Slashdot Mirror
Linux in healthcare computing
CsJmn writes
"I came across this short article on Linux in the January
issue online edition of Healthcare Informatics magazine (a
healthcare computing industry trade magazine). The story is
about half way down this page ."
The story is about the sucessful introduction of Linux to
Huntsville Hospital in Alabama. Apparently, John Carpenter,
Microsoft's worldwide healthcare industry Marketing manager
is worried "It will certainly drive us to put new stuff
into our products."
Not a bad article, though I did notice that the support FUD is still with us. Maybe it will take IBM supporting before they finally give up the lie.
"It will certainly drive us to put new stuff into our products."
new stuff like web browsers?
"try another patient and restart"
Why not just fix the existing product?
That would be a good start.
Finally something good happening in my state. If it wasnt for the news today that the KKK if going to be marching saturday i would be happy.
John Carpenter works in the Healcare division, wha t next, Dan O'Bannon working in the Aerospace division.
i'd much rather my life depended on linux
than nt. i hope other hospitals come to
the same conclusion.
Perhaps Mr. Carpenter should pull his M$Head out of his M$Ass and try a more professional term like "features"?? I'd recommend "dependability" and "robustness" but as we've seen so far, those words can't be found in any version of M$Vocabulary. I think you need M$FUD Service Pack or the M$PRBullshit HotFix in order to use those words.
I hope Microshaft hires more product managers of Mr. Carpenter's caliber. It will help speed up their emminent downfall.
While my wife worked there, she told me about the central computer system crashing almost daily. I would guess they were down (patient records, test results, etc.) 20-40% of the time. According to scuttlebutt, the IBM mainframes were 20 years old and woefully underpowered, filled with viruses (the software kind), and you couldn't run a virus checker on any of the Windows boxes because it would lock up.
In that kind of environment, I would think a cheap Linux solution that worked and didn't crash would be a marvel!
Still, I wonder how long they've been running Linux...
I used to be a Tech. Svcs. Mgr. for a company that operated several hospitals and clinics and most of us in IT were scared to death when we heard that our primary application vendors were considering dropping support for their UNIX- and VMS-based products in favor of those they were developing/porting to NT. They were working on this the entire time I was employed there and the customers who were running the UNIX and VMS products were the poor cousins when upgrades came around (we were two releases behind current on VMS because the vendor whose product we ran on our Alphas couldn't get their poop in a pile and validate their product on a version of VMS that was nearly two years old). One vendor had the gaul to inform us that we were in the minority of their customer base (unhappy? VMS-based?, who knows) even though our informal survey of their users taken at one of the usergroup conferences showed that the VMS and/or UNIX OSs were not the reason that the product was seen as difficult to use. Our conclusion: MS was pushing cheap/free development tools at them which made developing for anything other than NT too expensive.
Our firewall could barely keep up with the load and was running on an NT server even though we threw several inhouse administrators and consultants at the performance problems. Why an NT-based firewall? Because the dain-bread analyst chosen (mainly because he had an MBA) to implement the firewall couldn't handle the TIS-on-BSD firewall that was originally purchased and refused to accept any assistance; took him forever to set up the NT-based as well :-). Want a report on firewall activity? Expect that to take all day on the NT box... and the firewall performance to be even more sluggish than usual!
One thing that I found to be a common complaint among users of healthcare software was that users either love their application or they despise it; mostly the latter. For some reason, healthcare software vendors seem to attract the least talented programmers or those that have little to no knowledge of the operating system that they are developing for; healthcare applications seem to go out of their way to circumvent any system services, security, you name it. My apologies to any healthcare developers out their; perhaps I haven't met you or found any users who've used your software yet.
Just what can MS add to their product to make them more attractive? Yah, a browser! That's just what the nurses need!
It's great to see Linux at a Heatlhcare site, I
wish there would be more installations. However
Microsoft has managed to convince majority of CIO folks, that Linux is more of a hobby tool. They are currently trying to lure most of the Healthcare CIOs away from traditional UNIX arch to
Windows NT arch. This area is one big market where
Linux can save Healthcare CIO's a lot of money.
-- A Linux fan
Finally, something on slashdot that directly relates to me.
I am an IS Director for an insurance claims administrator. We have a mix of Unix systems - databases run on HP-UX, UnixWare, Linux and the departmental servers are all Linux. Windows workstations for now but I am trying out qvwm as a possible way to re-use the old 486DX systems we have that aren't even Y2K compliant. The show stoppers of course are lack of MS Office and f^&%ing Progress who canceled their Unix client support. Bastards.
Anyway, Linux is just another Unix to me. However, the HP-UX system, while slower than my dual PPro Linux system and ten times the cost, is quite impressive when it comes to stability under ridiculous loads. HP does have wonderful support, though we pay like 2% of the purchase price per month. It's pretty silly - they sent a 4mm tape to replace the buggy version of "top" that came with the system (32K binary). But I digress.
Mark
Mark
i can just see some poor bastard installing
stock redhat and storing patient records into it.
i dont know if a computer technical solution will
fix the problem so much as some kind of other solution
that involves people having control over themselves
instead of giant corporations or the government
having control over them.
even linux isn't about freedom when you are just a lowly user or entry in a database.
Hah. I just got back from vacation (gave away a bunch of Red Hat CDs overseas) and the first task from the boss was to install Red Hat on two machines. It seems a monitoring application was too unstable on MS-Win, so the software vendor had ported it to Linux. On the other hand, we need to talk to a process control device and as the manufacturer has allowed its UNIX interface to fade in favor of MS-Win, this process control company is going to get less business because we need to talk from UNIX...
The masses are slowly getting it, but too slow for my taste.
"Users that have customized Linux to run their apps must also maintain and support it, which requires staffing."
Windoze does not require staffing? And huge wastes of precious time to baby-sit?
"Given Windows' dominating presence..., combined with healthcare's traditional conservatism
regarding new technologies, Linux is a long way from mainstream."
Doesn't NT mean "New Technology"? Isn't Windoze 98 new technology?
And W2k, what about that? Is it Ok to rush out to migrate to this crap
but Linux - I don't know, that's "new technology"...
"The days of having enormously expensive, proprietary systems
is going away because the information is now in everyone's hands."
I'm glad to see more people are beginning to view "proprietary" as a dirty word.
Zoloft
"Stuff"? In Microsoft's case, "stuff" should probably be replaced with another "s" word..
Q: What are the system requirements for Windows 2000? .. Stuff..
A: Uh..
This just shows they just plain don't get it. People don't want "new stuff." They want something that will fucking work . What a concept.
Hmm, I guess John Carpenter missed that BugNET article. Or maybe "stuff" is his euphemism for "bug fixes."
Always mount a scratch patient.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
You mean the "stability" angle alone isn't going to do it for them? (read with a sarcastic tone.)
Come on MS, that's how you compete in a free marketplace! You INNOVATE! Make a better product or sell a comparable one for cheaper.
I wonder what they would put into their products if it weren't for competitiors like Linux, WordPerfect, Intuit, Netscape and others... IMHO, not much.
-Derek
Try telling that to the next black minister who finds his church razed to the ground one Sunday, or the next black guy they burn alive.
I'm sure they'll agree with you completely.
Idiot.
axolotl
Maybe it's my mood lately... But something about hearing GNU/GPL stuff refered to as "Freeware" just rubs me the wrong way.
I guess that would be the proprietary protocols they talked about in the Halloween document.
Same old MS - it's innovation, we didn't break that guy's stuff on purpose... sure....
The revolution will NOT be televised.
fish and pipes
Hopefully, they'll start with QUALITY!!!!!
Do those guys still exist?
What century are they from?
I'm out of my tree just now but please feel free to leave a banana.
The guy states that, "Win NT would crash alot",
and the Micro$oft reply is, "we better add some
stuff"? To agree with a previous post, "Why not
fix the OS"? It's getting too funny!
New stuff like "De-commoditized protocols" is more like it...
First, let's not have loss-of-data comments. Hospitals are anal enough that they print out everything at the same time they enter it into any computer. If you go for surgery somewhere, the appointment scheduling and room scheduling will quite likely be on NT. But that won't spell your doom.
However, an NT crash in a hospital is still a major headache. The typical large hospital has one cluster of operating rooms (for the prescheduled surgeries) next to a large recovery room (pre-op right next door as well, as well as a waiting room). In the recovery room's desk area is an NT server that handles room bookings with all of the hosptal's wards. When the LAN is working, it's awesome. By the time the patient ir out of the RR, the nurse station at his ward has staff knowing exactly when to expect him, what specialists to call in an emergency, diet, prescriptions, and as an added benefit, the patient's friends wait for him by his room, rather than outside the RR (where only one or two should stick around -- a crowd around there would be in the way). The patient's paper records arrive with him.
When the LAN crashes, this we enter nightmare land. Paper records have to be copied and delivered by hand, as well as confirmation that the ward is ready for the patient. (forget about doing it over the phone -- too many details to convey) The hospital can't divert too many staff for this, and can't use the tube shoot (it's mostly for delivering samples and drugs). The recovery room gets crowded with patients who aren't cleared out, and the hospital may have to postpone prescheduled surgery (I saw this happen as a volunteer in one place.)
So, knowing Linux has made an inroad is very good news. There was only one real impediment: you can't ask nurses to start learning Unix commands, or they will give you a very dirty look
Microsoft could start a campaign FUDding people about the risk of their medical records being seen by scary Hackers (TM), and then offering a product with a decommoditized protocol for hospital LANs for transfering medical records in a proprietary format.
That's about all they could do at this point.
The FDA is capable of barring their entry to anything they could seriously munge up.
I wasn't sure what I was reading for a second there. Maybe I've sniffed too many rubber tires...
--
Infuriate left and right
The next article on the page refers to some computers "infected by the year 2000 bug." What's with this? Is the general public this mal-informed or has someone just deleted their wetware dictionary?
They are referring to it as "Open Source." damn! Next time I should wait until I'm finished reading the article before I reply!
Well, I guess that the "freedom to innovate" mantra is starting to hurt.
:)
"You mean we actually have to COMPETE???" And with free software at that! Oh I get a warm fuzzy feeling.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
An abacas? Stone Tablets? Get a clue.
I would trust my life to Linux and just about any commercial unix I have ever dealt with. Also VMS. I have the experience that tells me that these are stable and can be trusted.
I wouldn't keep recipes on RedmondWare.
Of course, you are perhaps refering to patient record confidentiality? That is another issue.
If I'm in the hospital, I'd like some degree of certainty that the staff knows what my lab results are and what meds I'm to get. If they are keeping that info on NT, they had better give me lots of prozac.
-- hgc
-- hgc
Linux: There is no infringing code.
I would like to add that Huntsville is one of the most high tech cities in the nation. You can throw a rock and it will quite likely hit a rocket scientist, optics engineer or a genetics researcher. I remember reading some statistics that per capita it has the highest concentration of computers in the country. It's research park is the second largest in the world. Only Silicon Valley is larger. It is not at all surprising to see its non-technical industries on the cutting edge with the rest of the city.
As a matter of fact, there's quite a large group of Linux users in the North Alabama area. We host LUNA Lunches every few weeks, and have InstallFests every other month. At the last Fest, we had well over 50 people show up! (Not sure of the exact max; I was working). There are quite a few more than that subscribed to our mailing list, and some of our more distant members are trying to create Middle and North-Western Users Groups as well. If you're within driving distance and interested in attending the next Fest, or you'd just like more information, check out our page at:
http://luna.huntsville.al.us/ .
LUNAtics -- to arms!
Unxmaal