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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."
Linux at the desk top is so next year.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
AMEN BROTHER! I'm a doctor in a hospital that just deployed an electronic health record system that is slower than the system it replaced - which was slower than the TTY system it replaced - that refuses to search patient names if you can't provide a first initial. I'm an anesthesiologist, so I see people I don't have long relationships with, and remembering someone's first name is just damned hard when you remember their medical conditions better than their name. The one piece of medical software I've seen that is really fantastic - and no, I don't own a piece of the company, I just wish I did - is our radiology system, Stentor iSite (now bought by Phillips, I think). It's very easy to use, yet the advanced user can access all sorts of features that improve the experience.
Two possibilities: in the process of porting, they have to rewrite all of the bits that call grody Windows bits, such as IE, and therefore many problem bits get fixed . . . or they just write bad code all over again, Linux gets the blame, and hospitals revert at great cost.
You don't "call" IE, you serve it. And the description poster provided is of the Java server code rewrite that didn't work like the prior "tty" system. That's mainframe terminal software. (I'm an AS/400 System i programmer. McKesson also used to run their enterprise software on AS/400, but they also bought HBOC medical system software company which was mainframe software, so it's probably referring to that.)
There was a big problem with the HBOC thing, lawsuits, etc., but they would have rewritten in J2EE anyway. And you'll hear people who have to use web systems replacing mainframe tty systems saying the same thing everytime. I have a collection of articles that make that point over and over.
rd
I actually think you're the redhat newbie and not the parent. RedHat in recent (3-4 years?) has been very stable. All the stuff gets seriously stress-tested on Fedora first, so by the time it makes it into a stable RedHat, things are stable--i.e. the packages don't "suck". Additionally, because things are "tested" on Fedora first you get this kind of intrinsic QA for things making it into RedHat stable. Next time you decide to squeeze milk through your sinuses, at least do it for something funnier ;-)
Glad to see someone else saw this glaring piece of obviousness.
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.
The amount of testing/development that takes place in the fedora community all funnels directly into a more stable and usable product(i.e. RHEL). That subscription to RHN ensures those engineers bust their ass to fix whats wrong and get it delivered to you: it also means that if your the IT staff in said hospitable and something doesn't make 100%, you can call someone who it does make 100% to and get an answer/fix instead of diagnosing it for 45 minutes while a doctor needing to do a simple task breathes down your neck and wastes both their time and yours.
Trackball users will be first against the wall.
OpenVista is the open source version of the VA's VistA program, deployed at over 1500 sites worldwide. You can also grab it for free from http://sourceforge.net/projects/openvista.
Yes, you can get professional training, installation and ongoing support for it:
http://medsphere.org/
Remember OSS isn't just Linux.
.net integration. I personally went with Dundas, but I suspect my needs are simpler to yours there.
In your particular case, that would be EnterpriseDB. You didn't say whether you're running SE or EE, and I can't remember whether BI is emulated by EnterpriseDB or if they only emulate AS, but if you want to talk about an open source strategy it is worth at least mentioning. The other big money saver is moving from EE back to SE - partitioning is all well and good, but you can afford about a terabyte of solid-state drive for the saving in licence fees, which would more than make up for it in many cases.
Browser based terminals... Give silverlight a whirl - Win, Mac and Linux with reasonable
This company has been offering Linux based systems running Mirth, an open source HL7 messaging application, for cheap as dirt for quite some time. This is their homepage: http://www.mirthproject.org/ Products like this and OpenVista are really causing a stir in the health care industry. IT costs might go down, but they sure as hell won't pass that savings to the consumer.
They were mid-range "commodity" unix servers. For instance, IBM pSeries. p630's, p550's, etc. McKesson couldn't spell System Z.
There were a couple of reasons to replace them. First though, I need to correct myself. I meant to say twinax and not token ring. I had one foot in the bed when I wrote the comment last night. In fact, replacing a twinax network might make more sense to you.
That said:
1) The machines did perform their alloted tasks adequately, but did not perform the newer tasks that employees were required to perform. For one, email is increasingly becoming an integral part of intercorporation communications. These employees using the terminals did not otherwise have access to a PC to check their email. Furthermore, the hospital had newer software tools that, while not critical and necessary to their jobs, could help the employees perform their jobs more quickly.
2) The users were frustrated by their inability to check email and see notices posted on the hospital's intranet site. Their basic job duties weren't impeded, of course.
3) The cost of supporting 5250 terminals for us had risen past the point that they were a viable solution. Parts were becoming scarcer. IT personnel who actually knew anything about them were in short supply. It just didn't make sense to keep them around. And once you replace one in a department, you have to replace them all in order to prevent a riot. Employees are petty and once one employee gets something that another employee perceives as better (and yes a Pentium II, low end Pentium III was perceived as better), then you better make sure that all employees are happy.
If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.