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| Live from the AMIA conference in Wash. D.C. |
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 Posted by I. Valdes on Sunday November 04, 2001 @ 02:45 PM
from the conference dept.
We are reporting live from the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA)fall conference. The conference this year is being held in the Marriott Wardman Park in Washington D.C. I'll be giving the first annual Linux Medical News Open Source Medical Achievement Award as well as sending updates to this article as they occur.
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This is the first time I've flown since 9/11 and I was flying into Reagan National airport as well. As you can imagine, security was heavy at Bush International in Houston. My id was checked 3 times, laptop was scanned separately and I didn't think about taking my Palm V out of my pocket. This set off the scanner and earned me a wand and frisk search. Two soldiers carrying rifles were in evidence which was a first for me to see them in a US airport.
I arrived in Washington late Saturday night and took Washington's excellent Metro to the hotel and spent the night. Today I received a phone call from Dan Johnson, MD. Many of the open source medical software people will be getting together at 5:00pm in the lobby as well as at 7:30pm for dinner.
Johnson is something of the patriarch of open source software, realizing its potential long before just about anyone else. His son also happens to be kernel manager for RedHat. He is going to be taking over David Pepper, MD's role as moderator of the open source medical software panel Monday. Dr. Pepper was held up in Arizona and may not be able to make it because of ticket confusion.
That's it for now.
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Re: Live from the AMIA conference in Wash. D.C.
by I. Valdes on Monday November 05, 2001 @ 09:06 PM
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Sunday night found me having dinner with Brian Bray of Minoru Development Corp. and Dan Johnson at a local Indian food restaurant. Brian Bray was new to me, but I had met Dan at last year's meeting. Brian is quite plugged in to the European medical open source scene and is working full time in France. In fact, he was having some 'reverse culture shock' since he had not been in the US for 2 years. Brian formerly worked for Microsoft after the company he worked for was purchased by MS. He left in 1995 mostly due to an un-welcome requirement of moving to Redmond. His insights on Microsoft were interesting and informative.
We meandered back to the hotel after dinner, caught up with Tim Cook and found ourselves going out to dinner again to an Afghan restaurant which we considered timely. Mike Bainbridge, Mike Gnassi, Brian Bray, Tim Cook and Shiela Teasdale were in attendance. The alcohol flowed freely and we had a rollicking good time discussing all things geeky in medicine.
Monday was a busy day with the panel discussion beginning at 10:30 am in the Coolidge room. The room was full with a small over flow crowd standing in the back. Dan Johnson moderated and I started off presenting the Linux Medical News award to Tim Cook. Brian Bray followed with a presentation on the Spirit project as well as the PICNIC project which is 'to prepare regional health care providers to implement the next generation, secure, user-friendly, health care networks and to make the European market for telematics health care services less fragmented.' Tim Cook and Mike Bainbridge follwed. Mike works for the British e-health company Torex and his presentation discussed the promise of open source for the national health system in Britain.
Finally, Derrick Jones, a marketing representative from RedHat discussed his perspectives on medical open source.
The floor was opened up for questions, one of which was how to keep big fish from hijacking code from small fish once you have open sourced. (Brian Bray's answer: many, many open source authors and foundations that would be interested in defending your rights.)
It seemed to be a friendly crowd, with most staying the full 2.5 hours so the interest seemed to be there. Afterwards several people who I know only by e-mail introduced themselves which was fun. It was unknown how much preaching to the choir was being done which would have been an interesting exercise to have a show of hands. Perhaps next year.
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