MIE2009 – open source workshop

I am in the workshop that I submitted, and we are running, titled ‘Open source and healthcare in Europe – time to put leading edge ideas into practice’. Helen Betts is chairing the session, and gave the introductions. I cannot blog and tweet while I am talking, so summary of my contributions will be post hoc – but I will try and cover the rest of the workshop.

I gave an overview of the Open Steps meetings held in 2004 and the EFMI STC 2008 meeting – see http://bit.ly/bq0TZ for Open Steps report and my slides at slideshare – http://www.slideshare.net/drpeter/open-source-workshop-mie2009-1930491

Anze Droljc from Slovenia gave a presentation on developing open source solutions in breast screening programmes. He gave an overview of Drools, a business management rule engine, and then went on to describe how the data to support the breast screening programme are captured in the central repository and are shared. They have developed an end-user application that does not need use of a mouse, but is keyboard-driven. The system being developed allows interaction of open source and proprietary applications. It seems that only open source tools are being used, and the actual solution being developed is not open source, but is proprietary.

Thomas Karopka, the new chair of the EFMI Libre/free and open source working group, talked about “Building the FLOSS-HC Community – a strategy for the advancement of FLOSS in health care”. He presented some ideas, for further discussion. He began with presenting the free software (http://www.fsf.org/licensing/essays/free-sw.html) and open source initiative definitions, and the differences between them. Thomas feels that open source has made quite a lot of progress in recent years. He covered a number of issues that might be influencing the uptake, or not, of FLOSS in healthcare – including lack of professional support for products, concerns over quality of software, sustainability concerns, and whether there is anyone to sue if things go wrong.

Thomas identified four steps to discuss that might be useful:

1. need for a dedicated FLOSS healthcare inventory to gather together a comprehensive list of FLOSS healthcare products and projects;

2. development of a collaboration platform, that might include software repository, use case database and FLOSS healthcare knowledge base;

3. setting up a ‘network of networks’ to link the various FLOSS WGs and foster collaboration between different projects and networks; and

4.developing FLOSS dissemination activities.

The latter part of session will be a business meeting of the EFMI LIFOSS WG; a report on this will be given later.