Benjamin Jung wrote: > Hello, > > I was trying to find a website that lists Open Source Applications used > in Healthcare and their status, e.g. obsolete, beta, stable,... A quick > Google search returned some pages that list applications, but they do > not go into more details. Additionally, most of these 'link collection > pages' have been updated only "a couple of years ago". > > Are you aware of any such websites that give up-to-date information? > If not: > Do you think such a site would be beneficial to market OSS in healthcare > in one single place? > Anybody interested in some initial email brain storming? > > Imagine a physician/hospital/lab that is looking for an Open Source > application for a specific purpose. Where do they get comprehensive, > comparable information? Some applications are hosted on sites such as > sourceforge and freshmeat; others aren't. Some applications are > mentioned regularly in News and Blogs; others aren't. Some applications > are being taught and introduced at university; others aren't.
As other people have already mentioned, there are several sites with such catalogues and lists, with various degrees of currency. However, all of these sites focus primarily on open source applications, and to a lesser extent, open source infrastructure software (operating systems, Web servers, database servers, programming environments etc etc). Joseph dal Molin has correctly pointed out that pointers to evaluations of health-related open source applications would also be valuable. The problem is that there are, to my knowledge, very few such evaluations. Indeed, they are rather thin on the ground for closed-source health software applications as well. However, there are an increasing number of descriptions or mentions of open source software in health care and health research, and it may be valuable to catalogue these. For example, we have recently published a peer-reviewed paper which describes a public health surveillance system based on data collected from hospital emergency departments (aka emergency rooms, casualties), which primarily uses open source software components, from the server operating system up - see http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/5/141/abstract (OK, I'll admit that SAS is used in a few places in the system, but we'll replace that with Python and R code eventually.) A wiki or simple online database could be used to collect links to scientific papers and even web sites and blog entries which similarly make reference to the use of open source in health. It would even be possible to do some data mining to find these references, using Google Scholar ( http://scholar.google.com/ ) or directly using the full-text corpus now available for many open access journals (see for example http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/about/datamining/ ). However, I think that some sort of editorial oversight of such a catalogue would be needed, to prevent accumulation of junk and off-topic unsuitable references. Alas, at this stage, I am not volunteering for such an editorial role, but would be happy to contribute items (and even do some data mining to find candidate references). Perhaps one or more of the existing open source software catalogues might like to expand their scope to include references to or descriptions of OSS in health, rather than just open source applications. Tim C Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/openhealth/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
