Roger A. Maduro
Roger A. Maduro is the founder, publisher, and editor-in-chief of Open Health News, the leading news site focused on open source in medicine and health. The mission of Open Health News is to provide a voice to open health projects, organizations, and companies, to communicate their work to health IT adopters, policymakers and other members of the community. By combining original content together with curated content and landing pages for community resources, Open Health News has become a unique website site that attracts readers doing serious research on health IT solutions. The site receives over 30,000 unique visitors per month and over 350,000 page views.
Roger discovered the power of open source solutions while working for one of the founders of Winstar Telecommunications, which at one point became the largest Local Exchange Carrier (LEC) in the United States. Roger started working for Winstar in 1996 when it had only a couple of dozen employees. In 1997 Roger put together a systems architecture plan for the company’s IT infrastructure to run on open systems and open source solutions. At the time there was no model to follow, so he had to assemble a team of early Linux enthusiasts, research, build, test, and deploy the open source solutions. As a result of this work, Winstar became one of the leading open source enterprise adopters by 1999.
The efforts of his team at Winstar were so successful that Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Sun Microsystems loaned nearly $10 million worth of equipment for the team to test in their labs. By the Spring of 2000, ten Winstar offices around the world, from its Herndon, VA offices to offices in Amsterdam and Hong Kong, were running on a Linux-based open source IT, Web, and networking infrastructure. The platform demonstrated to be technologically superior, more capable, reliable, and secure than Microsoft Windows for less than a tenth of the cost, saving the company $28 million a year.
Roger shifted his focus to open source solutions in the healthcare industry in 2001 leveraging all the knowledge acquired during the pioneering work at Winstar. As a consultant he did extensive work for the US Department of Veterans Affairs between 2002 and 2004. Roger was part of a team that researched and documented all of the major open source applications in the healthcare industry as well as health IT applications developed by the Federal government and State agencies. The team leveraged all their research to write an extensive and detailed white paper laying out an open source strategy for the VA and its electronic health record system, VistA. Roger then worked as a consultant with several health IT companies helping them develop open source strategies, including open source business models. Roger was a co-founder and board member of the VistA Software Alliance (VSA), and also member of the Board of Stewards of Open Health Tools (OHT), as well as the chair of its legal committee. He is a regular speaker at open source conferences.