Brian Bray wrote: > > > The product is not software, it's medical information. It has a short > lifetime and must be kept up to date. Not only are there new drugs and > treatments, but new research on old treatments, new vendors of the same > drug, and the prices change all the time. Not to mention special offers > and introductory pricing as drug/treatment vendors attempt to build > their own markets. There have already been discussions about open source (or "open knowledge") projects to get the following kinds of reference information into publicly available databases: - terms - pharmaceutical drugs - drug/drug interactions - drug/allergy/illness interactions - public clinical demographics (publicly known names, address, contacts of HCFs, HCPs etc) At the moment, prescription packages are sold by companies who have a monopoly on this sort of information. One suggestion has been that public databases could be populated by clinicians themselves, over the web. It is easy to imagine the last one in the list above getting done this way. Getting the above information into "open knowledge" is one of the strands of a "domain-oriented development approach" (diagram: http://www.deepthought.com.au/health/domain_development/Output/main.html#1065637) - thomas beale
