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Open Source Could Have Saved Ontario Hundreds of Millions
Platinum Dragon writes "Ontario's auditor-general released a blistering report this week detailing how successive governments threw away a billion dollars developing an integrated electronic medical record system. This CBC article highlights an open source system developed at McMaster University that is already used by hundreds of doctors in Ontario. As one of the developers points out, 'we don't have very high-priced executives and consultants,' some of whom cost Ontario taxpayers $2,700 per day."
The McMaster University researchers claim their system could be rolled out for two percent of the billion-dollars-plus already spent on the project. The report itself (PDF) also makes note of the excessive consultation spending: "By 2008, the Ministry’s eHealth Program Branch had fewer than 30 full-time employees but was engaging more than 300 consultants, a number of whom held senior management positions."
I worked (through a contract company) at the Ontario Ministry of Health during the Y2K crunch, doing upgrades and support, handling a small team of guys.
It was a decent place to work, but the waste is incredible. We were getting paid 18 to 20 bucks an hour, but the companies handling us were either 2 or 3 deep. And each one took a cut.
One overheard phone call indicated that the top company in the food chain was getting over a hundred dollars an hour for some of us.
And another guy who was getting paid directly was whining on the phone about only making 125 dollars an hour managing the operation... though none of us ever saw him lift a finger to actually manage anything. The managers we reported to were great though.
So the contract companies took way too much money. That was issue number one.
The other was that for the amount of cubicles they had filled, it sure didn't seem like there was enough work to keep everyone busy. And as government employees they get good pay and LOTS of vacation.
And some people were getting paid WAAAY too much for what they were doing at work. Nothing like finding gigabytes of japanese teenagers pissing on things, and bestiality porn on a directors computer.
They must have buried that little discovery because when I Googled him last he was still working there.
Of course, on the plus side, since I was one of the more experienced guys I tended to stick by the phone to manage and support the other team members, and got to read Slashdot all day between phone calls and running down to help when one of the guys ran into trouble.
I wonder if I could get back on there.... :)
. but you don't have bureaucrats wasting billions in order to keep themselves and their buddies rolling in the dough, and billions more being wasted through sheer indifference.
Righto.. in private industry it's CEOs doing all that.
Are you really that naive to think that private business doesn't do the exact same thing all the time?
If you actually look at the output of U.S. healthcare, you might notice we spend the most, and don't get the best care.
AccountKiller
That's not the case if large portions of the economy are controlled by corporations that are all doing that. In theory, it might be possible for me to live and eat without ever dealing with a major corporation, but in practice it's nearly impossible to do. If anything, I see taxation by government as much preferable to de-facto taxation by corporations, since at least I have a vote in the former, and the sums are usually lower.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The project was a horribly mismanaged flop, and open source wouldn't have saved it. The problem was with the management, not the coding. An open source project with that management would still have lost the same amount of money.
Hell, people were being paid thousands just to stay on call, doing no work. How does open source fix that? It doesn't.
Loved the article's assumed correlation of open source and lower cost though...
Not quite so, while paying to corporations might not seem compulsory like taxes are, in many ways they are. Food for example, we all need it. It is as mandatory as taxes. Yes, with corporations you get an array of options, but the cheapest provider may still being overcharging. With government you can get an even cheaper, if not optimal price, because you have power over it. The government is like a corporation we all own.
What is the alternative? No government spending on public health? What about the fire department? Wouldn't a corporation handle it better? What about roads? What about national defense? What about the police? Should we recur to corporations for a judicial system?
If you say "no", as I hope, then you agree with government spending, we just have to figure out the bugs, because while you must pay taxes to the government, the government give you legislative representation in return, if your representation fails you that's where the problem is.
Saying the government is the problem is not constructive, because getting rid of the government is not the solution, fixing the government is the solution. It might be that a given service is not best served by the government at some point, that doesn't invalidate the idea of a government.
But... the future refused to change.
Do not antagonize the crazy Americans. They may send you Celine Dion.
It took us decades to get rid of her.
Signed,
Canada
(Canadian here)....
My government doesn't run my healthcare - my doctors do. My government just pays the bills. I don't have to call any government employees for approval for anything. There are no beurocrats in the way.
Your motivation is understandable -and my motivation is the same. I go to work so I can put good food on the plate, have nice things, drive a nice car, and go on awesome vacations.
The one thing, however, I've never had to worry about, is whether or not I can change jobs or re-locate because of my health-care situation. I worry about my *health* - but not how I'm going to pay for it when I get sick. For me, these healthcare debates are silly, because all my life, healthcare has been a universal right for me and all my neighbors.
What if we built roads only privately, and had no public schools, no public police force... would you say the same thing? Would you wall yourself away in your private world where only people who direcly paid for those resources could use them? That sounds silly, right?
I guess my point is - it's more about a shift in view about how you feel about healthcare in a society. If you view access to good healthcare as something that should be proportional to invididual income - then your view makes sense.
Do consider, though, that providing universal healthcare actually drops prices - and you'd end up paying *less* for the same, or better, healthcare, as well as having a society where healthcare ceased to be a worry.
A private company ignores its customers at its peril.
Only when that corporation has competition. If I have a monopoly on a good that has a highly inelastic demand curve (e.g. food, communications, heating oil, medicine, etc.) I can be as big of a jerk to my customers, and they'll have no choice but to take it. In fact, I can be an even bigger jerk than the government, because, in the case of the government, the people have the choice of voting me out when my term ends. In the case of a corporation, there's no such recourse. Heck, a corporation doesn't even have to accept petitions from its citizens, which is something that the US government is constitutionally required to do.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it