Open Source vs. Commercial Software: The wrong debate in moving healthcare IT forward

David's blog — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 12:06:57 GMT

re: Open Source vs. Commercial Software: The wrong debate in moving healthcare IT forward

Jason — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 20:04:55 GMT

I'm of the opinion that researchers just plain don't know the difference between Open Standards and Open Source. They don't "get" that Open Source might well use Proprietary standards or vice versa.

Open standards needs to be embraced by all. How an individual application stores and manipulates patient might well be proprietary, just so long as it is accessable and consumable by others.. *that* is the solution needed.

I could probably write an article on this, but in my experience, hospital systems have to make some serious decisions if they go to an Open Source EMR application. Who supports it? Do they hire a consultant company? That could get expensive. And if so, then they really are no better off, from their perspective, than owning a proprietary application from Siemens, Eclipsys, or Cerner. Do they customize it themselves? probably not: the more they customize it, the less likely they'll have the original developers of the app support it, and they'll have to maintain multiple code streams. Not to mention, hospitals, in my experience *and* opinion, just don't employ the caliber of professional developers and engineers required to support these enterprise applications. Usually, they cannot attract the talent (due to salary costs) or cannot keep them (young talented engineers like to work with cutting edge software and hospitals are not traditionally the cutting edge, they like to "play it safe", correctly so).
Any thoughts?

re: Open Source vs. Commercial Software: The wrong debate in moving healthcare IT forward

hlthblog — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 20:47:29 GMT

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Jason. You are right on the money, although in defense of my colleagues who work in hospital IT departments, they're not all Luddites. When I was a hospital CIO/CMIO at Overlake Hospital in Bellevue, Washington (www.overlakehospital.org) I was blessed by having a team of some of the most talented professionals in the business. We paid them well, and they delivered!

Bill Crounse, MD

re: Open Source vs. Commercial Software: The wrong debate in moving healthcare IT forward

Jason — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 21:00:35 GMT

Glad to hear it, seriously.. :)

I"ve had the experience of working as both a clinician and a Software Engineer in hospitals and have consistently found that they employed developers that cared about the hospital's mission, but really did not have the skill set available, nor the foresight to improve upon existing designs. "Good Enough" was more important than "Great". I suppose that's a fine example, but those of us that want to improve a broken system felt frustrated and moved on.

Again, nice to know there are hospitals out there that want to use IT to its fullest extent, in order to improve patient care!

re: Open Source vs. Commercial Software: The wrong debate in moving healthcare IT forward

I. Valdes, MD, MS — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 21:03:50 GMT

A standard, whether proprietary or open is a theoretical construct that does nothing without an implementation. The best world is an open standard implemented under a Free and Open Source license. An open standard implemented in a proprietary way might as well be proprietary since it cannot be studied, fixed or extended meaningfully. -- IV

re: Open Source vs. Commercial Software: The wrong debate in moving healthcare IT forward

zeroknowledge — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 02:57:29 GMT

my thoughts on your post at http://healthcaresecurityguru.wordpress.com/

Healthcare IT Security » Blog Archive » Open Source vs. Commercial Software in healthcare

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re: Open Source vs. Commercial Software: The wrong debate in moving healthcare IT forward

LewisC — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 00:14:21 GMT

Hi,

I recently created a survey to measure database usage in various enterprises. I would love to get some feedback from the healthcare industry. basically, I ask for some demographic info and then a series of database and open source questions. I would appreciate it if any readers here would take the time to answer.

BTW, the results of this survey will be made publicly available. That will allow anyone to draw their own conclusions. I will also make some analysis available after I complete, for free and with any kind of a registration.

The survey is at <a href="http://www.esurveyspro.com/Survey.aspx?id=94f02050-560e-4f37-bc75-1c7b948ca63e">http://www.esurveyspro.com/Survey.aspx?id=94f02050-560e-4f37-bc75-1c7b948ca63e</a>

Thanks,

LewisC

re: Open Source vs. Commercial Software: The wrong debate in moving healthcare IT forward

LewisC — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 00:15:16 GMT

Ack. That was bad. Sorry about the URLs. The survey is at:

http://www.esurveyspro.com/Survey.aspx?id=94f02050-560e-4f37-bc75-1c7b948ca63e

And additional information is at:

http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/oracle-guide/please-help-me-out-take-a-25-question-database-oss-survey-26256

Thanks,

LewisC