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U.S. Government Crafted OSS
matthewg writes "According to the New York Times the federal government has developed an open-source medical records system. It was originally developed for the Department of Veterans Affairs, and doctors started obtaining it under FOIA requests. Some good information on the process of converting it from an internal project to a deployable system exists, and how its open nature has made the system better is available at the WorldVista site." From the article: "Medicare has not estimated what its software giveaway is worth. But Duncan Pringle, chief Vista technologist at Perot Systems, said that each doctor in a practice paid about $20,000 to $25,000 to get started with a commercial system, including costs of software, a license fee charged to each doctor, installation and servicing."
I'm guessing this is meant to read 'U.S. Government-Crafted OSS'. Then it makes sense.
This could potentially be bad news for the company I work at. We deliver an enterprise-class medical software suite, known for integrating all the labwork, billing, nursing, ordering, scheduling, etc., systems into a single architecture. The thing costs several millions of dollars, though.
Some clients seem to like it because it gives you seamless operation through your entire organization, and others don't like it because it's a huge monolithic piece of software, and represents TONS of vendor lock-in.
I wish the execs up top here would realize that in this day in age, open standards like XML and now open source applications like this pose a huge threat to their business model, whose only strong point is that you get a highly integrated system (we're like the Microsoft of healthcare IT, basically).
Oh well. I'm just one lowly developer. What can I do about it? I'd like to see my company succeed, but I worry that they're way too stuck in the 20th-century "lock them in", "monolithic application", "integration over interopability", "the only standard is a defacto one" -mindset.
I should get a copy of this as a US citizen and taxpayer.
Ahhh, but the question is do you feel that a Canadian, Japanese, or (god forbid!) French citizen/doctor/whoever should be able to get a copy of this for free also?
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
The Government will do research on a subject, then send the results off to have the data evaluated by a private company. It is the company that is either the publisher, or will publish it in a private journal. Since the article you are requesting will include research and conclusions that might are not Govenrment owned the FOIA wont help to get access to it. But if you want to get the raw data that was sent in for evaluation originally, the FOIA will get it for you, as long as the information is not classified in nature, or fall into one of the 9 "FOIA Caveats".
Given that DHCP/Vista has been around since long before Microsoft began developing Windows XP, much less Longhorn, as well as the fact that trying to sue the Veteran's Administration would be a PR debacle, I don't think that Bill Gates would be stupid enough to try -- going into court and having the VA produce decade-old documents demonstrating the prior use of the name would get the case dismissed with prejudice, and Microsoft would probably lose all rights to the name and have to put off their OS release for another five years while they pick a new one.