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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."
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.