(This is a preview of a talk that I am going to give next week at Healthcare::Refactored, with Karen Herzog) There are two definitions of the word “Hacker”. One is an original and authentic term that the geekdom uses with respect. This is a cherished label in the technical community, which might read something like: “A person adept at […]
Category: FOSS Culture
How to change the world over the weekend
I love hackathons. I love winning them. I love competing in them. I love winning them. I love judging them. I also love not losing them. This weekend, I am acting as a mentor to the first Health 2.0 hackathon in Houston Texas. As far as I know (which is not that far, really) this […]
Practical collaborative document writing for patient communities
Hi, I have a lot of experience with collaborative document writing, and now, in my role with Cautious Patient Foundation, I have been providing technical help to several patient communities. I helped write the security standards for the NWHIN Direct project and I am currently working with the e-patient/QS community to create a document detailing […]
Hacking data: showing patterns in kids health
Here is my submission for the Local Children’s Data Health 2.0 developer challenge. The challenge was to make data available through kidsdata.org come alive. Generally, the red circles correspond to the percentage of child allergy suffers who had -seen- a doctor, but had no specific plan to address their condition. The red tags, are healthcare […]
You might be a cyborg….
People often do not get why I am so convinced that only GPL Software should be used in Medicine. I can understand why. Without understanding the nature of Healthcare, people assume that I am being religious about the issue. This is the furthest thing from the truth. It has been a while since I have […]
OpenMRS shines in Haiti
I am utterly not surprised to hear that OpenMRS is shining in Haiti. This reminds me of the tremendous reponse that the VA had to hurricane katrina using VistA. For fun you should ask those involved for the inside scoop of how VistA enabled an entire hospital to uproot and move over the course of […]
VistA License debate: its about proprietarization
It looks like WorldVistA is, for now, holding fast to the GPL and AGPL for VistA licensing. I have been a vocal advocate for compromising with DSS and Open Health Tools around the LGPL. The LGPL would allow for some innovations to be licensed under the GPL, and others, in the core of VistA to […]
Open Source Health Software Conference
So I have two small news items. First, I am renaming the yearly Houston Open Source Conference from fosshealth to OSHealthCon, which just stands for Open Source Health Software Conference. Why the name change? Well, it is caused by the need for me to distance myself from the term “free”. I know what “free” means […]
Enabling open core
What license should you consider for your new Health IT platform? As you consider that, you should think carefully about your user audience. You want people in the Open Source community to develop against your code. You want people to add value to your core. To achieve this you have to recognize that our community […]
Away from iphone and towards a better platform analogy
As many of you know, the CHIP/Indivo/Harvard guys (who I guess I should call the ITdotHealth guys) wrote an article in the NEJM saying that we needed something like the Iphone app store in Healthcare IT. I wrote a rebuttal saying that, among other platforms, the Google android platform was a better fit. Frankly, I thought […]