Hi,
Whenever I hear that someone was doing Health IT a long-long time ago, I always suggest that they find copies of their old code and post them online so that we can have a strong source of prior-art to fight software patents with.
Recently, Bob Paddock took me seriously and dug up some invaluable prior art on automated prescribing. Today he sent me the results, including scans of printouts of both the printed prescriptions and the source code that made them. All of it with a date so long ago that it would invalidate any still active patent covering those subjects.
Bravo,
-FT
I would like to post many of the Fortran, C, Pascal, RatFor, and assembly language routines created during my 30 years in this business just to see how my style and logic has changed (notice I didn’t say progressed). However, many of those programs are sitting on a 9 track tape, linc tape, or a 50M multiplatter drives.
But then again, if you ever want to get that stuff out, now is the time. Waiting will only make getting into those kinds of data stores harder and harder.
-FT