Our aim is to evaluate the feasibility and usefulness of open source software applied to knowledge transfer, continuing medical education, collaborative clinical databases, decision support systems and quality management in the context of collaborations with medical institutions in developing countries. 

Open source platform for non-profit: the Cure2Children experience

At the end of 2006 I began my collaboration with Cure2Children. We had to develop the IT infrastructure, with the following requirements:

• Geographically distributed teams: C2C operates in several countries, for example Pakistan and Italy
• The C2C italian team is itself "distributed": some work in Florence, others in Milano, so they need a shared collaborative space
• Use of open source software: we want to share the solutions that we could develop for our projects
• User friendly environment: no power user in the organisation
• Low cost

We agreed that the best solution was an open source web platform.

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CDATA project

Clinical setting is a peculiar and complex environment.
Coming to web application for collaborative project, we usually face problems like these:

• unclear and ever changing data structure and application requirements
• medical-informatics worlds "mismatch"
• complex and rich data structure, semantic, and workflow
• health professionals are far from being "power users": user-friendly interface and simple application model needed
• fast-paced working environment and "offline" collaborative groups
• security and privacy issues

Simplicity is a complex matter.

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