Thanks to my anaesthetic colleague Paul Cooper from NHS Orkney for dredging this one from the archive :
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/25/nhsia_vapes_oss_paper/
For a very long time, advocates of open source and open architecture have had a very hard time convincing anyone involved in Healthcare Strategic Planning to take notice. Lots of barriers, not least risk aversion, but the NHS culture is just innately afraid of anything that it doesn't understand. However, the times they are a-changing. Thanks to the efforts of a few prominent clinical colleagues (most notably Dr Tony Shannon from Leeds and Dr Ian McNicoll), NHS Digital seems to be putting some weight and investment behind a variety of initiatives that seek to promote truly open platforms for collecting, storing and sharing healthcare data.
I'm not holding my breath, but this is probably as exciting as it gets for someone like me, who has spent his entire medical career promoting the idea that the megasuite approach to digital health just doesn't work. Worse than that, it locks up skills and data in monolithic organisations and blocks new, young, agile SMEs from getting a toe-hold in the market.
Links for further info :
http://opal.openhealthcare.org.uk/
https://www.digitalhealth.net/2017/09/gartner-says-nhs-reliant-closed-systems/