I had no direct access to my own information, since I use Linux and OSX rather than the files' Windows-based viewer. As a software engineer, I found software an

I had no direct access to my own information, since I use Linux and OSX rather than the files' Windows-based viewer. As a software engineer, I found software and programming tools to hack the files and make them open -- but a nontechnical person would have difficulty making use of their own medical data. What does he think a non-technical person would do with an open source format? Being open source doesn't fundamentally change things in the sense that it's not like my grandmom is going to say, "Ahh... this is file format IEEE-12312. Let me write a quick viewer optimized for my concerns." I suspect the author thinks there would be a rich ecosystem of tools for an open source file format, but in something as specialized as medical records I don't think the non-technical user would do much better. Viewing your vaccination history is much different than identifying sepsis vs trying to diagnose MS in the brain vs cancer vs high blood pressure. You need to have some degree of medical expertise to even know what to begin looking at and what tools are providing useful data. With that said I'm not opposed to open source file formats. But I just think it doesn't dramatically change the equation -- at least not today.