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."

Comments

Note to self:

[JUSTONEMORELATTE]

Doctors are paying US$20k per head for software installs.

Nice to know in case my current day job comes to an unfortunate end.

Re:Note to self:

[cduffy]

I'm working in this field.

It's not exactly an install-and-forget situation -- not remotely. The hardware is expensive, the support is labor-intensive (and most often involves sending people on-site to fix things that don't belong to us), and the set of 3rd-party software we need to write integrations for is massive.

Oh -- and from what I hear, this particular system is much despised by most of the MDs who use it. Certainly, the ones we have on staff have little but contempt (granted, we're a competitor) and one of my coworkers who's spent some time as a VA patient has repeatedly heard similar sentiments.

Re:Note to self:

[Qzukk]

Oh -- and from what I hear, this particular system is much despised by most of the MDs who use it.

Which is the reverse of what I hear. I was at a medical conference recently trying to pitch our own wares, and it seemed to me that half the people at the conference were from the state penitentiary system and used the state's software, and the other half were from VA hospitals and used Vista. I was told fairly consistently by the VA docs that they loved the system and that they'd never use anything else. Of course, the hospital set it up for these doctors, so they never had to deal with any of the guts.

Looking at the system myself, it looks like 99% of the headache is in setting it up. Once it's configured correctly, that's when you get the doctors praising it like it was the best thing since sliced bread.

The most interesting thing about the article is that the software's been Free all along, some group issued a FOIA request for the source code and got it, and it's been an opensource project for at least a year now.

Don't Forget

[AKAImBatman]

U.S. Government Crafted OSS

Let's not forget that the Government was doing OSS before OSS existed. The Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) was funded by DARPA during the creation of the Internet. Due to the rules behind government funding, the BSD Operating System (it was originally just some tools) was released free to the public.

It makes sense if you think about it. Public funds are going into making the software. So who should own the design? The public, of course! Entities like NASA have the same requirements, save for when NASA pays third parties to do the development (in which case the developer owns the rights).

Re:Vista

[EasyTarget]

Microsoft are like, so gonna sue their asses.

I mean it's incredible, the new windoze name has only been known for half a day, and already evil linux commies are trying to cash in on their intellectual properties.

A complete open source VistA stack

[popocatapetl]

There is a complete open source stack of VistA on GT.M on Linux. You can download a ready to run Linux live CD from the WorldVistA site at Source Forge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/worldvista). Grab a 512MB / 1GB USB flash drive, download and burn a CD image, and you're good to go.

Vista isn't actually open source in the normal way

[wildephyre]

It's public domain for starters, and Vista has existed in some form or another since the late 1960's. And how the Veterans Department releases it isn't actually in a functioning form.
I did some investigation into it a few months back as one of my customers is a small rural hospital who is shelling out a large sum of money to both IBM and a small software vendor for their management software/hardware.
The biggest knock on Vista is that its written in MUMPS, a rather obscure programming language dating to the late 60's. It's a really interesting language, but altogether it's something of a pain to deal with, and the only two open source implementations of it are the Sanchez GT/M stuff that WorldVista uses (which I'm not even sure *IS* open source, the licensing isn't very clear on it, further, alot of it is written in assembler which means its effectively non-portable), and another MUMPS->C translator developed by a guy at the University of Northern Iowa. http://math-cs.cns.uni.edu/~okane/cgi-bin/newpres/ m.compiler/compiler/index.cgi It's an interesting (and really very solid) system, but unless the MUMPS language it's written in gets some serious support behind it, it's lack of portability and available toolkits will doom it to further oblivion.

Bad news for my company ... (maybe)

[Anonymous Coward]

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.