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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."
Just wanna give a shout out to the PR rep that planted this story. Three brand mentions in the opening paragraph - can I get a whoop-whoop?
Two points off for the "less expensive commodity hardware instead of expensive mainframes" - that's a Microsoft marketing phrase from the early 1990's for God's sake - but still a pretty good job all around.
Honestly, it would be nice, but IT costs are afterthoughts when it comes to the healthcare industry. The market is so broken. Quality of care and price are completely detached. The privatization here, the socialization there... it's just one big quagmire. If this sort of thing did catch on, which would be a long ways in the future and a big if at that, the effect on the price of care would be almost unnoticeable. It's nice to dream, but beaureacracy and corporate litigiousness have busted the market. It's a mess.
I got a catholic block.
If that isn't the parable of the broken window if I have ever heard it! Efficiency to any market is a good thing. The more unnecessary cost involved in the healthcare industry, the more dollars it needlessly sucks out of the rest of the economy. Sure, you can make the argument that healthcare is a capital purchase in that it increases your viability in the labor force, but that is a stretch. Cutting bloat is never a bad thing. We need to cut some serious bloat out of the industry, and we should start with beaurecracy and go all the way down to reforming the insurance industry. There needs to be some kind of oversight on cost to quality ratios, as this hybrid government backed/privately funded monster is the model of inefficiency. I like to argue for social justice so I'm naturally wary of any solely private system, but a well-designed private system would be ten times better than what we have now.
I got a catholic block.
I think the market could find something much more efficient than health care that would more than offset the effect on the economy. Your argument reminds me of the broken window fallacy. Wasting money in health care is like breaking windows and saying that it's providing jobs. Sure, but fixing that window is just taking resources away from better endeavors.
/br
Call me when we get doctors that are not gouging prices like crazy, hospital admins that do very little for their 6 figure incomes, Supplies that are horribly overpriced, medications that are priced 9000 percent higher than normal.
The entire medical biz is a scam to get the poor to finance a few $2,500,000 homes and lots of BMW 7 series cars. Doctors do not deserve to be paid insane rates. Some doctors are sane and charge real rates and tell their clients to avoid the hospital at all costs while helping them with outpaitent surgery in their offices.
IT costs are less than 1/90th the cost of health care.
yes its a huge market. it all works fine in a local institution, but the real challenge lies when you try to "generalize" it to different institutions, each with their own idiosyntric processes and data elements. Keep in mind unless you make the underlying engine some standards based (using RIM or terminology driven) or use good design software practices (Archetypes) you ll have a lot of trouble customizing it.. unless of course.. you become like existing vendors who develop the whole thing from scratch at each installation site and send a team of IT services who work there forever and keep your revenue stream running. Good Luck.
my 2 cents
I don't understand the mentality either. Once here on /. I simply stated that it might be a good idea for people to try to behave a bit more sustainably and I get ripped into about moving into a grass hut with a dirt floor. Consumption is a religion for some and it is due to a belief that the economy will collapse if we don't all go out and buy something and just throw it away unopened. Why would people think that?
well you are right but when you talk about the domain of healthcare or biomedicine in general, the complexity of data and processes is so high that to develop a software system you need "extra" data-structures/information models such as HL7 standards, ontologies etc. to meet the requirements of the application. So somehow I tend to think that X (health care domain-specific) language would a superset of a general purpose language that simply provide basic programming elements (say OO, loops, variables etc). Not sure about verbosity though.
In mathematical terms:
A = {basic set of programming artifacts}
B = {domain-specific structures and computable knowledge elements}
X = {A U B}
and Y = {A}
Think about what your user is actually trying to accomplish.
But you missed the point in the grandparent posting -- this system is sold to the suits who run the hospital, not the poor sods who actually get to use it. As a result there is really no impetus for the management of the software company to spend anything more than the barest minimum they can get away with to actually develop the software or make sure it runs right.
I've been in this sort of situation (as a programmer) and I can say that it's not pleasant, nor conducive to good software development, usability, reliability etc.
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
If you ask why, or even worse, try to reduce your consumption, you are directly challenging the personal validation system of the more conformist consumers. If someone measures their self worth on the amount of money they earn, or the expensive toys they have, then you are questioning their status in the social pecking order.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
They might be peanuts, but yet there tend to stack together pretty quickly. Just some months ago, I went to a talk about Open Source Course Management Systems where UKs MP Mr. John Pugh gave a very interesting talk. In one part of that talk he addressed the issue of the NHS (UK health system) upgrades to the doctors' machines. It seems, he argued, they were upgraded to new Microsoft Office software. But, when people tried to convince the NHS to use open source to reduce costs, they said that it was not possible because Microsoft was giving a "special edition" of Microsoft Office which was specifically created for Doctors. Pugh's comments were really funny and insightful, paraphrasing a lot, he said something like:
"So, what kind of 'special version' of word should a doctor need? do they come with special medical symbols? "
Oh well... I can not do sarcasm as well as a real Briton would do it... sorry.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Don't kid yourself.
Java is "fully of weird mysteries" regardless of the platform.
Java app servers are plenty prone to crashing and eating up
all available memory. You don't need to run them on Linux for
that. AIX or Solaris will do equally well.
My guess is that they made changes without fully understanding
them or testing them. They disturbed their the little java
house of cards they had going.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.