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Switching Hospital Systems to Linux
Posted by
samzenpus
on Wed Dec 12, 2007 11:08 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: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
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Affordable health care (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Affordable health care (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
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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.
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Re:... and screw the economy (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
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Re:... and screw the economy (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
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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:4, Informative)
Linux at the desk top is so next year.
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Re:Lackluster vendor makes incremental, pitiful st (Score:5, Informative)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Re:(laughs so hard milk squirts out his nose) (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:(laughs so hard milk squirts out his nose) (Score:5, Informative)
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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.
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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.
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]
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.
No!!! (Score:5, Funny)
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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}
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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...
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