This personal journey has highlighted for me the pressing need for better digital solutions to support families like mine and the healthcare professionals who care for our children. I continuously consult with doctors or other parents to make sure that such a platform has a real target audience.
With 20 years of experience as a lead developer, server administrator, and CTO, I've worked on dozens of large-scale projects. However, I've never collaborated with volunteer or open-source developers.
I'm considering developing a free, ad-free online platform to help families manage medical information and improve communication with healthcare providers—completely non-profit, with no monetization involved. We would run the solution on our servers that we already have and for some functions (e.g. SMS notifications) we would try to approach telecommunication operators as SMS sponsors. In an ideal scenario, in case of success of such a platform, the state administration would take over the responsibility for the operation of this platform. The platform should be developed as open-source and if it proves successful in one country (my country in the EU will be the first), the ambition of the authors and the consulting health professionals should be to help to promote it in other countries.
Key features include:
1) Centralizing medical documentation for easy sharing.
2) Provide doctors with a comprehensive view of the child's medical history (including visuals, timeline from birth, charts, etc.)
3) Simplifying scheduling and communication with multiple specialists.
4) Integrating AI to manage and interpret medical data - for the purpose of auto-categorizing, summarizing, assignment to parts of the human body or picking a date for the next visit - not to replace a medical examination!
5) Implementation of useful functions for doctors and parents according to their own expressed needs, for which neither state systems nor their software offer any solution.
My question to the community is: Do you think it's realistic to find volunteer developers who would contribute to such a project purely as a service to society? Or is this an overly optimistic idea? Do you believe that it is possible to inspire and motivate some experienced developers to participate for free in the development of a platform that should then be known by many parents and doctors across the country? Unfortunately, government institutions don't create such projects and the private sector has to have a business model to want to do it.
Note: with this post I am not looking for the developers themselves for this platform. I am only interested in your personal experience and opinion if it is real or if I am completely naive.
I'd greatly appreciate any insights, experiences, or advice you might have, especially if you've worked on similar altruistic projects.
Thank you everyone!
Even if your national government is actively looking for new software, to provide such functionality across their nationalized health care system, I'd say you're at-best looking at a brick-wall learning curve.
So one area to focus on is making it super easy for patients to obtain their data in electronic form, and parsing that data into a common/shared schema (like hl7 or fhir) to make it workable.
Once the data is there, you can focus on "social" features like inviting others to view all or some of your data and be able to leave comments/make annotations. Less focus on who the other user is, more on how effortless would be for them to navigate through the data, take notes, generate a report.
Then you dont need to worry about issues related to marketplaces, like bringing the providers onboard first, as patients will be pulling them in as needed via simple invite links.
Patients could also make their data public for experts to navigate, compare, or examine. This is where the magic occurs, if you manage to figure out the User Experience doctors need to make full use of all the data and tools you give them.