Open source software has revolutionized many industries, but did you know it’s making waves in healthcare too?
Platforms like OpenMRS and GNU Health are being used worldwide to provide accessible solutions for doctors, hospitals, and patients. From managing digital patient records to tracking medications and analyzing disease trends, open source tools are helping to create a more efficient healthcare system.
As a community that thrives on innovation, can KDE contribute to this transformation?
Could we create tools or apps that connect patients and doctors more effectively?
How can open source software make healthcare more affordable and efficient?
I’d love to hear your thoughts, ideas, or even experiences in this area. Let’s explore how the KDE and open source communities can make a meaningful impact in healthcare!
The Arch User Repository has a package called ‘mygnuhealth-git’ that points to the KDE GitLab for the sources. I don’t know what the status of that is, I can’t access it, maybe defunct?.
Open source can definitely be a part of a cost-cutting process, since the software is free. There are two important caveats, though:
A company using open-source software will often want to sponsor or hire developers to improve the software for their exact use cases, which increases costs again. The benefits are huge since the company actually gains some influence over the development direction, but achieving this may end up costlier than licensing proprietary software that the company has no control over.
If there are net savings, patient costs won’t fall unless the company actually passes those cost savings onto them, as opposed to paying it to the CEO, shareholders, or workers.
I’m only familiar with the American health care system, but a major issue I run into again and again is too much IT, which results in enormous admin burdens as well. Every doctor, clinic, hospital, and insurance company uses a different system and none of them seamlessly talk to the others; every one must re-invent the wheel. And none of them are any good at it.
What’s probably needed here is some kind of industry consortium that standardizes and builds one IT backend and electronic medical record system based on an open protocol to ensure interoperability, with an open-source reference implementation that small players can use, and open specs so that larger players can build their own software that conforms to the spec.
Then people should be able to keep their own electronic medical records on a credit card-sized card or a smartphone, and every provider would have a device using the standardized system that can read from it and write data to it.
This way, the spiraling IT and admin costs can be controlled and providers would be able to have predictable costs in the form of a known membership fee in the industry-wide IT consortium which would do the work of developing and maintaining this standardized system.
100% - and the catch is that IMO the one backend would need to be built first, and deployed in a nationally-coordinated fashion across the continuum of care. Otherwise, the first-mover disadvantage would be prohibitive for any one IDN, clinical lab, etc. to both build and maintain the internal capabilities they need, while simultaneously building and maintaining interoperability with everyone else still using proprietary solutions.
With any luck it will lead to less hostage/ransomware situations too. Unless they are stupid enough to keep running it on the virus/trojan/ransomware delivery system masquerading as an OS called Windows that is. Then all hope is lost, they have a 40+ year track record of putting out that garbage on regular basis. With no end in sight for any improvement in that stellar record.
I don’t have faith in anything positive like this coming from the U.S. government anytime soon, which is why I was ruminating about an industry consortium taking the lead on it. Could even be a consortium of the smaller players who suffer disproportionately from from crushing IT and admin burdens, and don’t have the money to build full bespoke systems for themselves individually.
At a former job of mine, we were like 90% of the way there to getting everyone on board (internally and externally) for a consortium of smaller players in a particular retail healthcare space. It would have been governance by the provider entities, coordination and deployment by the megacorp that I worked for, based on the idea that small, independent entities could get the best of both worlds.
Their advantage was the authentic connection with patients that’s facilitated by individual local ownership, and the corresponding ability to manage their business in a way that’s well-tailored to that patient population. Their disadvantage was that big national players have the big pools of money and coordination to negotiate with payors, do marketing buys, manage tech platforms, etc. We - and our customer advisory board - believed those disadvantages were solvable through that consortium model.
At the time that plan fell through mostly just due to inertia…maybe now there’s an opportunity somewhere in healthcare with an entity that has natural business dealings with a large number of smaller providers, and doesn’t have an existing proprietary tech stack that it has an interest in defending?