From Healthcare IT News:
The Agency for Health Research and Quality and the Social Security Administration here on Monday announced plans for kicking off challenges to identify technologies that solve specific problems.
SSA Executive Director of Health IT Jude Soundararajan said here at the White House Blue Button 2.0 Developer Conference that in September SSA will launch a GitHub site with its use case for disabilities. And he said that developer contests will follow.
"We get tons of faxes, tons of unstructured data we want to analyze. Look for challenges around that and look for challenges around FHIR for our use case," Soundararajan said. "I'm looking forward to working with the developer community." ...Can someone explain this one to me?
4 comments:
GitHub is sort of like Wikipedia, except SSA would have far more control over publication. Here's how I see this plan working out (if it is actually implemented):
Step 1: SSA announces they are looking for developers to develop a program which can sort through medical records (chronological order, types of records, etc.) by capturing "FHIR" (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) which is a new data format some healthcare providers are using which allows consistent tracking of clinical data across multiple providers.
Step 2: Multiple developers submit their programs to SSA through GitHub and SSA selects which developers' submission(s) best fit their needs (aka "use case").
Step 3: SSA releases the portions of the developers work which are sufficient, while directing developers to resubmit the work which was found insufficient.
Step 4: Repeat steps 2 and 3 until product is finished.
It sounds sort of like a grant application process except the process does not necessarily close. Also, developers can be working at different stages, or sometimes even the same stage, at the same time with the work being uploaded upon completion of the developer's particular portion. That way, a user interface specialist can be working on art, sound, etc., a data specialist could be planning how best FHIR could be received and stored, and at the same time a networking expert could be designing how the program will interface with ERE.
There is no guarantee this plan will be more successful than the standard software development contracting SSA has previously done, but I do not believe it will be worse. It would certainly be more competitive.
The use of the word contests is the big clue here.
SSA needs software for some specific purposes. They are going to stake a reward of some amount for developing code that successfully addresses the problem.
They will post their need and sample data and software developers will (hopefully) work on the project trying to win some or all of the prize money.
SSA gets the code submitted.
GitHub Inc. is a web-based hosting service for version control using Git. It is mostly used for computer code. It offers all of the distributed version control and source code management functionality of Git as well as adding its own features.
"GitHub is a development platform inspired by the way you work. From open source to business, you can host and review code, manage projects, and build software alongside 30 million developers."
So they will put their use cases, that is, the problems that they are trying to solve out there and use this managed platform to see if the developer community, whether incentivized by contests, prizes or something else or "open source" (done for the fun of the challenge). Github lets oters see what is being done and build upon that earlier work.
Jude is a smart guy. Tapping into developers via this route is kind of a variation of using the private developers recruited into government service that occurred with Obama administration, only these wouldn't be government employees or contractors. Interesting what the concept is for ownership, reuse and payment.
Any further info about this plan now 3 years old?
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