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back to article NHS eye hospital embiggens in-house open source system

Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust has said that it has added three new modules for prescribing, operations notes and correspondence to OpenEyes, its open source e-patient record system. OpenEyes was developed by an in-house team, led by consultant surgeon and former medical director at Moorfields, Bill Aylward. He …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Need someone to install the ruddy thing?

    There's decent money to be made in consulting with and for open source based solutions. Not quite as much gouging opportunity as "traditional" closed-source specialist "service delivery" by the big software consultancies, but then you don't need to be big to handle it either. All in all a nice field leveler and honest business enabler.

    The downside, of course, is that the client must at least have some notion of what sort of question to ask, and what to do with the answers.

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Need someone to install the ruddy thing?

      "...Not quite as much gouging opportunity as "traditional" closed-source specialist "service delivery"..."

      Err? All the consultancies I've worked with do both. I don't want a consultancy who start with the premice that open/closed source is the answer, what's the question?

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      1. Anonymous Coward
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        Anonymous Coward

        Whoosh

        I think you misunderstood the point. A little.

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  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "New way of doing things" or "empire building"?

    time will tell.

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  3. Richard Jukes

    As with most things, its not really possible to write a decent application unless you know how the organisation works. Every bit of hire software I look at just isnt right, so I'll end up writing my own :-(

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  4. Ocular Sinister

    Will they share this technology with other trusts?

    Will they share this technology and their experience with other trusts? Well, its open source so the code will be available for all and sundry, but it would be nice if there was some inter-trust collaboration to share knowledge and experience.

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    1. handle
      Reply Icon

      Maybe you missed this bit

      "Aylward said that the team have collaborated with 40 clinicians from other trusts to develop and test the functionality of the modules, including cataract specialists in Fife and glaucoma specialists in Cardiff."

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  5. Dr Who

    About bloody time

    The open source model should always have been the way forward for the development of clinical systems within the NHS. The NHS as a whole has a huge amount of technical expertise including clinicians (obviously) but also information technologists. The problem is that it's locally based and spread across hundreds of institutions. Pooling those resources via a well organised open source development project has enormous power. At the very least it has to be a vast improvement on the alternative, which is to establish a central body to dictate and deliver the systems for the whole NHS as has been catastrophically demonstrated by the National Programme for IT.

    This is not a song of praise for open source in general and has nothing to do with Linux on the desktop or other such pseudo-religious issues. What I am saying is that if ever there was a perfect context for the development of an open source application, then the NHS is it.

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    1. Kevin Johnston
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      Re: About bloody time

      Too true. As you say, the NHS has a huge pool of expertise in almost every discipline going and places like Moorfields who have a very good global rep in their field can do a lot towards getting in place systems which are designed to achieve what is in reality a fairly basic need albeit with some features peculiar to their market.

      Too many of these vast-scale projects aim for world domination 'thou shalt use only this' which automatically restricts it to a small handful of suppliers who all want to shoehorn in their preferred product with minimum modification regardless of how little it fits the need and the choice comes down to which is least useless since you have to pick one of them.

      Here's hoping that this is the start of the revolution where people who know what they want and are able to build at least the basic framework get the support they need to change the concept of IT back to providing the tools to do a job rather than dictating the way a job is to be done.

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    2. The BigYin
      Reply Icon

      Re: About bloody time

      Agreed. It's not like medicine is closed source. Anyone (not just doctors) can go pretty much look-up whatever the hell they want.

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  6. The BigYin

    Excellent

    So now other eye hospitals can just grab this and use it. Heck, some parts are probably fairly generic and could get sucked into other systems. But oh no! What will all the IT suppliers do?

    Umm...coin it in I think.

    The hospitals probably don't want to run their own massive IT departments, so they will still need outside experts to install/update/code OpenEye. So they can just hire the skills as needed. The big advantage is that if on supplier turns out to be pish, they can just switch to another keeping the same code base.

    Of course, if OpenEye turns out to be sub-standard that's still a problem. But that's the current problem with closed source stuff too.

    The is exactly where F/OSS should be getting used in preference to proprietary.

    Check out openMolar - started by one dentist because they got so hacked off.

    I'm willing to bet that openMolar and OpenEye have some commonality (e.g. when is Ms. X booked in, did Mr. Y's results arrive; etc). Can you say "openNSHCore" (or similar)? I knew you could.

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    1. mhoulden
      Reply Icon
      Coat

      Re: Excellent

      Disappointing that the dentist didn't call it OpenUpSayAah. I hope the proctology dept doesn't go for a similar name or we could have Open Bowels next.

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  7. Matt Hamilton
    Thumb Up

    History of OSS at Moorfields

    Glad to see Moorfields continuing their use of OSS software. They moved to Zope for their public website about a decade ago and still using it to this day. Good to see OSS getting more recognition within actual processes within the NHS. There is quite a few case studies worldwide of using Open Source Software in this way in which one dept produces something and then others adopt it. This is really where the cost savings can be had, and you don't end up beholden to a single supplier.

    -Matt

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  8. Skoorb

    Project website

    For anybody interested, the homepage for the project is http://www.openeyes.org.uk/

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  9. Hayden Clark Silver badge
    Happy

    Best use of the money

    It says something about the grossly wasteful and grasping "big" IT suppliers that it is actually cheaper in the long run for a hospital to write it's own system.

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  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    It's PHP. What the hell were they thinking?

    0 1
  11. John Brown (no body) Silver badge
    Thumb Up

    Insourcing...

    ...is the new outsourcing.

    0 0
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