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Introducing Open Source to the Doctors
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.
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.
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.