JP Morgan Healthcare: Google’s Schmidt on Open Source and Health IT

Current health-care information technology systems don’t work well with one another. And that’s a big obstacle to the creation of a truly universal electronic-medical record system, which proponents say could theoretically lead to more efficient care and allow for data mining to see trends, measure outcomes and show the comparative effectiveness of different treatments.

One solution to the problem may be to take the electronic-medical record architecture out of the hands of the corporate world, suggested Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference last night.  Schmidt said that using such an open-source strategy — giving programmers the freedom to modify and distribute software — is a proven way to fix disparate software architectures. It’s the same development strategy that brought about the modern internet and “all the other technologies that you use every day.”