Open source and ehealth

The debate about open source software compared to proprietary software in the area of ehealth is worth following.

An article in a  journal , jmir, on medical internet research, lists some compelling cons for open source use in the field of health informatics.

Notably it states "Successful OSS projects tap into the skills of the community that forms around them to suggest new features, report bugs, and modify the source code accordingly. A nascent developer community must have something testable to play with but, once formed, open source communities can put skilled time of much greater orders of magnitude into a problem. The central argument to OSS development is that when everyone can inspect the source code, the software gets more scrutiny and more corrective feedback than a single development team can provide."

The website ehealthaustalia.org contains ehealth information and links to commercial companies providing proprietary software.

The vision of ehealth is for interoperability. Interoperability meaning that the information shared between providers must be understood by sender and receiver.

Its not rocket science to see that open source would be a better fit for the model of ehealth.

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