by Ted Eytan, on 24 Mar 2007 04:40 pm
The Journey
Science vs. Witchcraft
Without infringing on Lee’s Quote syndicate, I’d like to offer this from Linus Torvalds, from Businessweek, in 2004.
In science, the whole system builds on people looking at other people’s results and building on top of them. In witchcraft, somebody had a small secret and guarded it — but never allowed others to really understand it and build on it.
Linus was talking about open source vs. proprietary software. In health care and health care information technology specifically, there has been a bit of a witchcraft mentality. Our patients benefit when we replace witchcraft with science, not only in the treatments we recommend, but in the way we provide those treatments.
Last week, we took a product that we created as part of our clinical information system to a health care team (nurses, doctors, and support staff) to make it better. And they did. Very quickly. We showed them the limits of what could be done, and they went with it, with our team fixing and improving on the spot. They understood what we had done and built on it to make it better. Exactly as our patients expect.