rant ...)
    4. What is up with wanting to harm someone who bears you no malice and who, with your consent, tries to help you?