“Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
- Lewis Carroll
So, the first half of November has felt a lot like before breakfast at Lewis Carroll’s house. We could have universal health care by next year. Genes now account for a very small part of the human genome, a contrary view to what scientists previously thought. And yes, we have elected our very first African-American President.
President-Elect Obama is dedicating part of his administration to health care – this is no surprise (every President does) – and is bringing with him a wave of optimism, which is apparently changing the face of health care even before he enters office. As Edward Kennedy writes in the Nov. 9th Washington Post article entitled “Health Care Can’t Wait”:
Another good omen occurred in 2006 in Massachusetts, when businesses and workers, insurance companies and patients, Democrats and Republicans came together on a practical solution for the state. Since that solution was enacted, Massachusetts has expanded coverage to more than three-quarters of the state’s uninsured; the state now has far and away the nation’s lowest proportion of medically uninsured people. As a result of the large increase in enrollment, insurance premiums have dropped significantly. ….
President-elect Barack Obama has issued a clarion call for action on health care. His practical and thoughtful proposals draw from our Massachusetts experience and add important measures to improve quality and reduce costs. His plan includes crucial investments in modernizing the use of information technology in health care. He calls for a new emphasis on prevention and wellness, because the best way to treat a disease is to prevent it from striking.
Those of us who are working on OpenClinica look forward to the change ahead and its possible implications for Health IT. Akaza Research is currently working on the next release, which will include the latest in open-source Java frameworks, Hibernate and Spring. We are working on new ways to incorporate OpenClinica into other applications and frameworks, through an API. You can read more about our plans in the wiki roadmap, posted here.
In short, we are really amazed at what we’ve accomplished this month. Let’s keep the momentum rolling.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: Edward Kennedy, healtcare, Health IT, Hibernate, Lewis Carroll, Obama, OpenClinica, Spring, universal health care | Leave a Comment »
Why Pharmaceutical Companies Now Have a Reason to Choose Open Source
On October 27th, Bio-IT World published an article on the newly released OpenClinica 2.5. In a somewhat bold statement the article’s author stated that “Akaza Research has given pharmaceutical companies reason to take heed of the open source movement.” Akaza Research, of course, is the primary commercial force behind OpenClinica, the world’s most popular open source electronic data capture software.
What the author fails to explain, in my opinion, is why this is the case. For instance, I personally do not believe that the larger pharmaceutical companies would choose an open source EDC system for open source’s sake. In other words, the cost and flexibility benefits of open source, while significant, may not offer the same degree of value to Big Pharma as it would to myriad smaller companies. The industry’s largest firms have the financial resources and technical expertise to obtain and utilize essentially any solution in the marketplace and will therefore need a stronger motivation in order to move to open source. And I think that this motivation has to come from the quality of the technology and the overall solution through which it is implemented.
I do not believe OpenClinica would be making such a strong impact in such a short period of time if it weren’t for the robust open source community behind it. It is this community that provides fundamental value to the software. The decentralized efforts of users around the globe fuel OpenClinica’s evolution in a way that is both rapid and driven by true market demand from the trenches. The result is a product containing features that real-world users want and that work in the way these real world users want them to.
The open source community also helps to self-police the quality of OpenClinica distributions. There is a diverse group of users and developers who experiment with beta releases and continuously scour the system source code. From their unbridled vantage points within the community, these people report issues in a frank, public, and uncompromising manner. This transparency and candid public discourse about the software makes it difficult, if not impossible, to cut corners or sweep defects under the rug.
In a sense, with proprietary software you never really know what you’re getting. With open source software you know it all—both the good and the bad. It is the open source community that drives OpenClinica’s success, and this, in my opinion, is why pharmaceutical companies have reason to take heed of OpenClinica.
Filed under: Industry Commentary | Tagged: Akaza Research, Bio-IT, EDC, electronic data capture, open source, OpenClinica, pharma, pharmaceutical companies, quality | Leave a Comment »