Open Medical Data

Just saw your page from a tweet by the new head of the UK Open Data Institute.

I have some feedback, fairly minor.

First of all; there’s no contact info onhttp://www.artisopensource.net/cure/ — you can find it via the youtube video but you want to be easy to contact in case the person with the solution you need isn’t as tech-savvy.

This suggestion is minor, but the data has no copyright or license statements. I doubt it makes much difference to your goals, but it’s best practice and it’s helpful when pioneers such as yourself set the example of best practice as people will certainly follow this lead.

Please publish your tools, doctors and other people in similar situations may find them valuable. Proprietary formats produced by lab equipment are stupid and frustrating.

On a design perspective; your site is very cool, but it’s not easy to review the data and the more skilled people you get to engage with it the better. I don’t know any doctors personally, so this is just an idea; but if I had to review something I’d rather have it all at my finger tips so I could skip around easily. I would consider making a very old-school view a bit like:http://totl.net/Spud/media/ with the list of images and videos on the left menu and the main frame being used to display them. It’s a bit artless, but different interfaces work for different people. Perhaps with an option to show/hide thumbnails. Maybe even add an option to show/hide thumbnails.

I wish you the very best. Reading about you doing something smart and novel to address your disease gave me a bit more faith in humanity after having read about all the hate and stupidity in the news this morning.

– Christopher Gutteridge, University of Southampton Open Data Service.