Collaboration, Open Source-Style?

HealthCamp SFBay

Last week, I was fortunate enough to attend two great health care conferences: HealthCamp SFBay and Health 2.0. A number of people have asked me variations of the same question. What did you learn? What was the best part? What was the neatest thing you saw?

Alexandra Carmichael presenting at Health 2.0

I learned about the power of patient collaboration to conduct open source health research. Alexandra Carmichael, co-founder of CureTogether (pictured above), is a few steps ahead of me in articulating what open source means in terms of community collaboration:

Open source is a production model that enables communities of people with common interests to work together productively with minimal centralized control. Fundamental elements of an open source approach include:

• “source” (goods, ideas, code) that is accessible to everyone
• openness
• collaboration and community
• recognition for contributions
• transparency
• democratization of the tools necessary to contribute

Open source-style approaches to solving problems involve sharing a common pool of resources and knowledge for the greater good. It is up to each 'stakeholder' to decide what, when, and how to contribute. Open source communities are surprisingly efficient and structured given their lack of obvious, concrete organization.

I recently finished reading a book Alexandra mentions, The Cathedral and The Bazaar. The book describes the underlying assumptions and rules that drive open source communities. This includes individual roles and responsibilities, as well as the ways in which individual intellectual property are respected and supported.

I don't know if the Health 2.0 Accelerators think of themselves as an open source-style community, but the more I learn about their great work, the more I see the parallels. Chris McIntyre of change:healthcare shared a video of the Health 2.0 Accelerators presentation (below, 33 minute video).

This demo shows the innovation and integration that can happen when modern health companies decide they want to get together to help the patient. -Chris McIntyre

Health 2.0 Accelerator Demo (October 2009) from chris mcintyre on Vimeo.

About the Health 2.0 Accelerators:

Advancing consumer-centric health care by driving integration of technology and the consumer experience across a network of new and established technology companies and health care organizations.

This kind of collaboration and cooperation (yes, you can share knowledge and resources while maintaining full ownership of your own work) will help health care make the quantum leap it needs to make to get caught up to other industries. Who knows, maybe one day collaboration and innovation in health care will be the norm.