Calle Hedberg wrote:
[...snip...]
> The over-focusing on the TOOLS (e.g. software) is not only dominant among
> software developers, it's dominant among health managers too. We see again
> and again that people get hooked on our software (taking up max 20% of our
> overall efforts), whereas the crucial areas are institutional and human
> resource development (transformation, research to understand the "business
> logic", implementation, training, etc).
Absolutely. Only a small part of the investment in any health
information system is in the software implementation. Although open
source software does save software development effort, I contend that
the biggest (potential) benefit of open source health information
systems is that they make it easier to perform autopsies (or perhaps
vivisection) on earlier systems so that the successful bit s can be
emulated and the mistakes avoided in later systems.
Hence, it doesn't matter that OSCAR is implemented in an obsolete (or at
least, legacy), proprietary software environment (AREV running under
MS-DOS or clones). What matters is distilling the wisdom embodied in
OSCAR and the lessons learnt in its real-life implementations so that
other systems and implementations can benefit.
Perhaps "open source" is a (slight) misnomer? What matters most is "open
design" or even "open wisdom". Access to source code just makes the
dissection required to determine the design or extract the wisdom
easier. Of course, the other nice thing about open source software is
that after the dissection, it is sometimes possible to play at being Dr
Frankenstein...(although I suspect that this happens less often in
reality than some open source evangelists would have us believe).
Tim C
