The Geek Cure (Article by WWeek)
Thursday, August 19, 2010
By Aaron Mesh
Willamette Week
Portland has the perfect opportunity to lead open-source computing and transform American health care. Will we blow it?
The day Deborah Bryant has dreamed of for a decade has finally arrived.
Bryant is a public policy manager at Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab, and travels the country preaching the gospel of open source—the faction of computer programmers who believe the best and most inexpensive software is made by those who freely share their work.
Last month, she was in Portland—the city widely considered America’s open-source capital—to speak at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention. The convention is to these software developers what Comic-Con is to Iron Man fans. Her point at the gathering? The federal stimulus package will mean billions—yes, billions—of dollars for healthcare technology. And, she added, open-source developers are poised to seize their share. "Help us help people,” she urged her audience. "Help us save money in health care.”
But Bryant isn’t exactly ebullient. (Read more...)
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