My Google vs Facebook analogy from yesterday was rhetorically useful, but I think it’s misleading.  There is way to much me-too-ism on the web right now, and I don’t want to suggest that clone of something from the pure-web world will be of any significant benefit to healthcare.  I think what I was getting at though was that the problem solvers in healthcare need their version of the Open Source, collaborative infrastructure that is currently driving the web.

A small, but very interesting, development on the web that I’d like to explore further is GitHub.  GitHub is a very niche operation that is doing something that probably would have been considered impossible a few years back: commercial source code hosting.  For a small fee, the promise to maintain the intellectual property of software shops.  For an established company, this idea is ludicrous.  They are asking their customers to move their most valuable asset outside the walls of their company and put it in the hands of this little startup.

GitHub seems to be making money so it seems that enough organizations are willing to trust their IP to this small software shop.  What really makes GitHub interesting though is how they’ve used Open Source technology to build not just a for-profit company, but a vibrant community around their service.  The GitHub website is actually a social networking site.  Instead of throwing sheep at each other though, they’re trading code.  This is one social networking site that has figured out how to enable valuable intellectual and commercial activity.

So what does this mean for healthcare?  Can their be a healthcare github?  I think sage might be on the right track.  This article from xconomy has some more info on sage.  They’ve already signed up some big names, but they’re also running into some of the same problems that you’d expect when you ask big companies to share IP.  While I hope they’re successful and I think that they’re structured appropriately for what they want to accomplish, the barriers to entry still seem to high.

I still don’t know what the right approach is to deploying mass creativity and the wisdom of the crowds to the healthcare problem.  It will, however, need near zero friction toward sharing ideas and data.