Open Sesame
It was only a matter of time before open source and healthcare IT came together. The VA's OpenVista system was released as open source code last week.
Vendors are following suit. McKesson and Red Hat announced an end-to-end open source healthcare solution. Philips Medical Systems is using CollabNet for its new collaborative software development infrastructure. Palm is using Tolven's open source EHR records on their Treos smartphone. Medicity launched an open source healthcare portal. The U.S. is following in the footsteps of other countries in this regard; Brazil's whole healthcare system is built on open-source technologies.
One hurdle to these open source efforts will gaining CCHIT approval where applicable, compatiability with RHIOs and payor systems, and countering proprietary software vendors' claims that open source is unreliable. We see how effective that was for Microsoft ;)
These bleeding edge examples are largely symbolic in the big picture today, but like open source in the enterprise in another ten years it will be a different story.
Tags: Healthcare+PR, Linux+EMR, Online+PR, Open+Source+Healthcare+ITPosted by Shawn Whalen on March 12, 2007 at 10:12 AM
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