Timothy Cook

Open Source Working Group, AMIA

Open Source in Health Care
14 minutes, 6.8mb, recorded 2004-09-09
Topics: Open Source
Health care, particularly primary care, stands to gain much from adopting open source software. At Medinfo 2004, Scott Mace talked with Timothy Cook, chair of the Open Source Working Group of the American Medical Informatics Associaton (AMIA). Listen to Tim discuss the areas where open source will be adopted fastest, a recent award-willing project, open-source knowledge bases, why security and privacy concerns are red herrings, open source implementations of HL7 standards, record exchange efforts, and other interoperability concerns.

Cook's background from the mid 1970's to the mid 1990's with the U.S. Government in voice and data RF communications systems was a natural lead in to leased-line WAN / LAN computer communications systems. This experience led to involvement with connecting dissimilar data storage systems using various communications protocols across several networks, different hardware platforms and operating systems. An open source advocate since 1994, Cook became involved in health care IT in 1997 and immediately saw that open collaboration and shared development of standards and applications could lead to the solutions to untangle the communications and data storage nightmare that is health informatics today. While starting up an open source EHR project, Cook also encouraged collaboration between various projects on an international basis and became a co-founder of the Open Source Health Care Alliance (OSHCA) in Cook's focus and dedication to a better health care IT infrastructure was rewarded by him being the inaugural recipient of the Linux Medical News Open Source Achievement Award in 2001.


This free podcast is from our Opening Move series.