Open Source Medicine/Intro
The medical systems now in existence are fraught with problems. The enormous amounts of data they gather remain disconnected and scattered, doctors are overwhelmed, much research (especially pharmaceutical) is done by private companies who take decades to develop drugs, and develop drugs only for diseases that afflict large numbers of wealthy people. Drug development for diseases of poverty, like leprosy, are not pursued because it is not financially feasible. Personalized drug development is not developed because it is not financially feasible. In the USA, 45000 people die annually because they lack health insurance [1].
There is a way out: open source medicine. Use modern information technology to make medical knowledge freely available and share it globally by a standardized system. Develop drugs openly, so that people can pursue the research that matters to them, rather than base it on bottom-line considerations. Organize the medical knowledge of humanity intelligently and put it at the fingertips of every doctor. Automate as much of the medical system as possible (but no more!) to take the strain off doctors.
There is already a huge amount of open-source software already available to make the management of healthcare easier — keeping patient records, processing body-imaging information etc. This needs to be integrated over time, so that, say, the medical records program can talk to the body-scanning program.
Another promising development is the use of distributed computing to store and process medical data. This allows a patient's medical history to be accessed from any hospital in the world. This is only possible with free and open-source software; if different doctors are using different private systems, their records will be incompatible, but if they are all collaborating, their records can inform one another.
Medicine is fast becoming an information science for at least three reasons: firstly, the number of research papers is growing rapidly. Secondly, it now costs only a few thousand dollars to sequence a genome, whereas the Human Genome Project in the nineties took $300 million. By about 2013, the cost of genome sequencing will make it accessible to everyone, creating a lot more clinically-relevant data. Thirdly, scanning devices are doubling in resolution every year while becoming smarter and smaller. (You can now read and diagnose an EKG using an iPhone!) We are moving into the area of information-rich, scanning-intensive medicine.
Open Clinical have stated the situation bluntly —It is now humanly impossible for unaided healthcare professionals to possess all the knowledge needed to deliver medical care with the efficacy and safety made possible by current scientific knowledge. This can only get worse in the post-genomic era. A potential solution to the knowledge crisis is the adoption of rigorous methods and technologies for knowledge management. [2]
