Open Source and Healthcarein Europe -

Time to Put Leading Edge Ideas into Practice

Peter J Murray, Graham WrightThomas Karopka, Helen Betts, Andrej Orel

Open Source and Healthcarein Europe -

Time to Put Leading Edge Ideas into Practice

A workshop organised by theEFMI LIFOSS and IMIA OS Working groups

Helen Betts

UK representative to EFMI; Director, CHIRAD

Workshop Chair

Workshop outline:

Main issues/messages of the 2004 Open Steps workshops and the EFMI STC 2008 - Peter Murray

Building the FLOSS-HC Community - A strategy for the advancement of FLOSS in health care - Thomas Karopka

Open Source Business Rule Management System (BRMS) – A implementation in the breast cancer screening program DORA – Anze Droljc/Andrej Orel

Workshop outline:

Discussion – Helen Betts chairing

EFMI/IMIA WGs business meeting/discussion(builds on preceding presentations and discussion) -Thomas Karopka leading

Peter J. Murray

Director, CHIRAD;Acting Executive Director, IMIA

Open Steps (2004) workshops andEFMI STC 2008

Peter J. Murray

Founding member of:

IMIA Open Source WG (2002)AMIA Open Source WG (2003)

EFMI Libre/Free and Open Source WG (2005)

What was Open Steps?

What were the outputs?

What has happened since with WG activity?

What did the EFMI STC 2008 find?

Marwell Open Steps meeting

Marwell Zoo Hotel, Winchester, UK – February 2004

- invited 24hour thinktank of 30 people; funded by BCSHIF

- mostly UK; others Czech, Belgian, Dutch, North American

- iterative discussions and electronic voting

Main purpose of Open Steps:

...to identify key issues, opportunities, obstacles, areas of

work and research ... around the potential for using open

source software, solutions and approaches within health

care, and in particular within health informatics, in the UK

and Europe.

Three quarters of attendees described their

'ideal vision for the future use of software in

healthcare' as containing at least a significant

percentage of Free/Libre/Open Source

Software (FLOSS), with nearly one third

wanting to see it 'entirely open source'.

The emergence of a situation wherein FLOSS

could interface with proprietary software

within the healthcare domain was seen to be

both achievable and desirable, and also likely

if the right drivers were put in place and

barriers addressed.

Participants rated the most important issues why

people do and might use FLOSS within the health

domain as:

quality, stability and robustness of software

and data, as well as long-term availability of

important health data through not being

locked up in proprietary systems that do not

allow interoperability and data migration.

Participants felt that the strongest drivers (towards adoption/use of FLOSS in healthcare) were:- adoption and use of the right standards (the strongest driver)

- the development of an OS 'killer application' (the next strongest)

- political mandate towards the use of OSS

Participants felt that the strongest drivers (towards adoption/use of FLOSS in healthcare) were:

- producing positive case studies comparing financial benefits of OSS budget reductions

- sharing of learning and knowledge

- promoting OSS best practice case studies

Strongest barriers:

- lack of understanding of cost of ownership

- lack of an 'incubator' for OSS

They felt that the two most important areas for FLOSS activity by IMIA OSWG and other FLOSS groups were:

- 'political' activity and

- work on raising awareness among healthcare workers and the wider public.

San Francisco (medinfo2004) meetingSeptember 2004

- presentation and discussion of Marwell results

- international audience (many from USA)

- general validation of Marwell outputs

plus:- modularity of software development (driver)- lack of interaction between FLOSS groups (barrier)

Focus of effort over the next 5 years

'political' activity; inc. working within existing health informatics and other

organisations and persuading them to support and commit to FLOSS

approaches; working in local health communities; making available documents

and speaking on the benefits of FLOSS; further Open Steps type meetings,

possibly at European level and including more industry players;

availability; publicising the importance of health data being available across

time and all kinds of boundaries between systems – and the role FLOSS can

play.

Software development was NOT seen as a major priority by these groups

WHY?

- because most are not primarily programmers/developers?

- because of health care backgrounds?

- do they think there is enough software development projects already out there?

Full report available:

http://www.peter-murray.net/chiradinfo/marwell04/marwellreportv01p01.htm

http://bit.ly/bq0TZ

What has happened since?

EFMI STC 2008:

Presentations and discussion on range of FLOSS issues in health(care).

Discussion of progress made (or not) since 2004 meetings.

Conclusions of discussions:

Many of the issues presented at the firstOpen Steps meetings four years ago.

Things have not really moved on much.

Why is this?

Should the Open Source community be worried about this?

Where do we go from here?

We hope this workshop willprovide some answers

Peter J. Murray

peterjmurray@gmail.com

@peterjmurray on Twitter (#MIE09)

http://www.slideshare.net/drpeter

http://www.hi-blogs.info