Open Source Health Research Plan

We’ve been thinking a lot at CureTogether about open source health research and how it can work. Our thoughts have coalesced into a plan, which I’ve written up here and summarized below. It was also listed as a featured article here and included on the Lifeboat Foundation blog.

We’d love to hear your ideas in the comments section. How do you see this working?

–

Summary of the Open Source Health Research Plan

Open source has emerged as a powerful set of principles for solving complex problems
in fields as diverse as education and physical security. With roughly 60 million
Americans suffering from a chronic health condition, traditional research progressing
slowly, and personalized medicine on the horizon, the time is right to apply open source
to health research. Advances in technology enabling cheap, massive data collection
combined with the emerging phenomena of self quantification and crowdsourcing make
this plan feasible today. We can all work together to cure disease, and hereʼs how.
.

The Elements of Open Source

The State of Health Research

The Open Source Health Research Plan

• Step 1: Define the “source”
• Step 2: Apply the elements
• Step 3: Develop a platform
• Step 4: Build community
• Step 5: Make discoveries

.
The Challenges

• Intellectual Property
• Privacy and Security
• Accuracy
• Awareness
• Institutional Resistance

.
About the Author
Acknowledgements
References
.

You can read the whole report here. Please join the discussion and leave your comments below.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.