How Open Source Technology is Transforming Healthcare and Biomedicine. Article by Limor Wainstein

Overview

Underpinning the operational efficiency and financial sustainability of any healthcare organization is an IT infrastructure composed of hardware and software that help to provide a variety of important functions. Such functions range from administrative databases to clinical decision support systems to medical research.

Traditionally, the hardware and software that constitute a healthcare organization’s IT infrastructure are closed-source, proprietary systems that are expensive to acquire. This reliance on proprietary hardware and software impacts both patient access to the best possible services and the overall financial viability of healthcare organizations.

Open source software and open hardware are growing in influence across healthcare as low-cost alternatives to proprietary solutions. In biomedicine, for example, the Open BioMedical Initiative (OBM) is a non-profit initiative that promotes increased access to and distribution of biomedical technologies through the open source development of software and the production of open hardware.

The nature of open source software is such that its original source code is freely available and modifiable. Similarly, for open hardware, the design details for these devices are made open to the public and thus they can be re-created at a low cost. Proponents of open source argue that there is an ethical duty to openly share these types of technologies throughout medicine in order for patients to receive maximum benefits.

Open Source Licensing

While open source has been championed for promoting free access to and redistribution of high-quality software components and hardware designs, there are some important licensing challenges to bear in mind.

There are actually several types of open source licenses, and some are more restrictive than others in terms of how you use the underlying code or designs. The GPL license, for example, is a type of open source license that stipulates for any application containing GPL-licensed code, even if such code is just a few lines long, the entire application must be released under the same GPL license.

Non-compliance with open source licenses can lead to a slew of litigation issues down the line, so it is imperative for healthcare organizations to bear the challenges of open source license compliance in mind and properly manage their licenses if they decide to adopt open source.

UPF Open Science Initiative

The UPF open science initiative advocates the use of open source software models, and the university promotes access to the various tools developed, including image processing tools and the Rocket platform.

Rocket is a cloud-based ecosystem that enables clinicians to store, visualize, collaborate on, and process different types of clinical data, such as biomedical imagery and ECG data. Rocket is open source code and it is available at the BCN MedTech Github repository. 

5 Open Source Use Cases in Healthcare/Biomedicine

Securing Patient Data

https://opensource.com/article/18/8/foss-hippa-healthcare-open-source-tools

Helathcare organizations face real challenges in ensuring they protect patients’ Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and personal health information (PHI) from fraud and theft. The responsibility to protect such information, regardless of its format, is outlined in the HIPAA regulations.

Patient data is increasingly is collected, transferred, and stored in digital format within a healthcare organization’s IT infrastructure. A wealth of open source tools can be used to secure this patient data, both when it’s in transit and when it is at rest.

GNU Privacy Guard, for example, securely encrypts files in transit. Other open source security and medical record management tools, such as ClearHealth, pyrcrypto, and FreeMED can be further used to secure patient data while achieving HIPAA compliance.

Powering Maternal Health Programs In Developing Nations

Maternal deaths have markedly declined worldwide since 1990, however, UNICEF data shows that two thirds of all maternal deaths per year worldwide occur in sub-Saharan Africa. To begin to address this issue the Praekelt Foundation, which is a non-profit organization, has driven innovation to improve maternal health programs in sub-Saharan areas using a range of open source libraries, tools, and frameworks. The result is national-scale, maternal health programs in South Africa, Nigeria, and Uganda that deliver potentially life-saving information to expecting women and mothers via text messaging.

Open source tools used for building the required IT infrastructure for these programs include Twisted (an event-driven networking engine), Apache Mesos (computer cluster management), and Django (a web framework).

Preparation For Orthopedic Surgery

For orthopedic surgeons, surgical preparation is challenging due to an inability to see the parts of the patient’s musculoskeletal systems that need to be worked on in advance of surgery.

Imaging techniques such as CT and X-ray can help reduce the guesswork, however, the ingenuity of 3D printing combined with the Blender open source 3D creation suite are driving even better preparation for these procedures by enabling surgeons to use CT image data, convert it into 3D mesh data, and build precise 3D bone models to aid surgical procedures.

Text Analytics For Biomedical Documents

A 2013 paper, published in the PLOS computational biology journal, goes into detail about the use of the GATE an open source text mining/analytics software for getting more value out of biomedical documents.

Among the example uses of text analytics/text mining tools are:

●            The ability to leverage information from genome-wide association studies to discover cancer mutation associations.

●            Analyzing medical records to improve the statistical power of treatment/outcome models among psychiatry patients.

Biomedical Research As A Service

BRISSKit is a cloud-based platform comprised of a suite of open source applications that enable biomedical researchers to securely manage and combine datasets, and manage their studies. Researchers can upload, manage, combine and collaborate on data in a secure infrastructure without the high cost of commercial procurement of such an environment.

Researchers can export data to analysis software such as R, and because the platform contains open source components, research groups can modify the tools to suit their needs.

Healthcare Technology Predictions Going Forward

Increased use of open source isn’t the only emerging trend shaping the digital transformation in healthcare. Here are some healthcare technology predictions going forward into 2019:

●            More widespread use of IoT-enabled medical devices, equipped with sensors that can monitor their usage and linked to data analytics engines that can predict medical equipment failures. 

●            Improvements in artificial intelligence technologies will drive the use of robots in large hospitals to automate tedious, repeatable tasks.

●            Use of blockchain technology to improve information privacy and solidify the integrity of medical records.

●            Increased mobile engagement between healthcare providers and patients through the use of mobile telemedicine apps.