Clinician, researcher, and patients working together: progress aired at Indivo conference

While thousands of health care professionals were flocking to the BIO International Convention this week, I spent Monday in a small library at the Harvard Medical School listening to a discussion of the Indivo patient health record and related open source projects with about 80 intensely committed followers. Lead Indivo architect Daniel Haas, whom I interviewed a year ago, succeeded in getting the historical 2.0 release of Indivo out on the day of the conference. This article explains the significance of the release in the health care field and the promise of the work being done at Harvard Medical School and its collaborators.

Although still at the early adoption stages, Indivo and the related SMART and i2b2 projects merit attention and have received impressive backing. The Office of the National Coordinator funded SMART, and NIH funded i2b2. National Coordinator Farzad Mostashari was scheduled to attend Monday's conference (although he ended up having to speak over a video hookup). Indivo inspired both Microsoft HealthVault and Google Health, and a good deal of its code underlies HealthVault. Australia has taken a nationwide PHR initiative inspired by Indivo. A Partners HealthCare representative spoke at the conference, as did someone from the MIT Media Lab. Clayton M. Christensen et al. cited Indivo as a good model in The Innovator's Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care. Let's take a look at what makes the combination so powerful...