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

Re:... and screw the economy

[explosivejared]

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.

Re:... and screw the economy

[blurryrunner]

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

Re:No!!!

[copdk4]

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}

Re:... and screw the economy

[JohnBailey]

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? Social conditioning. The entire retail market is designed to make us aspire to the new stuff when the old stuff is perfectly adequate. This applies to consumer electronics, clothing, housing, etc. Its taken a while, but now many people are conditioned to confuse the words want and need.

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.