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Switching Hospital Systems to Linux
Posted by
samzenpus
on Wed Dec 12, 2007 10:08 PM
from the open-sores dept.
from the open-sores dept.
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."
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hmm (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
It looks like they're taking a 4 month break from touring, but they'll be back on the road in February!
http://www.thecure.com/events/default.asp?Year=Upcoming [thecure.com]
Re:hmm (Score:5, Funny)
Tuesday, Wednesday, RAID set's broke
Thursday, let out the magic smoke
but on Friday, I patch bugs
Monday, my xorg conf is toast
Tuesday, Wednesday, CPU roasts
Thursday, it won't even POST
but on Friday, I patch bugs
Parent
Re:LINUX IS FUCKING SHIT!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Affordable health care (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Affordable health care (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Affordable health care (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Affordable health care (Score:5, Interesting)
You would think that after they pay for their equipment, the costs of using it would go down. It just isn't so, Sure there are still costs like maintenance and so on but generally the cost of using it goes up once it is paid off.
Parent
Re:Affordable health care (Score:4, Insightful)
"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.
Parent
Re:... and screw the economy (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:... and screw the economy (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:... and screw the economy (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:... and screw the economy (Score:5, Interesting)
You get the picture. In fact, in most of health care, that's just what happens already. They spend as little as possible on IT and reapportion the cost to areas of service that will directly benefit their ability to attract doctors and customers and therefore generate greater revenues.
Those reading this might think I'm kidding, but let me tell you this: I once replaced a token ring network with an ethernet network connecting Pentium IIs and IIIs. In 2005.
-- A former healthcare IT worker.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Affordable health care (Score:4, Interesting)
But thinking about it, I guess you're right, these socialist countries suck. The game console they carted into my room while I was in the hospital was a stinkin' NES - now, come on. How rinky-dink and Soviet can you get? I wanted an N64, damnit!
Parent
Lackluster vendor makes incremental, pitiful step (Score:5, Interesting)
I wish our hospital system could dig its way out of it. I don't think running on top of Linux will help much. See if you can get a screenshot of their software on their website - I can't - they don't promote this stuff to the physicians and nurses who use it - it gets sold to the suits. There's a goldmine out their awaiting some entrepreneur who could really take pride in writing good software of this sort, and though I love Linux, I don't really care what it runs on top of.
Re:Lackluster vendor makes incremental, pitiful st (Score:3, Interesting)
RedHat may help though - they might insist on some level of quality / provide some assistance in the creation of software that does not suck quite so much. They have a reputation to maintain, as well as sufficient company-ness to expla
(laughs so hard milk squirts out his nose) (Score:3, Funny)
(laughs so hard milk squirts out his nose)
Red Hat newbie, are we?
Re:(laughs so hard milk squirts out his nose) (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:(laughs so hard milk squirts out his nose) (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:(laughs so hard milk squirts out his nose) (Score:5, Informative)
Just because a product wasn't plug-and-play in 1997 when you last used it, doesn't mean it still sucks a decade later.
The amount of testing/development that takes place in the fedora community all funnels directly into a more stable and usable product(i.e. RHEL). That subscription to RHN ensures those engineers bust their ass to fix whats wrong and get it delivered to you: it also means that if your the IT staff in said hospitable and something doesn't make 100%, you can call someone who it does make 100% to and get an answer/fix instead of diagnosing it for 45 minutes while a doctor needing to do a simple task breathes down your neck and wastes both their time and yours.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
OBVIOUSLY you haven't been using Windows Vista.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You don't "call" IE, you serve it. And the description poster provided is of the Java server code rewrite that didn't work like the prior "tty" system. That's mainframe terminal software. (I'm an AS/400 System i pro
Re:Lackluster vendor makes incremental, pitiful st (Score:4, Informative)
Linux at the desk top is so next year.
Parent
Re:Lackluster vendor makes incremental, pitiful st (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Lackluster vendor makes incremental, pitiful st (Score:5, Interesting)
Pay attention here, IT freaks. Notice that the user here (possibly your doctor) says nothing about the OS. This is simply abysmal design and implementation. Unix/Linux/Windows/OSX/Oracle/Postgres/MySQL/MSSQL....ALL could end up thusly. Or all could end up not too bad. Design it right, and build it right. Think about what your user is actually trying to accomplish.
I saw some comments upthread about RedHat this and Linux that...Bullshit. The user interface is (most of) the key. If you screw that, the backend matters little.
Yes, if you start from a stable base, it is easier. But no matter what the base is, if you fuck up the actual program and interface the that user, in this case a doctor or nurse, uses....everything else is irrelevant. They will hate it. And still not care what the base OS is.
Parent
Re:Lackluster vendor makes incremental, pitiful st (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Lackluster vendor makes incremental, pitiful st (Score:5, Interesting)
We're in beta testing with actual patients now and my boss is bankrolling us into starting a company to sell the software and other medical-related IT solutions to local doctors (many of whom have horribly inefficient offices and don't fully realize it). I'm hoping we can expand beyond just local doctors, because it is a huge market and the best anyone else seems to be doing (around southern Ontario at least) is holding seminars to talk about how technology could be used to enhance medical practice someday.
Parent
Re:Lackluster vendor makes incremental, pitiful st (Score:4, Insightful)
my 2 cents
Parent
Re:Lackluster vendor makes incremental, pitiful st (Score:5, Funny)
I remember sitting in on a presentation they once made to one of our directors regarding some new patient records management system they were trying to pitch to us. Not one single screen shot was shown nor were any technical people on hand so that I could ask the difficult questions. In the end, when she asked me my opinion, the conversation went like this:
Me: Remember application X that you used to use at hospital Y?
Her: Uh... yes.
Me: They wrote it.
We didn't buy the software.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
They want accountability. They want someone to blame/sue if something goes wrong. A bunch of geeks writing software anonymously across the Internet? No hospital manager will go for that, especially with privacy guidelines going rampant. Even if they have the source code, they will not have the time/money to audit that code to make sure that everyone's info is not going to Russia.
They'll talk to Redhat and McKesson... Those companies are taking the responsibility (and liabi
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
They want accountability. They want someone to blame/sue if something goes wrong.
IMHO if they went this way the best option would be to hire a couple of really good programmers and get them to do the final QA on the code. Set down guidelines for the anonymous geeks out there and ignore code that breaches this. True this allows for winners of the underhanded C competition to have a crack at sneaking code into the system, but the accountability is there, and is thus no different from hiring a software company. The geeks benefit because at some point the cost of health care would surely d
Just wanna give a shout out to the PR rep... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Dont make me laugh (Score:3, Interesting)
OpenVista (Score:5, Informative)
OpenVista is the open source version of the VA's VistA program, deployed at over 1500 sites worldwide. You can also grab it for free from http://sourceforge.net/projects/openvista [sourceforge.net].
Yes, you can get professional training, installation and ongoing support for it:
http://medsphere.org/ [medsphere.org]
Re:OpenVista (Score:4, Informative)
I'm a pretty hardcore advocate of FOSS solutions, and I was excited by the hype around VistA. But after learning about this system in some detail there's no way I could recommend it as a reasonable alternative to the better commercial systems out there despite the savings on software licenses. MUMPS is a platform without much of a future. There are huge gaps in functionality. And the future of VistA outside the VA is far from certain. I'd encourage anyone looking for an EMR/EHR system to educate themselves about VistA a little, but I suspect most of them will reach the same conclusions we did.
Parent
OpenVista (Score:3, Funny)
As Michael Bolton once said "No way. Why should I change? He's the one who sucks."
Posting as AC for obvious reasons... (Score:4, Interesting)
We can argue about how much of healthcare costs are sucked up by IT. But whatever percentage you come up with is likely to be not insignificant. And one of the biggest costs of healthcare IT is the amount of money paid to so-called "IT Consultants".
My understanding is that pure healthcare people don't understand much about IT and since they figure IT is the next biggest thing, they are willing to give money hand over fist to people who have decent resumes in this field who present themselves as IT "experts".
They are throwing their money away. It's really awful.
If you don't believe me, look at some of the so-called IT "standards" documents coming out of the healthcare IT community.
Sure, HL7 V3 is a good, robust yet flexible standard definition. But look at some of the abysmal crap that is being built off of it.
I mean, seriously, read some of these "standards" documents coming from non-HL7 sources. Not only are they inconsistent with reality. They have massive internal contradictions, logical inconsistencies and even simple syntax errors. And this is stuff from organizations that have been around for A DECADE.
Believe me, IT consulting has nothing to do with helping the healthcare industry actually make the best use of modern technology and everything to do with lining the pockets of a few contractors who would be thrown out of any other domain for sheer incompetence.
Just make it work (Score:3, Interesting)
In the past Unix (SunOS) was the preferred platform, there are actually many MRI systems running on a 100Mhz Sparc processors today, which still do and excellent job.
We've moved to Windows, it's a common interface for users who can learn it quickly. Windows requires CPU's in the 3Ghz range and higher to be effective. Windows also has major issues with Service Patches and hotfixes in the Medical imaging world, all updates have to be QA'd so there is a delay of months before they get applied. Medical Imaging will probably continue to move away from Windows and it's patches if can make an interface easy for the average user who walks upto a system and start using it.
Recently at Siemens Medical http://www.siemensmedical.com/ [siemensmedical.com] the MRI systems moved from Windows to Linux (Suse) for the image reconstruction computers (Not at the user console). During MRI imaging data is coming in from the scanner at 10MSamples/Sec at 24bit accuracy up to 32 separate channels, that's a significant amount of data to be processed, having a mouse pointer and a GUI interface is just not needed, Linux just more efficient.
Bad idea (Score:3, Insightful)
It's Not a Mainframe (Score:5, Interesting)
The original Computerworld article [computerworld.com] cited is confusing, but it refers to UNIX mainframes. The most likely educated guess is they're talking about high-end UNIX servers from Sun, Hewlett-Packard, and/or IBM, not what we would generally think of as true mainframes, notably IBM's System z [wikipedia.org].
Yes, among System z's five popular operating systems z/OS contains a complete and certified UNIX(TM) implementation (called z/OS UNIX System Services). And yes, System z runs 100% GPL open source kernel.org Linux. And yes, OpenSolaris on z will be z's OS #6 before too long, and that's clearly UNIX(TM) too. But I doubt the article is talking about any of these technologies, based on the context of the article. There are not 2,500 U.S. hospital IBM mainframes (the number of McKesson hospital customers cited), for example. Maybe there should be.
Computerworld's editors seem to be on vacation, unfortunately, so their usually good copy editing is suffering, resulting in some gibberish articles. This week they also reported that Steve Jobs and The Woz approached Commodore in 1982 to talk about the latter company selling the Apple II, pointing out that Apple's two founders didn't have enough money to launch the product, worked out of a basement, and the safety and stability of cashing out for a couple hundred Gs was better than the alternative. Unfortunately for Computerworld they got the date wrong: by 1982 Apple was doing just fine, and The Woz was doing Nissan commercials.
mainframe to windows (Score:3, Interesting)
No!!! (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:No!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
In mathematical terms:
A = {basic set of programming artifacts}
B = {domain-specific structures and computable knowledge elements}
X = {A U B}
and Y = {A}
Parent
Re:No!!! (Score:4, Funny)
public class YourWrong {
public static void main(String args[]) {
System.out.println("Hello Asshole. Yeah, this is 50 lines...");
}
}
That's five lines...
$ wc -l YourWrong.java
5 YourWrong.java
$ javac YourWrong.java
$ java YourWrong
Hello Asshole. Yeah, this is 50 lines...
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Just watch (Score:5, Funny)
The janitor will come by, type a few random key strokes into the terminal, and boom, no more linux box. *nix computers are just too easy too kill.
Yeah, that's the major flaw of Unix operating systems, and it still hasn't been solved in the 35 years Unix has been around.
If only there was some sort of system under which some special user with special powers could create user accounts deprived of these special powers so that they wouldn't be able to break everything...
Parent
Re:In the middle of a hospital system implementati (Score:3, Informative)
In your particular case, that would be EnterpriseDB. You didn't say whether you're running SE or EE, and I can't remember whether BI is emulated by EnterpriseDB or if they only emulate AS, but if you want to talk about an open source strategy it is worth at least mentioning. The other big money saver is moving from EE back to SE - partitioning is all well and good, but you can afford about a terabyte of solid-state drive for the saving in licence fees, which would more than m