Switching Hospital Systems to Linux 305
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."
Re:Lackluster vendor makes incremental, pitiful st (Score:4, Informative)
Linux at the desk top is so next year.
Re:Lackluster vendor makes incremental, pitiful st (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Lackluster vendor makes incremental, pitiful st (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 programmer. McKesson also used to run their enterprise software on AS/400, but they also bought HBOC medical system software company which was mainframe software, so it's probably referring to that.)
There was a big problem with the HBOC thing, lawsuits, etc., but they would have rewritten in J2EE anyway. And you'll hear people who have to use web systems replacing mainframe tty systems saying the same thing everytime. I have a collection of articles that make that point over and over.
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Re:(laughs so hard milk squirts out his nose) (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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.
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 make up for it in many cases.
Browser based terminals... Give silverlight a whirl - Win, Mac and Linux with reasonable
Mirth (Score:1, Informative)
Re:It's Not a Mainframe (Score:1, Informative)
Re:... and screw the economy (Score:3, Informative)
That said:
1) The machines did perform their alloted tasks adequately, but did not perform the newer tasks that employees were required to perform. For one, email is increasingly becoming an integral part of intercorporation communications. These employees using the terminals did not otherwise have access to a PC to check their email. Furthermore, the hospital had newer software tools that, while not critical and necessary to their jobs, could help the employees perform their jobs more quickly.
2) The users were frustrated by their inability to check email and see notices posted on the hospital's intranet site. Their basic job duties weren't impeded, of course.
3) The cost of supporting 5250 terminals for us had risen past the point that they were a viable solution. Parts were becoming scarcer. IT personnel who actually knew anything about them were in short supply. It just didn't make sense to keep them around. And once you replace one in a department, you have to replace them all in order to prevent a riot. Employees are petty and once one employee gets something that another employee perceives as better (and yes a Pentium II, low end Pentium III was perceived as better), then you better make sure that all employees are happy.
I contacted about 40 software providers... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I contacted about 40 software providers... (Score:1, Informative)