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Open Source Medical Billing Software
tr0tt3r writes "There is a thriving community of people who are devoted to using Free and Open Source Software to run Medical Practices. While there are many projects that are capable of tracking patient data and scheduling functions, there has been no way to run a Doctors office using GPL software because there was no GPL Medical Billing. This is mostly due to the difficulty of handling HCFA 1500 alongside EDI formats like X12.Recently
several different projects have banded together to create FreeB the first GPL medical billing system."
The ideal model is work for hire improving and releasing GPL'd source code.
Mmm, yeah.
Open source developer: So listen, doc, I will write a J2EE-compatible billing engine and will use Perl regexp instead of that horrible MFC mess you have for sending data to insurance company's WebSphere server. That will be $300.
Doctor: Mmm, what? Get the fuck out of my office. I don't even understand half of the words you are saying. I can hire a secretary for $6/hour to come weekends and do all that for me.
>You do not understand how vertical markets work at all.
Ah, disappointment... I was expecting you to disagree with me factually in some way...
Of course the existing vendors don't care about FOSS (other than to be afraid of it). Why should they? FOSS will disrupt their proprietary business model, as it is currently disrupting all proprietary software business models.
Yeah, FOSS software is how customers will be freed from being violated (to use your term) by license costs, although not support costs. There aren't going to be a bunch of developers giving out free support on IRC for this kind of specialty software. It ain't the fun stuff, that's for sure. As you say it's nothing complicated... that means boring work.
And well, it turns out that it is good for the doctor who can go to anybody for support. But if you've ever done any contracting you would know that once a customer has a vendor they trust who offers them a rate that fits their budget, they tend to stay with that vendor barring some cataclysm or bad service.
Think of it this way... FOSS gives the customer what they want... reasonable prices and no vendor lock-in. And it breaks the market wide open for anyone who wants to enter it since there are no complicated license deals/agreements. It's called "competition" and though the entrenched, established vendors would rather not have any, efforts like this seem to imply it is coming.
You missed the point.
The customers don't give a shit. A smallish medical practice has something like $2 million in "sales" per year. $5-20k is pissing in the ocean.
Doctors want their shit to work so the insurance companies pay for his services. That's it. They do not care about open source and likely prefer to deal with the vendors that they know about.
The other thing is that EDI and other standards that vertical applications must adhere to are not free. The standards and specs are not open and often cost signifigant sums of money.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
There are many non-profit clinincs that operate on shoe-string budgets with donated equipment and doctor time. I think many of these might be interested in a package like this.
Not all doctors make six figures and most doctors donate some time to work on indigint patients.
Cheap storage VM.
Let's look at it from the perspective of the company providing the support. Earlier in this thread it was established that writing the actual software involved is a very easy task. You have two business options here:
1) Write the software yourself, with vendor lock-in schemes included, and generate revenue off both support and upgrades. As your software is proprietary, once a customer starts using it, there aren't really any other options for support.
2) Provide support for an open source product. The fact that it is open source means that your customer can go to anyone else for support whenever they feel like it. That makes open source both a strength and a weakness to your company.
If you were an investor, which most likely means you really don't care if software is open source or not, which would you choose? I know I'd consider the first option to be a more lucrative business plan. If we were talking about software that takes a huge investment to create (say, a web browser), I'd be much more likely to go with the second choice.