Switching Hospital Systems to Linux

jcatcw writes "Health care software vendor McKesson Provider Technologies is focusing on ways to cut IT costs for customers, including hospitals and medical offices. The cure is moving many of McKesson's medical software applications to Linux, which can then be used on less expensive commodity hardware instead of expensive mainframes. A deal with Red Hat allows McKesson to offer its software in a top-to-bottom package for mission-critical hospital IT systems."

Comments

hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

the cure are doing what now?

Re:hmm

[BadAnalogyGuy]

the cure are doing what now?

It looks like they're taking a 4 month break from touring, but they'll be back on the road in February!

http://www.thecure.com/events/default.asp?Year=Upcoming

Re:hmm

[cooley]

The cure is moving many of McKesson's medical software applications to Linux Monday, applications choke
Tuesday, Wednesday, RAID set's broke
Thursday, let out the magic smoke
but on Friday, I patch bugs

Monday, my xorg conf is toast
Tuesday, Wednesday, CPU roasts
Thursday, it won't even POST
but on Friday, I patch bugs

(laughs so hard milk squirts out his nose)

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

RedHat may help though - they might insist on some level of quality / provide some assistance in the creation of software that does not suck quite so much.

(laughs so hard milk squirts out his nose)

Red Hat newbie, are we?

Re:(laughs so hard milk squirts out his nose)

[gardyloo]

Gosh, I hope you were drinking milk.

Re:(laughs so hard milk squirts out his nose)

[remmelt]

> Just because a product wasn't plug-and-play in 1997 when you last used it, doesn't mean it still sucks a decade later.

OBVIOUSLY you haven't been using Windows Vista.

No!!!

[pegr]

Just what we need... MUMPS for Linux. No!!!!!

Re:No!!!

[copdk4]

dont underestimate the power of MUMPS. My advisor was one of the developers of the language (Octo's lab at Mass General).. sometimes during our meetings he pulls up the MUMPS command prompt and writes 2 lines to do stuff that would probably take me alteast 50 lines of Java code. seriously no joke. Someday I plan to learn it once he lets me graduate :)

Re:No!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Big deal. A Hello World in Java takes up 50 lines of Java code.
public class YourWrong {
        public static void main(String args[]) {
                System.out.println("Hello Asshole. Yeah, this is 50 lines...");
        }
}


That's five lines...


$ wc -l YourWrong.java
5 YourWrong.java
$ javac YourWrong.java
$ java YourWrong
Hello Asshole. Yeah, this is 50 lines...

Re:Lackluster vendor makes incremental, pitiful st

[RESPAWN]

I was going to make my own McKesson sucks comment, but instead I'll just second yours. They write Crap. Period. End of story.

I remember sitting in on a presentation they once made to one of our directors regarding some new patient records management system they were trying to pitch to us. Not one single screen shot was shown nor were any technical people on hand so that I could ask the difficult questions. In the end, when she asked me my opinion, the conversation went like this:

Me: Remember application X that you used to use at hospital Y?
Her: Uh... yes.
Me: They wrote it.

We didn't buy the software.

Re:Just watch

[4D6963]

The janitor will come by, type a few random key strokes into the terminal, and boom, no more linux box. *nix computers are just too easy too kill.

Yeah, that's the major flaw of Unix operating systems, and it still hasn't been solved in the 35 years Unix has been around.

If only there was some sort of system under which some special user with special powers could create user accounts deprived of these special powers so that they wouldn't be able to break everything...

OpenVista

[RCSInfo]

OpenVista is an implementation of VistA as in Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture, which existed long before Microsoft Windows Vista, or any Microsoft Windows for that matter.

As Michael Bolton once said "No way. Why should I change? He's the one who sucks."

Re:Affordable health care

[Nimey]

How long would you have to wait in line?