Collective intelligence in AthenaHealth by Matthew Holt
Scott Shreeve has spent much of his career promoting open source as a way to harvest collective intelligence. But (irritated by a description from a knocker) he’s done a great job at defining one shining example of building a network that becomes more intelligent as more data (and nodes) get plugged into it. And that network is a private SaaS company, AthenaHealth.
It’s a great example of two of O’Reillys constituents of Web 2.0, especially the second one:
- Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability that get richer as more people use them
- Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them
Now of course that control over data is in a private network. And it’s not an open source project. but the point is AthenaHealth is using that business positioning to add features and gets more powerful as it adds more clients.
Matthew Holt
Health 2.0 Developer Challenges