So I am going to run a conference. I figured this was about as bad a time as I could pick, since no one has any travel budget, and people are getting laid off left and right! However, I have been wanting to do this for long enough that I have decided to something about it.
So why a conference? Here are my thoughts.
- Free and Open Source in Healthcare has come into its own.
- Serious players like DSS, e-MDs and Misys are now taking a hybrid FOSS/proprietary approach.
- Pure plays like ClearHealth and Medsphere are kicking butt and taking names.
- Grant writers are starting to favor Open Source in their grant applications
- Huge policy decisions are being made by law makers regarding Health IT, some proposals, most notably Stark’s, strongly favor open source software.
- Mature Open Source efforts are impacting every aspect of Health IT, including EHR, Bio-Informatics, HIE, Imaging, PHR, etc, etc…
- Despite having many mature projects we are still operating as a dispersed community.
I have the privilege of being known, and at least a little respected by members of several of the most important FOSS Healthcare projects. Projects like:
- Tolven
- Medsphere
- ClearHealth
- Mirth
- WorldVistA
- OpenEMR
- OSCAR
- Misys HIE projects
In fact, I am probably one of the most well-connected people in FOSS healthcare. I think part of the reason is that after I left ClearHealth as project manager, I decided not to start another codebase. I also think that as the original developer of FreeB (a library rather than a standalone project), I have some credibility as a contributor to the movement generally, rather than being loyal to a particular project or group. Thats fine by me. It also puts me in a really good position to highlight the competition between the projects! I win no matter which project comes out on top! But while competition is healthy, FOSS is also about collaboration, and we do not have enough of it.
Healthcare IT is, probably even more than IT generally, an ecosystem. We need software to do hundreds of very different tasks, and that means tens of thousands of programmers all need to be working in some kind of coordinated manner. There are several areas where collaboration in Health IT is critical:
- Interoperability
- Web Services
- Service Oriented Architecture
- Library-ization of critical functionality
- Good ideas moving between projects
My own project, FreeB, was one of the first Health IT specific FOSS project to be useful to several other FOSS projects. Now Mirth, from Webreach, has taken the title of “most helpful project for other projects”. We need more of this kind of cross-project code, that other people can rely on and build on.
Meeting together gives us common direction, allows us to reduce duplication of effort, and is generally fun. I would love it if I could abandon projects because better stuff that I did not know about was out there! The projects listed above are doing really well and almost all of them have communities that they are building! But I get a call every month from a legitimate project or a new effort from a standing project that says “How do we build community”. I am also humbled by new projects taking on different problems (Like Trisano) or by companies that seem to “get it” out of the blue and take the plung into FOSS (like DSS)
WorldVista and OpenMRS are the only two projects that I know of that are large enough and successful enough to have their own community meetings. Both of these communities rave about the level of progress that is made during large community meetings. I have been to the WorldVistA meetings and they are a tremendous amount of fun! One of my personal goals in life is to one day attend an OpenMRS meeting in Africa or South America!
But other projects are too small to make a community meeting worthwhile. You have to rent the space, sort out the food, sell tickets, provide t-shirts… It is daunting to do a community meeting and it is not worth the effort if only 5 people from your project can make it. The problem is that it takes meetings to jump-start community and community to make meeting worthwhile.
So I am starting a conference, which I hope will at least be held yearly, that will do three things.
- Provide one-stop shopping for people interested in using, developing, selling or buying FOSS software in healthcare.
- Provide a place where projects meet, compete and collaborate.
- Provide a place where projects of any size can hold face-to-face community/development meetings without worrying about the details.
With that in mind I am happy to announce FOSS in Healthcare. This conference will be held in the Summer of 09 (July 31 – Aug 2) in Houston T.X. Click here to register.
There are two big issues I need to address:
1. I need to know how many people are coming so that I can escalate my facilities if I need to and 2. I need to make this conference affordable to the individual FOSS enthusiast.
With that in mind, we are offering 1 month of early-bird registration at $60 a person. After that the fee goes to $250 per ticket. Basically, that means that if you register now, the sponsers (contact me if you want to be one) will be paying your way, but if you wait… its all on you!!
I might offer some kind of middle ground like $120 per ticket the month after the $60 deal runs out… but there are no guarentees. I can promise you that $60 a ticket is as cheap as it gets.
Please drop me a comment about what you would like from a FOSS Health IT conference! At this stage I might be able to accomidate a really good idea!!
-FT