Open source becomes a force in health care IT

[LinuxMint-4]

Open source becomes a force in health care IT
by Matt Asay

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10230940-16.html

Open source is picking up steam in enterprise computing, even as the economy peters out. If West Virginia Sen. Jay Rockefeller has his way, open source will soon make its mark on medicine, too, with the lower cost of open source a key impetus behind the move.

Rockefeller last week introduced Senate Bill 90, the "Health Information Technology Public Utility Act of 2009," which "would create a Public Utility Board under (National Coordinator for Health Information Technology) David Blumenthal to push a model of open-source health software, offer grants to hospitals which adopt the model, ensure interoperability with other systems, and create quality measures for the software," as ZDNet's Dana Blankenhorn reports.

This is just the latest demonstration of open source's growing strength in the health care market, some of which is sponsored by President Barack Obama's economic stimulus plan, as Red Hat points out.

With $20 billion in stimulus funds earmarked to induce hospitals to adopt electronic records, one open-source start-up stands to benefit in a big way: Medsphere, the company that has commercialized VistA, the U.S. Department of Affairs' health care management system created with billions of dollars in taxpayer funds.

Medsphere is selling an upgraded version of VistA for comparative pennies on the dollar. Given that a comparable proprietary system routinely runs $20 million to $100 million, according to data assembled by The Wall Street Journal, Medsphere could completely upend the proprietary health care management market.

Proprietary vendors like McKesson and Cerner hold out the same tired arguments that used to be trotted out to combat Linux, MySQL, and other open-source technology: open source is really not cheaper, the software isn't as feature-rich as theirs, etc.

Given how much success such arguments did (not) have against other open-source projects, here's some advice for Cerner and the others determined to cling to their monopoly rents: it won't work. Open source, open standards, and open data is the new starting point for the software conversation.

Medsphere Chairman Kenneth Kizer says Medsphere's OpenVistA "can be installed in one third the time and for about one third the cost of the big-name proprietary systems." Particularly now, that's a story that is going to resonate.

Open source has updated its marketing message. Time for the proprietary health care vendors to do the same.

[eddie]

And in a side story.....
http://gizmodo.com/5234955/conficker-wo ... -equipment

[njwrightmd]

There is a lot of money put aside in the recent U.S. Stimulus bill for physicians to switch to electronic medical records (EMR). If a doctor puts in an EMR, she may be repaid up to $45,000. This doesn't cover the cost of the EMR implementation, but it helps. There are caveats to this. It looks like a doctor needs to have a certain percentage of medicaid patients, maybe 20%. Since my practice is 70% medicaid that's no problem. In order to be repaid through the stimulus package, the EMR software installed needs to be certified through the certification commission for healthcare information technology (CCHIT). VISTA is not on this list, and I didn't see any open source software on the list, on a quick look. I looked through the members of the CCHIT, and I didn't see many M.D.s, certainly no community physicians such as myself.

There are doctors out there who see the push for EMR as a conspiracy to make doctors practice medicine according to what corporate CEOs want. What better way to assess doctors' practices than by accessing their EMRs? Going electronic does not make a bad physician better, and making everyone go electronic will not in itself improve medical care or make it cheaper.

As a physician, as a computer user, and as an advocate for free/open source, I don't like the way the current push for EMR is going. I hope Senator Rockefeller's ideas take hold and change some of it.