There have been several announcements from NHS England / HSCIC in support of open source solutions for NHS organisations. These announcements have spawned much discussion and debate - on EHI/HSJ/NHSHackday sites and at EHILive - which ranges in style and content from Chicken Licken to Richard Stallman.
In a short series of blogs I’m planning to post I’m going to look at these announcements and the reaction from a few different perspectives. In this post I’m looking at where the direction for such support from NHS England is coming from and what ‘support’ for open source solutions might actually mean.
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Some notes taken on observing people the other side of the pond dissecting a major Govt IT project to deliver a political objective.
Would this project have benefited from Opensorcery? If PPACA wasn’t communist enough! Writing in Bloomberg Businessweek, Paul Ford explains that the debacle known as healthcare.gov makes clear that it is time for government to change the way it delivers IT: embrace the open source approach to software development that has revolutionized the technology industry. Well, openness worked before for Obama e.g. with the IT spending dashboard (code here) but that was in the first years of the first term. You can do anything in that period of a presidency.
Looking at the Congressional hearing (which makes our PAC look rather tame on NPfIT) as reported by Grauniad two lessons stand out for me. One technical, the other political.
From a technical perspective the importance of proving an end-to-end test FIRST and not two weeks prior to a go-live is crucial. This is the approach we are taking with Wardware and the other projects we are working on. Can we pass a simple message through the components of the stack? No. Fix it. And now? Yes. Great! Build on and test for regressions.
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Here is a piece co-authored by me published in the Guardian Healthcare Network on open source in the NHS.
In my view the NHS would benefit greatly from greater use of open source, standards and data, according to the creators of the award-winning Open Me project:
“The NHS technology environment could be described as a giant hairball – a Gordian knot of past policies, established practices, new initiatives and government objectives and an ever changing landscape of opportunity from new technology....