EHI Interview: Tony Shannon

Open source software may not be cheaper or easier, but it’s a whole lot more collaborative says one of the participants in the skunkworks at EHI Live 2011.

Open source software does not have much of a pedigree in the NHS. It’s not that it has been tried and it has failed; it’s not been tried.

So says Tony Shannon, emergency medicine consultant at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, and an open source advocate and activist for more than ten years. He will be joining the open source skunkworks at EHI Live 2011 in November to talk about why this needs to change.

Standards, code, code, standards

Dr Shannon tracks his journey towards open source evangelism back to 2004 when he joined NHS Connecting for Health as a clinical lead. “The assumption was that the market combined with standards would be enough to achieve the connected service we needed,” he says.