Jon Edwards wrote: > (That's not to say that a European/Worldwide list is not valuable, just that > I was thinking of ways to help the adoption of open-source in the NHS... > which, I think, was what Douglas' original post was hinting at?)
This summarises the issue well. What we have to do is think about pulling all the disparate resources that already exist into a coherent document that looks like the kind of material that Derek Wanless (and by extension, Gordon Brown, Alan Milburn, Tony Blair) will find helpful and influential. I think the politicians and senior civil servants are aware that they can't micromanage every aspect of IT. Our task is to show them where our initiatives meet their top down strategies. > 1. It would be great if the "barriers to entry" posed by RFA accreditation > could be somehow lowered a little for open-source clinical systems. Not that > the standards should be lowered, just the cost of going through the > accreditation process! I'd be concerned about this. Politicians can't be seen to favour one supplier over another. I think anyone in that business will have to find the money, open source or not. And I'm sorry to say that all of the demos of OS practice software I have seen are frankly not competitive with currently available proprietary practice software. > 2. >> a Sourceforge-like repository of locally developed healthcare > applications; Obviously both Spirit and OIO will be valuable building blocks for any NHS initiative, but I think that, for reasons largely connected with quality assurance and ease of licensing, the NHS will want to give its imprimatur to an official distribution of its own. It should of course fund the necessary development, and release the fruits of its labours back into the free software community. Julian Todd had a vision for this at OSHCA2: http://www.carnall.demon.co.uk/oshca2/jt.htm > 3. Maybe some guidance for businesses who might want to open-source their > existing products? I'd love to see one of the smaller GP-systems suppliers > open-source their software as a way of competing against the dominance of > the few big companies. The situation is complex: Microsoft have just announced their alliance with BT, Cisco, SchlumbergerSema and others in a partnership codenamed LightBulb. Its main purpose will be to challenge the existing suppliers to the UK market, Torex, EMIS, McKesson HBOC and the like. Although there is IBM, they've made it pretty clear that their support for open source is at the level of the operating system: their profits will come from running proprietary application software on top of it. By definition OSHCA is interested in open source at this higher level, where we don't, to my knowledge, have battalions of suits pressing our case. I agree that an open source release of an already accredited GP system would be the most efficient way of getting a quick win here. Maybe if LightBulb squeezes existing systems suppliers hard enough, one (and it only takes one) will see the light. (sorry ;-) ) Ray Henry's talk at OSHCA2 documented one real life example where open sourcing an NHS-developed application proved difficult: http://www.carnall.demon.co.uk/oshca2/rh.htm He might have liked to read Sebastion Blondeel's advice on how to release free software: <http://cvs.idealx.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/documentation/publish/www/doc.pdf> (10k) had it been available to him. (published last month) Thanks for all the comments to date (Brian: that list of business case links is impressive!). I'll get to work on a draft response to share with you all. D. -- Douglas Carnall tel:+44 (0)20 7241 1255 fax:08700 557879 mob:07900 212881 http://www.carnall.org/ [EMAIL PROTECTED]
