John Sharp is an IT Manager for a major medical center in Northeast Ohio. Areas of expertise include: ehealth, personal health records, Web 2.0 technologies, social media and project management. He is active in the Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society and the American Medical Informatics Association. The opinions expressed on this blog are those of the author.
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Posts Tagged ‘open source’
Google Public Data Explorer for Healthcare
March 16, 2010
Google recently released its public data explorer which combines the Google visualization tools with public datasets include population data and health data. For healthcare, the initial launch includes Sexually Transmitted Diseases in the U.S. and Cancer cases in the U.S. The charts allow selection by state and time options. For these two charts, CDC data sources are used.
So could this data explorer be used more broadly with other health data sets. For starters, those at Data.gov (although most of the health data sets are Medicare cost data). But could major disease registries open themselves up to this API so that medical researchers could visualize more data sources and generate more research questions more quickly. This could be one solution for the for the lethal lag time. The CDC has additional data sets available. But what about opening closed data sets, such as, those from the Society of Thoracic Surgeons or other disease-specific registries. Then there is the growing volume of patient reported data from sites like PatientsLikeMe and CureTogether.
The limitation of this approach is having researchers capable of interpreting these data visualizations to make meaningful interpretations. The peer review process would prevent publication of misinterpretations of the data. An additional control would be combining the data explorer with social networking tools for users to discuss visualizations and research observations of the data. Perhaps this could be accomplished through Google Wave.
Comments and data sets welcome.
The Top 100 Open Source Software Tools for Medical Professionals
April 17, 2008
100 sounds like an exhaustive list but it also demonstrates the extent of tools available to health care. While some of these are definitely healthcare specific, others are general software tools – everything from antivirus to open office. Surprisingly, the category of “storing patient information” includes many open database models which most healthcare providers would not see as secure enough by HIPAA standards. There are patient-specific tools as well. Worth a review and perhaps a selective trial for some of these.
Open Source for eHealth
April 11, 2008
Open Health Tools is a relatively new site which is sponsoring projects related to health care. There are so far a small number of projects uploaded to their project list. They also have a collaboration area called OpenCollabnet.
A related initiative is Open eHealth described as “Open Source for Electronic Health – Open eHealth Foundation to Provide Solid Basis for Interoperability.” This group appears to be more focused on interoperability including SOA and has some important partners include Sun Microsystems. They note that, “The healthcare oriented components will initially include services for patient consent management, virtual patient records, patient information management and services for a standardized users, roles and relations management.” This is obviously in its early stages which may mean it is advantageous to join.
Open source has strong possibilities in health care if it can gain the trust of major players over proprietary systems. It will be important to see how IBM with its open source emphasis will work in this space.
