RE: [h2o-discuss] Linux on the Operating Table? (formatted correctly)

[John Wilbanks <wilbanks@cyber.law.harvard.edu>]

Sorry for the poor format -- I've done some elementary surgery on the
version below.

-----Original Message-----
From: wilbanks@cyber.law.harvard.edu
[mailto:wilbanks@cyber.law.harvard.edu]
Sent: Thursday, August 05, 1999 10:32 AM
To: h2o-discuss@eon.law.harvard.edu
Subject: [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