Hope For FOSS In Electronic Health Records

Fred Trotter writes "CCHIT is the dominant Electronic Health Record certification body in the US. It is also decidedly anti-FOSS and has been for years. Certification of one kind or another will be required for EHR systems to qualify for funding under the Stimulus Act. If CCHIT is chosen as the certification body, and the current certification strategies continue, it will not be possible to have a funded EHR that is both certified and truly FOSS. Now, however, CCHIT has agreed to meet the FOSS Health IT community at HIMSS 09 to address this issue." We discussed the shortcomings in the stimulus bill as it relates to FOSS a few days back.

Comments

Anti-FOSS?

[FooGoo]

So let me get this strait...CCHIT is considered anti-FOSS because they charge fees that for certification that the FOSS folks cannot afford?

Sounds like we need a welfare program for FOSS apps to be able to play in the big leagues. How do you think CCHIT gets their operating budget? Through fees I would expect.

Re:Anti-FOSS?

[sumdumass]

Outside of the entire Fees for OSS idea, I think it is preposterous to think that once you certify a program or application to do a certain thing, you have to continue paying them based on annual sale of your program or application to keep that certification.

We don't need welfare for OSS, we need something different in place. A certification process shouldn't be dependent on future fees paid nor should it base any of the fees on the sales of the software. If you want to know why health care is so expensive, it's shit like this.

Think about it, 25K can go into 25 copies sold $1000 at a time. That isn't so much when considering what the software brings to the table. But an annual $5000 on top of that based on sales means the same program that was certified at $1000 a pop is now not certified if more money isn't paid. The question is, is that 5k a version sold?, up to 25 licenses sold? or is it 5 licenses sold? Now licenses could be a misnomer too, Take MS servers for instance, you need a license for the server, a license for the workstation's MS operating system, a license for the network connections to the server, and a license for all the MS applications running on those systems. Lets say MS Office is a given and for shits and giggles, lets say MS dynamics CRM is installed. Now, that means 1 server license, 1 workstation, 1 connection, 1 office and 1 CRM, that's 5 licenses just to be up and running. OF course more workstations will need less licenses but in the certification ordeal with CCHIT, how many of those licenses count as sales? I mean the ERM software could have modular features and easily require 5 licenses, so with the 5k based on sales, if that is for every 5 licenses, then you might need to recover 5k per workstation on top of your profit and expenses for creating the damn thing.

It's a racket that shouldn't be allowed. If we are going to require certification, then there should be some rules and guidelines and limits on costs instead of creating a get rich quick scheme that drives the cost of health care up so some damn politicians can fool the people when they claim to be fixing the problem. The opposite of that would be to open up the ability for other companies or organizations to become certifies and forbid lock ins to certain companies or organizations so competition can drive costs down to something more reasonable.

one of FOSS's problems.

[MonoSynth]

If the law states that there should be a 'view but not save/copy/print' right (like here in the Netherlands), how could you enforce that *and* be truly open source? You have to certificate each and every release of the full software on a source code level (and provide authorization based on the (i.e.) md5 sum of the executable) to enforce such rights. One simple edit & recompile and you can save/print those x-ray pics, which is against the law.

At the very least, forking, maintaining your own version and fixing bugs for your (employer's) own use is either impossible or very expensive.