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[h2o-discuss] Linux on the Operating Table?
Interesting -- found this on salon. It's about the Linux Anesthesia
Modular Device Interface effort (<http://gasnet.med.yale.edu/lamdi/>).
I'm curious as to the folks' opinion on who would be liable if open
source software crashed and a patient died. Even though my address says
law.harvard.edu, I'm not a lawyer (or in training to be one) so I'm
throwing it out to the rest of you...
<begin snip>
Stefan Harms, a resident in the
department of anesthesiology at
the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg,
believes that
anesthesiologists could use better help.
One part of the answer,
he's convinced, is better anesthesia
software -- programs that will
monitor and record patient data, conduct
real-time modeling of
the effect of different drugs, and even
directly control the infusion
of those drugs. Yes, there are
anesthesia machines and software
packages that address some of these
jobs, says Harms, but they
are either too expensive or they don't
do everything Harms wants.
Sure, if you're a hospital with $60,000
to fling about, you can buy
a state-of-the art Narkomed 6000 -- but
many hospitals are on a
tighter budget.
When he isn't in the operating room
taking care of patients,
Harms is hacking on the five computers
in his basement. And he
thinks he knows how to achieve his dream
of low-cost, reliable
anesthesia software -- by going the
open-source route. Last year,
Harms founded LAMDI, the Linux
Anesthesia Modular Device
Interface. Harms thinks that the
open-source software
development model, in which the source
code to a program is
made freely available to the general
public for redistribution and
modification, offers fruitful
possibilities for addressing
anesthesiological software needs.
Harms is placing his bets on a central
tenet of open-source
ideology -- the belief that freely
available source code encourages
a "peer-review" process that produces
software that is less buggy
and more reliable than proprietary
"closed-source" software. The
theory is that when everyone can hack on
the code, fix problems
as they find them, and add their own new
features, the code
quickly improves. It has worked for the
Linux-based operating
system, says Harms. Why shouldn't it
work for anesthesiology
software, where avoiding crashes and
bugs is a life-or-death
situation?
"There is a compelling argument for open
source just for safety
reasons," says Harms. "If you use tools
and software that are not
peer-reviewed, you should be more liable
if something goes
wrong."
But is the anarchic open-source world
really appropriate for the
operating room? Who would be liable if
the software crashed and
the patient died? Some hacker grad
student at MIT or Stanford?
The anesthesiologist? The hospital? Can
free software pay the
price of patient mortality?
<end snip>
John Wilbanks
Assistant Director
Berkman Center for Internet and Society
wilbanks@law.harvard.edu
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu