Open Source Medicine Puts Health Above Profits

There is an open source revolution brewing in health care where noble motivations prevail over profit.

Open source is powering a revolution in medicine and health care in multiple ways. Open source software and methods make large-scale collaborative research projects feasible, multiplying the brainpower applied to a project, expanding the data pool, and creating transparency and accountability. This is a huge win for the advancement of new treatments and cures, and cutting the costs of research. Open source practice and records software cut the costs of running medical practices, and puts practitioners in charge instead of software vendors.

This is a marked contrast to the traditional secretive, highly-competitive methods of research and medical product development. It's expensive to bring new drugs and devices to market. Research and testing can take years, and FDA approval is expensive, bureaucratic, and time-consuming. But keeping everything in-house promises big profits for the winners. So the old ways persist, but at a high cost to people who can't afford expensive patented treatments, in side effects and defects that are not discovered until after a new medicine or device is released into the market, and in entire categories of diseases that are not studied because the profit potential isn't big enough...