October 16th, 2008
Bruce Perens gives doctors a present
Bruce Perens has a case study out today about his work bringing open standards to the casino industry.
While I spent many happy Comdexes tracking the automation of that industry, I was far more interested in the road map he offered, collectively defining the terms and requirements of true open standards.
It is, like everything else Bruce does, deceptively simple. And it has enormous relevance to the medical industry.
Medical computing, on all levels, is undergoing enormous pressure to embrace open standards. All sorts of committees and groups have been formed, claiming to stand for them.
But computing is just the tip of this iceberg. There are also hundreds of enormous sub-markets, not just radiology but specific systems for, say, eyes.
Each one of these can, if not really committed to open standards, screw up the attempt of a specialty practice to automate.
Buy a new eye scanner that doesn’t interact with your EMR system and you’ve got either a paperweight or a dead system. With patients’ sight at stake, you’re more likely to have a dead system than a paperweight.
In this way the equipment tail wags the computing dog.
It’s as if each practice had a million dollar printer, whose maker fears he is selling thousand dollar printers under open standards, and who thus has every reason to say yes but mean no.
Many of the large companies populating the HIMSS show floor, like GE and Siemens, are in this position. Even building an interoperability roadmap is a game of herding cats.
Perens’ simple standards can do a lot to herd those cats. Like most great inventors he cuts through the complexity to simple ideas, simple goals you either meet or don’t if you want to claim you’re on the open standard train.
The whole medical industry needs to examine his roadmap closely. Because this is the way to go, if you really want open standards.
And if you say you do but don’t we should, as John McCain says, know your name.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist since 1978, and has covered technology since 1982. He launched the Interactive Age Daily, the first daily coverage of the Internet to launch with a magazine, in September 1994. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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