Thanks for your comment. I can tell from your comments that you may not have familiarity with the term, concept, and philosophy of “open source”.

Tim Ellwell, whose comments are above, is someone who gets open source as a principle but also more importantly the practical realities of taking a previously proprietary enterprise application into the open.

Ingenix is making motions to open source some of their “tools”, and the standards that the tools utilize, so that they can “move up the value chain.” This allows them to avoid spending energy on recreating the wheel (standards like evidence based medicine, outcomes measurements, quality metrics, etc) and instead focusing on the value that their technology can produce. Open Sourcing these tools has nothing to do with the “information” per se (data that Ingenix has), but rather sharing a common toolset that can be shared with multiple players to create new types of data.

By the way, I have done my homework, including direct communications with their top leadership. Ingenix has been forth right about the stage they are in, and that their plans are being vigorously discussed internally. I will look forward to some announcements from them over the coming weeks and months ahead.

Also, I am confident that if Ingenix follows through with their statements, it will be a watershed event in health care information technology.

Borrowing a chapter from Kubler-Ross (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%BCbler-Ross_model) five stages of grief, I believe most large proprietary companies are in the Denial and Anger stages relative to Open Source. Open Source is viewed as a threat to them and they continue to bury their heads in the sand. It will only be after they lose their market that they’ll wake up.

Directional statements like the one we saw from Ingenix is actually a very positive sign as the patient is moving toward real acceptance. Given the fact that we have seen no actual code release from Ingenix, I’d place them in the ‘Bargaining’ stage. I expect they are trying to figure it out but are being transparent about their interest.

Ingenix is a great company with great technology and I am encouraged by their statement and I hope they make good on their promise.

Having gone through the process of evaluating an existing product and performing the required due diligence and understanding what is actually useful to an open source community and agreeing on the appropriate FOSS License does not happen quickly but it is needed in order to get to the actual “Acceptance’ stage.

With blogs like this, Ingenix might move more quickly toward the Depression stage which is needed to achieve true Acceptance. If they want help in open sourcing their products, I’m sure there are many of us who would be happy to advise.

As a company interested in creating open source interoperability solutions in support of health information exchanges (HIE), Misys welcomes Ingenix to the party. It’s beginning to get interesting.

Tim Elwell

I am not a religious advocate of open source, as I believe that each company can and should create their own “secret sauce” to allows them to create a different value proposition than the competition; however, I absolutely believe that common infrastructure concepts should be open, transparent, and shared in a way in which collaboration can happen.

Ingenix’s comments are interesting; because they are willing to give away some of their formerly proprietary information/tools in order to enhance collaboration because they are already moving up the value chain (see my previous posts).

* Open standards are a must
* Open communications improves internal communication (business intelligence & logistics) and external communication (to customers, MD, family, …), with no restraints to the number of users
* Open source greatly improves on user-friendlyness (less bloat & clutter, more flexible, rapid development, cutting edge techniques to make it look GREAT, no restraints for creativity and completely cross-platform)
* Open source gives the opportunity to create more value & improved quality

Resistance is egocentric and can’t guarantee added value, even on relatively short term