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."
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.
Re:Affordable health care (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:HIPAA (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Lackluster vendor makes incremental, pitiful st (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 liability) for the software. They won't talk to random Joe Blow on the internet.
Re:... and screw the economy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:... and screw the economy (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:embedded PowerPC Linux gets medical (Score:2, Insightful)
Who exactly the hell are you and who is Jeff Carr? And why do you think your names are recognizable without context?
I worked for these guys and can definitely say.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Bad idea (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Lackluster vendor makes incremental, pitiful st (Score:4, Insightful)
my 2 cents
In the middle of a hospital system implementation (Score:2, Insightful)
* The database and reporting layers are Oracle 10g.
* The hospital system application system runs on top of the Oracle 10g Business intelligence suite.
* The system is run on 3 servers per hospital site. Two of the servers are configured to use RHEL and one is running Windows Server 2003. Medium term planning (after the system is stabilized) include cutover from the Windows servers to the Linux servers.
* The system utilizes a client on workstations that is browser based. Initial design of this client includes ActiveX controls, which limits the use of the clients to Windows based workstations. Further down the road, testing on MONO based clients are options.
* Major customization and integration has taken place as part of a large project.
All in all, it is quite easy to switch systems to Linux, since Oracle is portable. It would also put a lower load on the servers and bandwidth. Note however that the biggest expenditure is still the Oracle licenses and the Windows licenses pales in comparison, and changeover would also cost money... so, is this not a case of penny pinching?
Re:... and screw the economy (Score:3, Insightful)
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}
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.
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.
Re:... and screw the economy (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Affordable health care (Score:2, Insightful)
The companies who made that machine need to recover R&D costs over a small number of units.
Those machines are not in everyone's house, ya know.
If the damn ambulance chasers stop with the frivolous lawsuits and concentrated on the actual screwups - the costs should go down. The Dr's unions need to start kicking out the "bad" ones.
MRI machines are mega bucks. Most hospitals I know run those babies 24/7/52 to get the volumn of patients through it to actually pay for it.
I don't have the statistic in front of me but US doctors typically run a lot more tests to diagnose than non-US doctors.
Maybe they're trying to avoid the ambulance chasers that sue because the patient didn't get a full head to toe MRI for that broken leg.
Also the attitude of - it's available - run the test.
The patients attitude of it's got to be some sort of DISEASE, gimme pillllllssss.
Re:Affordable health care (Score:3, Insightful)
The benefit from his spent money is that that system was there should he have needed it. The benefit from his spent money is lower cost health care for everyone, including everyone in his family, regardless of income or employment status.
You could say the same for paying property taxes that pay for a fire department you never need. Or for streets you never drive on.
You could say the same for homeowner's insurance that you never have to claim against. It's called "shared risk". The difference in this case is that countries outside the United States see health care as a basic human right.
Oh, and by the way, who the hell do you think pays for it when some poor unemployed, poverty-stricken schlub gets whacked by a bus and needs emergency room care? It's called the "Uncompensated Care pool" and it's paid for by the US taxpayer. We're already paying for part of our health care system through taxation. If we do away with private health insurance, and people give that money to a national health care system instead, I'd bet a paycheck that most people would end up paying LESS money. Have you SEEN how much some people pay for 'employer subsidized' health insurance? Lots of people pay $500 a month for the family coverage. Six grand a year times however many millions of people is a LOT of money.
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.
Re:Affordable health care (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's turn this around. Let's say that you live in the US, and you and your employer pay health insurance premiums from the time that you are 25 to the time you are 50. Those currently run about $800/month for a family of four, split between you and your employer, or about 9600/year. Over 25 years, let's just use constant dollars for simplicity, that will come to what, about $220,000? During these years, you're a low activity user of health care. Now, let's say you lose your job, and have a history of high blood pressure. You seek private health care insurance, and can't get it because of your prior history. You've paid close to a quarter of a million dollars, which has gone in about a 60/40 split to paying for other's care and insurance company overhead and profit, and at the very time in your life where it's time for you to be able to draw from the pool, you can't get to it.
That's the miracle of the US system.
In both cases, what you'd like to see happen is that you form a pool of risk, and individuals pay into the pool at the cost of their average risk, and take from the pool based on the individual experience. On average, people pay less. You can do it from taxes, or your can do it from a hodgepodge of private companies. If you do it from the hodgepodge of private companies, the private companies have an incentive to deny coverage to the folks who actually need health care. The private system sets up to create the exact situation you are proetsting might happen in the socialist approach.
I'm a died in the wool capitalist, but there are some problems that markets don't solve well, and this is one of them.