The Radical Potential Of Open Source Programming In Healthcare

Open source technology could have big implications pertaining to personalized data, specifically EHRs

Everyone wants personalized healthcare. From the moment they enter their primary care clinic they have certain expectations that they want met in regards to their personalized medical care. Most physicians are adopting a form of electronic healthcare, and patient records are being converted to a digital format. But electronic health records pose interesting problems related to sorting through vast amounts of patient data. This is where open source programming languages come in, and they have the ability to radically change the medical landscape.

So why aren’t EHRs receiving the same care that patients expect from their doctor? There are a variety of answers, but primarily it comes down to how the software interprets certain types of data within each record. There are a variety of software languages designed to calculate and sort through large amounts of data that have been out for years, and one of the most prominent language is referred to as “R”.

According to r-project.org “R is an integrated suite of software facilities for data manipulation, calculation, and graphical display.” Essentially this programming language has been built from the ground up to handle large statistical types of data. Not only can R handle these large data sets, but it has the ability to be tailored to an individual patient or physician if needed. There are a variety of other languages focused on interpreting this type of data, but other languages don’t have the ability to handle it as well as R does...