Open source in the NHS

A little while back I asked all the councils in Wales how much they spent on Open Data. Open data is information that it produced by the government and then given out to the world to use with as they will.  It has been very useful in order to develop systems and expand them.  So what about the NHS?  Has that done anything to improve the use of open data?

This is something that Ben Seawell investigated for his Masters Degree. The questions that he asks is:

1. Does your organisation have an Open Source Strategy?

2. What Software and Technologies did you choose for your Integrated Digital Care Technology Fund funded projects?

3. Is the software and technology you have used for your project an Open Source Product?

4. Does the software / technology interface with another system? If so is the interface based on Open Standards / Open APIs?

These are pretty good questions and do give us a lot of information on what they are doing to promote open data, and open sources material as possible.

The answers were a little more interesting than I realised. A lot of the different NHS trusts basically said that they did not do that much for open data \ open sources (which is fair enough to an extent), but it was the reasons for the lack of open source which was interesting.

First off the NHS is a vast and complex beast.  It has so many departments and different areas to it that it is unreal. To get all of these departments working together to make a single document. Not only that it would then need to have a number of different data protection measures which would hold this up for years.

How would you develop open sources programmes for the population too?  This was a point that was investigated by a number of the responses (Not using those words). Most hospitals could do something about patients attending but after that there is nothing really that they could do.

I loved this request because it showed that there is some other people who are interesting in open data.  There are other people who are interested in the use of open sources software being developed by the government (See previous posts such as here, here and here).  It also shows how complex a topic this is.  For something such as health, it is very personal to an individual and can be very sensitive.  Open data for public would be a nightmare in this instance. The best that we could hope for would be some development of open source software, that way we could give back to the NHS as well as take from it.