[sc-announce] Finding the "sweet spot" for openness in healthcare -- Science Commons blog

Donna Wentworth dwentworth at creativecommons.org
Thu Feb 14 12:28:12 EST 2008


Finding the "sweet spot" for openness in healthcare

February 14th, 2008<http://sciencecommons.org/weblog/archives/2008/02/14/finding-the-sweet-spot-for-openness-in-healthcare/>by
dwentworth

The Committee for Economic Development <http://www.ced.org/> has released a
report <http://www.ced.org/docs/report/report_healthcare2007dcc.pdf> [PDF]
that looks at ways to harness "openness" to transform healthcare in the US.
It gives a broad overview and analysis of the healthcare production chain,
identifying areas where increased knowledge-sharing could yield enormous
benefits — not least of which is the development of
evidence-based<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence-based_medicine>medicine.

As Daniel Griffin at the Information World Review
<http://blog.iwr.co.uk/>blog<http://blog.iwr.co.uk/> points
out <http://blog.iwr.co.uk/2008/02/could-an-open-a.html>, the report
appropriately defines openness in this context as a spectrum rather than a
binary, and helpfully distinguishes between information that's accessible
and information that's "responsive" and "malleable" (remixable). Writes
Griffin:

"Ultimately [the authors] say [openness] boils down to two things; the first
is that information must be accessible, this means that data should be both
available and free from restrictions while secondly responsiveness of that
information refers to how malleable or redistributable the information is
and therefore the more it can be considered 'open'."

These are important distinctions to make, and the report serves as an
excellent introduction to the opportunities and challenges of opening access
to biomedical research. Our thanks to Eliott
Maxwell<http://www.emaxwell.net/>for passing it along.
................
Donna Wentworth
Communications Specialist
Science Commons
http://sciencecommons.org
dwentworth at creativecommons.org <kaitlin at creativecommons.org>
................
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