Today in healthcare, platforms are understood mostly as “technology”. That’s not wrong, but it’s limiting. We want to offer you a more expansive view of platforms, and in turn, understand platforms as being more than just technology. This post is the third in our series on The New Rules of Healthcare Platforms. In this essay, we will: Explain why platform business models are NOT new; Share a survey of health plan execs that documents a view of platforms as “technology”; Explain how network effects are the North Star of platform business models and strategy; Expand your view of platforms beyond just “technology.”
Feature Articles
The Cyber Resilience Act Introduces Uncertainty And Risk Leaving Open Source Projects
By Simon Phipps | May 11, 2023
What might happen if the uncertainty persists around who is held responsible under the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA)? The global Open Source community is averse to legal risks and generally lacks access to counsel, so it’s very possible offers of source code will simply be withdrawn rather than seeking to resolve the uncertainty. The CRA rightly addresses the need for commercial suppliers to protect their customers from exploits and cyber attacks. But legislators have exposed the open development of software itself to the regulations rather than just the for-profit use of Open Source artifacts in the marketplace. They are incorrectly assuming that Dirk Riehle’s terminology calling single-company projects “commercial Open Source” means it’s possible to use the “commerciality” of an application to distinguish single-company activity from community projects, and by using the concepts of proprietary software to then define boundaries.
ASTHO Releases Two New Reports On IIS
By Noam H. Arzt, Ph.D. | May 10, 2023
In March 2023 the Association of State and Territorial Health Officers (ASTHO) released two environmental scans related to public health data and systems funded by a grant from ONC. The first report, Immunization Information Systems, and Health Information Exchanges: An Environmental Scan of Factors Influencing Data Sharing and Opportunities to Advance Population Health, provides a review of the state of both IIS and HIEs – as well as their points of intersection and support – especially as they were affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. ASTHO used a mixture of secondary source review (including our white paper on this topic from nearly ten years ago) and current interviews and focus groups to inform us about this complex and fluid topic.
3 Key Open Source Challenges in Developing Countries
By Ahmed Sobeh | April 27, 2023
When I go back home and talk to people in the tech industry, or any other industry for that matter, about what I do and the topics I'm involved in daily, I'm usually met with bemusement at the idea of an Open Source Programs Office (OSPO). The concept of a company contributing to an open source project without obvious immediate financial benefit can be culturally strange to understand or explain. As someone born and raised in a country that has been trying to develop for quite some time, I understand and relate to that. There was a point in time when my only understanding of open source was that it was software that I could use without paying and without needing to wait for a specific issue or additional feature to be released. I could just do whatever I needed myself, locally. Open source faces many struggles in developing countries that make how it's perceived and its associations inaccurate and out of touch. I will discuss these struggles in this article.
A Whirlwind Tour Of All The Connected Sites That Form The World Of Open Source Social Networks
By Bob Murphy | March 21, 2023
People want to communicate over the internet as easily as they do in real life, with similar protections but, potentially, farther reach. In other words, people want to be able to chat with a group of other people who aren't physically in the same location, and still maintain some control over who claims ownership of the conversation. In today's world, of course, a lot of companies have a lot to say about who owns the data you send back and forth over the world wide web. Most companies seem to feel they have the right to govern the way you communicate, how many people your message reaches, and so on. Open source, luckily, doesn't need to own your social life, and so appropriately it's open source developers who are delivering a social network that belongs, first and foremost, to you.
New Study Shows Patients Prefer Immediate Access to Test Results and have Unmet Information Needs
By Jordan Everson | March 20, 2023
A recent study of 8,000 patients that accessed their test results via an online patient portal found that more than 95% wanted to continue to immediately receive test results through their portal. That percentage stayed at 95% when focused on patients with non-normal results. These findings come amid concerns that the immediate release of test results could lead to patient distress when patients access test results before their physicians could contact them and help to interpret those results...since the ONC information blocking regulations became applicable to health care providers on April 5, 2021, a patient may be able to access test results in parallel to those results’ availability to the ordering clinician.
Let's Do Public Health Better
By Kim Bellard | February 27, 2023
Eric Reinhart, who describes himself as “a political anthropologist, psychoanalyst, and physician,” has had a busy month. He started with an essay in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) about “reconstructive justice,” then an op-ed in The New York Times on how our health care system is demoralizing the physicians who work in it, and then the two that caught my attention: companion pieces in The Nation and Stat News about reforming our public health “system” from a physician-driven one to a true community health one. He's preaching to my choir. I wrote almost five years ago: “We need to stop viewing public health as a boring, not glamorous, small part of our healthcare system, but, rather, as the bedrock of it, and of our health.” Dr. Reinhart pulls no punches about our public health system(s), or the people who lead them...
How Upstream Contributions Power Scientific Research
By Cara Delia, Leslie Hawthorn, and Jose Castillo Lema | February 3, 2023
Just as with software development, research under Horizon Europe promotes the adoption of sharing research outputs as early and widely as possible to citizen science, developing new indicators for evaluation research, and rewarding researchers. Horizon Europe emphasizes open science and open source technology. The program evolved from Horizon 2020, which provided financial support for research projects that promoted industrial competitiveness, advanced scientific excellence, or solved social challenges through the process of "open science." Open science is an approach to the scientific process based on open cooperative work, tools, and diffusing knowledge found in the Horizon Europe Regulation and Model Grant Agreement. This open science approach aligns with open source principles that provide a structure for such cooperation.
Open Source Software Is Transforming Healthcare
By Jimmy Ahern | January 12, 2023
In the summer of 2022, the UK government and NHS England published its Open Source Policy, stating that open source technology is: Particularly suitable for use within the healthcare industry where, through active collaboration between IT suppliers and user/clinicians communities, solutions can be honed to maximise benefits to delivery of health and social care. The public statement by NHS England is just the latest development in a broader trend: The wholehearted embrace of open source software by the healthcare sector. And no wonder; open source presents myriad opportunities for this most complex of industries, with potential solutions across various sub-sectors. Yes, open source is now powering everything from medical wearables to healthcare human resource management.
Some Barriers and Challenges to the CDC's Data Modernization Initiative
By Noam H. Arzt, Ph.D. | December 28, 2022
As we have discussed in earlier posts, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has launched a Data Modernization Initiative (DMI) focused on improving the data management capacity of public health in the United States. The major focus of this initiative is on investments in both people as well as systems and data to improve public health response. Though Congress has appropriated a significant amount of funding for Federal and state, territorial, local, and tribal (STLT) public health agencies, there are some sizable barriers and challenges to seeing the vision for DMI come to fruition:
The New Rules of Healthcare Platforms (Part 3): Platform Thinking Expands from “Technology” to Business Model & Strategy
By Vince Kuraitis, JD/MBA, and Randy Williams, MD | December 21, 2022
A New Generation Of Tools For Open Source Vulnerability Management
By Vincent Danen | December 16, 2022
Product security incident response teams (PSIRTs) are teams of security professionals that work diligently behind the scenes to protect software products and services of companies. A PSIRT is a different breed than a computer security incident response team (CSIRT), those that tend to be called Information Security. The difference is simple but stark: a CSIRT focuses on responding to incidents that affect a company's infrastructure, data or users. A PSIRT focuses on responding to incidents that affect products a company builds, the most common being the discovery of a vulnerability or security defect, and subsequent actions to manage or remediate. Read More »
A Data Scientist's Guide To Open Source Community Analysis
By Cali Dolfi | December 20, 2022
In the golden age of data analysis, open source communities are not exempt from the frenzy around getting some big, fancy numbers onto presentation slides. Such information can bring even more value if you master the art of generating a well-analyzed question with proper execution. You might expect me, a data scientist, to tell you that data analysis and automation will inform your community decisions. It's actually the opposite. Use data analysis to build on your existing open source community knowledge, incorporate others, and uncover potential biases and perspectives not considered. You might be an expert at implementing community events, while your colleague is a wiz at all things code. As each of you develops visualizations within the context of your own knowledge, you both can benefit from that information.
The New Rules of Healthcare Platforms (Part 2): Pipe Scale vs. Platform Scale
By Vince Kuraitis, JD/MBA, and Randy Williams, MD | November 21, 2022
Platform businesses scale differently than traditional businesses. Platforms scale through network effects. In the previous post, we introduced and described a widely used metaphor: pipes vs. platforms. Traditional businesses are pipes. Their value chains are linear. Value is added at sequential stages before a final product or service is delivered to consumers at the end of the pipeline. Platforms do not produce goods or services themselves—they make connections among stakeholders and facilitate value exchange among those stakeholders. Value is created outside the platform. Both pipeline businesses and platform businesses strive to achieve scale—but the type of scale they strive for is vastly different. In this post, we’ll explain how pipeline businesses strive for economies of scale (on the supply side) and how platform businesses scale through network effects (on the demand side).
ONC HITAC Public Health Data Systems Task Force Releases Recommendations
By Noam H. Arzt, Ph.D. | November 18, 2022
On November 10, 2022 the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology’s (ONC) Health Information Technology Advisory Committee (HITAC) accepted and approved the recommendations of its ad hoc Public Health Data Systems Task Force. As discussed in an earlier post, the Task Force has been meeting since August 2022 and was charged with examining how improvements might be made in ONC certification rules for criteria related to public health data submission. In addition, and perhaps for the first time, the task force was also charged with developing recommendations related to the public health side of the equation: how public health data systems and/or standards might improve to ensure a smoother flow of information with clinical care. Read More »
How Open Source Powers Innovation
By Gordon Haff | November 16, 2022
Where do people come together to make cutting-edge invention and innovation happen?....What of open source software? Certainly, major projects are highly collaborative. Open source software also supports the kind of knowledge diffusion that, throughout history, has enabled the spread of at least incremental advances in everything from viticulture to blast furnace design in 19th-century England. That said, open source software, historically, had a reputation primarily for being good enough and cheaper than proprietary software. That's changed significantly, especially in areas like working with large volumes of data and the whole cloud-native ecosystem. This development probably represents how collaboration has trumped a tendency towards incrementalism in many cases. IP concerns are primarily handled in open source software—occasional patent and license incompatibility issues notwithstanding.
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