This can only be done in developing markets because the health privacy regulations and mandatory screening laws cripple the ability of the Western medical industry to adopt open source solutions.
Open source software for developing world hospitals
71–80 of 119 posts
Re: Open source software for developing world hospitals
#72Looks great. Why such emphasis on "Ember"? Does the target audience really care what front-end framework is used?
Good question. The Ember reference isn't a religious statement in the holy war of frameworks.
It's about targeting contribution and letting potential contributors know what we're using so that they can know and self-select.
Goal #1 of the site currently is recruiting contributors b/c we aren't at a 1.0 release yet. We have it running in several hospitals in the charitable network that I serve, but it's not ready for wider distribution yet.
We want to get there by July 2016. Once we get there, we'll refocus the purpose of the homepage.
Re: Open source software for developing world hospitals
#73Anybody remember Care2x ?
Re: Open source software for developing world hospitals
#74Sorry another story about my journey with my son while he battled cancer. Closed Proprietary image formats and systems HURTS patients. We used the local hospital for Chemo and everything else at the Children's Hospital 1.5 hours away for his legs and lungs. I would always have to wait 20-30 minutes to get a DVD of the studies (PET, CT Scan or MRI even ultrasound, but those are worthless) and then bring them to the do…
So sorry for your loss. Thank you for sharing your experience.
I work as a developer at a large-ish (>20,000 employees) healthcare system. Our CIO carries around a thick 2-inch binder from his infant son's medical treatments back in the mid-90's (his son died at around a year of age). The binder is meticulously organized and includes sections for various departments, complementary organizations (long-term care hospital, specialists, etc.), etc. It was their only way of coordinating care at that time. That experience led to the push in our system for electronic records back in the early 2000's, and we're continuing to pursue standardization and interoperability to make records accessible across departmental and organizational boundaries.
To every healthcare organization—for/non-profit—that sees interop as a threat to your ability to sell licenses and fill beds, fuck you. Your customer's lives are much more important than your supposed competitive advantages—and, in the long term, the companies that share data will be the winners.
Re: Open source software for developing world hospitals
#75Sorry another story about my journey with my son while he battled cancer. Closed Proprietary image formats and systems HURTS patients. We used the local hospital for Chemo and everything else at the Children's Hospital 1.5 hours away for his legs and lungs. I would always have to wait 20-30 minutes to get a DVD of the studies (PET, CT Scan or MRI even ultrasound, but those are worthless) and then bring them to the do…
I'm shocked and also confused in reading this.
Why? Because the standards are there!
The ACR/NEMA standard dates back to 1985(!) and is nowadays known as DICOM. Here in Germany/Europe, the medical imaging systems as well as the archive systems (PACS) are designed to follow that standard. DICOM covers everything, from the exact flavour of lossless(!) image compression, to the metadata structure which covers fiels more than you ever need to describe the patient, up to the archiving of data. There are even Free Software / Open Source clients which do a great job in visualizing those datasets (OsiriX is a well known example).
I thought that this is an international standard. How can any hospital afford to buy crap medical devices that don't care about such an important 30-year old standard?
Did I get something wrong about DICOM?
Re: Open source software for developing world hospitals
#76Sorry another story about my journey with my son while he battled cancer. Closed Proprietary image formats and systems HURTS patients. We used the local hospital for Chemo and everything else at the Children's Hospital 1.5 hours away for his legs and lungs. I would always have to wait 20-30 minutes to get a DVD of the studies (PET, CT Scan or MRI even ultrasound, but those are worthless) and then bring them to the do…
I think it's too easy to blame proprietarism as such. It's a lack of universal sophistication in computer technology that makes designing systems living up to real medical concerns great efforts. When the "manufacturing techniques" of computer software is modernized, and enables more widespread implementation of these types of systems, proprietary formats simple won't be able to compete.
We know how to do this. Plenty of other industries have solved this problem. It takes organizational will to make it a priority.
Re: Open source software for developing world hospitals
#77I like the "Why HospitalRun?" at the bottom of the link...
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OhlxZY__spF_3ZnXLd5ga9vO...
Re: Open source software for developing world hospitals
#78Sorry another story about my journey with my son while he battled cancer. Closed Proprietary image formats and systems HURTS patients. We used the local hospital for Chemo and everything else at the Children's Hospital 1.5 hours away for his legs and lungs. I would always have to wait 20-30 minutes to get a DVD of the studies (PET, CT Scan or MRI even ultrasound, but those are worthless) and then bring them to the do…
Wow. Thanks for sharing this, I know it can't be easy talking about it. It's things like this where people who can solve the problem just aren't aware of the problem. Connecting the two is the hardest thing in innovation. It is painful to know how many developers can solve this yet they spend their days on improving their laundry for your cat delivered to your door app. Nobody is at fault or to blame, I'm not saying that whatever they are working on is not important or wrong, but I think more awareness of these kind of things would make more developers, who are very much capable, want to create a solution.
Note: I'm not putting any developers working on social/enterprise apps at fault or blaming, simply suggesting many of those developers would be more than willing to help out on solutions, they just aren't aware of the problem.
Re: Open source software for developing world hospitals
#79Looks great. Why such emphasis on "Ember"? Does the target audience really care what front-end framework is used?
I also read that as kind of weird. Who is their target audience really...
Re: Open source software for developing world hospitals
#80That reminded me about story my friend told me some time ago. He's IT specialist in hospital, they were having some problems with x-ray machine with server based on windows XP and thin clients as viewing stations. Eventually it was replaced with debian based workstations and haven't look back ever since. After this he told me about interesting case with it, there was patient complaining about middle foot pains, on pr…
So basically doctors were missing fractures because they couldn't fiddle with hue, saturation and colors on the image viewer ?
That's fucked up.