Four Reasons Why Open Source and the Internet Must Play a Role in Medicine

24 Jun 2008

CIO John Halamka explained lessons that hospitals and healthcare can learn from open source initiatives, including why online medical records can ensure a better healthcare community.

June 23, 2008 — CIO — It would be nice if medical professionals never lost patient information. But unfortunately, doctors and other healthcare specialists are only human. And the running cliché that doctors’ handwriting is hard to read is often repeated for a reason. During his presentation at the Red Hat Summit in Boston, Dr. John Halamka, CIO of Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, discussed four key reasons why medical records should be stored online. Storage, compliance, patient access and community are among the (supremely productive) Halamka’s supporting reasons for his claim that online medical records will ensure a national standard of healthcare.

Privacy issues are likely to arise, he admitted, but they can be worked out, and the benefit of better organization of our medical records would be phenomenal. “Open and transparent is good,” Halamka explained to this open-source-centric audience. “Proprietary is bad.”