Dear colleagues,
What follows is what I learned and what I think may interest the
openhealth participants. Hopefully my omissions, errors, and bias will be
quickly pointed out, challenged, and corrected. (Horst Herb, David
Chan, Cito Maramba, the Minoru team, and perhaps others from this list
were also there. :-)
1. Medinfo2001 meeting (London) is a smallish meeting that draws primarily
publicly-funded projects/developers/government staffers. Commercial
vendors/consultant types are visibly under-represented.
2. Familiarity with open source methods are high. Major obstacle to
releasing code seems to be lack of interest or fear of forming/supporting
a developer/user community. There is apparently little funding incentive
for this. Many projects with production code and even professed plan to
release code may choose to delay release of code for this reason.
3. Several publicly-funded projects are on the verge of going open-source.
For example, PICNIC (http://www.medcom.dk/picnic/OpenSource/default.htm),
BSTD (http://itch.uvic.ca/itch2000/PRUNA/PRUNA.HTM), and perhaps certain
automated guildeline projects (EsPer?).
4. Minoru/EuSpirit had part of the large EU booth. Brian Bray, Dave Scott,
and Bud Bruegger took turns there. A video of MUFFIN starring David Chan
M.D. was playing in the background. It was too bad that they were not
able to hand out a CD or URL that contains downloadable/runnable open
source software. A live demo system would be good too.
5. The vast majority of presentors have not and do not have plans to make
their code available for peer-review or re-use. This makes the Medinfo2001
experience rather frustrating. One hears success story after success story
- without the ability to know what was done or replicate/build-upon each
other's "success". Very very sad.
6. The level of participant interactions and discussions was extremely
low. Critical remarks are entirely absent. Congratulatory comments are
rampant. Maybe this has to do with the number of famous professors and
department directors? (And, perhaps made worse by the strangulating effect
of the ubiquitous neck ties??)
7. This makes me wonder about the future of the every 3-year Medinfo
meeting. Maybe the OSHCA annual meeting will become the favorite for the
working medical systems researchers?
(my impression of OSHCA2001 to follow)
Best regards,
Andrew
---
Andrew P. Ho, M.D.
OIO:Open Infrastructure for Outcomes
www.TxOutcome.Org
Assistant Clinical Professor
Department of Psychiatry, Harbor-UCLA Medical Center
University of California, Los Angeles
