Mitch Amiano wrote:
There exists a general market (and a size-able one at that) for
content management systems which do not deal with code "source as
lines of text" as it were, but rather as networks of elements inserted
as XML. The XML provides tree structures through various interfaces,
mostly but not only document editing interfaces. A quick look at
http://xml.coverpages.org/healthcare.html shows a plethora of activity
in this area.
I agree about that market and thank you for the link to what looks a
useful resource.
The value to the user, if I can read into Thomas' response, is the
ability to use the system to query and retrieve on the basis of the
structures, not just to store and seal it.
That's an example of a benefit to the user. Other benefits of an
XML-based format include: exchange formats "for free", directly
executable data type (aka schema) definitions (also in XML), generic
stores and processors, etc. I realize that that list starts to sound
more like "benefits to the programmer" rather than "benefits to the
user" so, another way to say it is that XML-based approaches give
customers a lot of liberty to invent new database structures because,
from just a definition of the new structure, the customer can get a
working database, working exchange format, and to some extent a working
UI pretty much "for free".
The medical record standardization efforts you link to above are a good
example: domain experts in medicine concentrate on applying their
knowledge to things like translating a paper Continuity of Care form
into an XML type. Increasingly, we should expect the results of such
efforts to be more and more "directly executable" -- those guys are
doing the heavy lifting of writing entirely new applications.
Doesn't a HIPAA compliant system also have to restrict access on the
basis of roles and privileges? So you'll need some sort of access
control lists or other security controls to even get in the door.
It's even worse than that. To really get anywhere you not only access
controls based on roles and privileges, but you need to innovate a
little bit about how to implement those. The problem is that, as an
industry, health care needs to learn to maintain widely distributed,
portable records. Yet, during transport from one end-use to another,
we should expect this data to pass through plenty of untrusted
processes. Therefore, I predict (not very boldly -- it's obvious),
that standards for encrypting XML content, standards for signing XML
content, standards for distributed management of "identity", and
standards for managing public cryptography keys are going to become very
important in the near future.
One last comment - where's the money for it going to come from?
Are you asking me or Patrick?
Health records are not my primary focus -- I'm aiming for a bigger
target with health records as a potentially tasty application. I'm
doing "lower level" work that "enables" stuff like health record
applications.
My plan, such as it is, is to try to make money "on the margins" of a
distributed, anarchic build-out of an important new open source
technology. Right now, the work I'm doing is an investment being made
by fiance and I -- I leverage some of this work for my part-time day job
and we invest some of our household income in my spending plenty of
additional time on this "practical research". I think that when I
"release early" the open source results, astute people in the open
source community will likely want to use the code, probably fork it and
improve it on their own, turn into direct-to-customer products of their
own, etc. By making money "on the margins" I mean that I intend to
charge small amounts for the download of some (GPLv3) components, charge
for documentation downloads, charge for a la carte consultations,
etc. That's chump change per transaction but, for a family business,
chump change can quickly add up. Of course, I'll also keep my eyes
open for unique direct-to-customer niches that, by luck, I'm the best
positioned to pounce on, build some equity, sell a company (or just
operate one), and "win big".
This being open source, the "big" investment building out this new
technology is likely to occur (if it does at all, knock on wood), in a
distributed, incremental way. My job as an open source researcher is
basically just to create the "frame" -- to create the new market for
that incremental, distributed investment by "shaping" the technology the
right way.
-t
_______________________________________________
Gnu-arch-users mailing list
Gnu-arch-users@gnu.org
http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-arch-users
GNU arch home page:
http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/gnu-arch/
