TECHNOLOGY FOR CHANGE

10 Open Source Projects Changing Medicine

Joe Maglitta | Date: 08-18-09 | Comments

Public and private team to tackle costly, closed, siloed health care, one project at a time.

Assuming debate moves beyond "You're stupid. No you are," health care reform will require new ways of lowering costs and de-siloing tens of thousands of sickly complex systems. Even if the current overhaul stalls (and maybe especially so), we'll still need fresh collaboration, technology and ideas.

With a tip of the nursing cap to a longer list on the Medicine 3.0 blog, here are 10 open source medical efforts whose long-term diagnosis is positive.

1. EpiSPIDER (below): Interactive mashup of worldwide epidemics using expert sources and generally available news.

2. HealthCloud Office: Amazon-based open suite for small medical practices.

3. IndivoHealth: Personally controlled health record system that lets patients own secure copies of their complete medical records. Developed by Children's Hospital Boston.

4. i2b2: Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside is an NIH-funded National Center for Biomedical Computing based at Partners HealthCare System. i2b2 is developing a scalable informatics framework to bridge data from clinical research and basic science research to better understand genetic bases of hypertension, obesity, arthritis and other complex diseases.

5. ClearHealth: Medical software designed by clinics and hospitals and powered by open-source software. ClearHealth includes modules for document storage, customizable reporting/forms, lab results and prescription management.

6. Tolven Institute: A worldwide collaborative creating a health care platform on open source and open systems; led by executives from Accenture, Booz Allen, Duke Medical and HealthSystems Group.

7. Medsphere: A community gathering place for health care administrators, clinicians, developers and enthusiasts to interact, share and collaborate.

8. HealthFrameWorks: An OpenHealth Services specification that leverages the many existing standards for health record representations (e.g., HL7/CDA, CCD and CCR) and report representations (e.g., PDF and HTML) to provide a simple standardized infrastructure for Web-based and local services.

9. SMIViewer (below): Free visual data analysis tool for research and teaching.

10. PLos Medicine: A peer-reviewed open-access journal published by the Public Library of Science.

Are there others that should be included?