A book title recently came across my twitter stream called: The Innovator’s Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care The title sounded familiar and when I went and learned more about the book, I realized it was from the same author of the relatively famous business book called The Innovator’s Dilemma The book is written by Harvard Business School’s Clayton M. Christensen who is a very popular writer at Harvard business school. I’ve read a number of his works and the man is just good at what he does.

Of course, this makes me wonder if he knows anything about health care. Has anyone read this book? I’d love to hear some reviews about whether it’s worth my time to read it or not.

I love when senators come out and write bills requesting for the government to fund an open source EMR. Turns out the most recent request came from Senator John D. Rockefeller has proposed a new law which would establish federal grants to develop open source software and standards for electronic medical records. You can read more about it on ars technica.

I have to admit that I strongly support the concept of open source EMR and really open source software in general. I just don’t know why government thinks that government grants would really help open source software. I could be wrong, but has there ever been a significant open source software project that was grant funded by the government? It just generally seems contrary to the open source development model.

I guess I just wonder how a senator gets it in his mind to write a proposal for open source EMR grants. Did an open source project request for him to do it? Where did the senator get this idea that it was a good idea to have an open source EMR? Did he consult the existing EMR projects to see if this is something that they would find beneficial to the cause?

Maybe he in fact did do all of these things, but I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that Senator Rockefeller knows little about open source software and in particular the challenges that open source EMR software is currently facing.