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."
Affordable health care (Score:5, Interesting)
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 explain to suits that when things go wrong, it is *not* their fault. So, I'll be optimistic about this.
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.
I'd hate to be a patient - first hand experience (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Lackluster vendor makes incremental, pitiful st (Score:3, Interesting)
Would also be supremely good for the Open Source community in general because of the massive amount of publicity we could gain from this (especially if the code is stronger, better and faster).
My $0.02 AU, ignore at will
embedded PowerPC Linux gets medical (Score:1, Interesting)
A year or so after the dust had settled following my departure from and the subsequent implosion of LinuxPPC, I got a call from some southeast Wisconsin consulting group. The woman who called admitted she didn't know what she was talking about, but here it was: "Linux development on an embedded PowerPC processor." Apparently one of the people there, whose name I recognized at the time, had said "find Jason Haas! we need to find Jason Haas! He'd be perfect!" I laughed and told the nice woman that I honestly had no clue how to do what she was talking about, but I knew just the person for it... and I gave them Jeff Carr's phone number. She thanked me and we hung up.
Time passes...
A few months later I get a call from jcarr. "Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeey!!!" (this will sound very familiar to anyone who knows jcarr!) It took a few minutes for me to be able to tell what he was saying, as he was rather excited.
Turns out I'd gotten him a job subcontracting for GE Medical Systems. What I like to refer to the military-media-medical industrial complex.
That was 2001 or 2002... and now jcarr's out in the Valley, hooked up with old school Mac developers like Chuck Boich,
and Linux folks too. We'll see about working on The Next Big thing some time soon. (RSN!)
Dont make me laugh (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
mainframe to windows (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Just make it work (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes.... that IS a lot of data.
And running a GUI should have nothing to do with it. A reasonably modern computer shouldn't incur all too much of a performance hit by running a GUI layer. Linux + Xfce makes a great lightweight desktop that should be very familiar to Windows users, and shouldn't incur all that much of a CPU hit on any recent sytem. Also, considering that a Medical MRI is an inherently visual system, it sort of makes sense to have some sort of GUI in place, even if it is only a simple one.
My biggest concern, like you mentioned, is that Windows simply isn't a stable system. Hotfixes, service packs, etc... all cause huge issues. On the other hand, a good single-purpose Unix installation should work indefinitely without any routine maintenance required.
I manage an old serial-line powered by SCO OpenServer last modified in the mid-90s. About once every 4 or 5 years, we replace a drive in the RAID array, but apart from that, the system has *never* had a software problem. Say what you like about the evils of SCO, but I couldn't possibly justify spending the time any money to replace a system that's been working at nearly 100% for over 10 years.
The *very* non-technical staff in the office also like it quite a lot better than the GUI Windows system that was supposed to replace it.
*nix + X11 should be the standard for medical equipment. Windows is simply a poor choice for the task.
Potential... (Score:2, Interesting)
Some years ago, when I entered the greek army to do my military duty and after boot camp, I ended up in a military hospital. To make the story short, I worked there for a couple months as an office assistant.
The resident Captain Psychiatrist called me to his office one day to request assistance for some Microsoft Access database he was building. I told him I didn't knew anything about it, but I was going to find out. I had time to spare.
I went through the built in help files and solved his problem and that excited him probably thinking he found some computer genius. So, he showed me his project, which was an extremely basic database in Access for his patients and asked me if I could take over. I am not a programmer (having only typed a few lines in C64 Basic and Amiga AMOS) and not the programming type (I even failed math at high school),but I am comfortable with computers and in the greek army people that know how to use a keyboard and click with a mouse are a tiny minority. Plus, I definitely had lots of time to spare!
So I bought a book on the subject, borrowed his Psycho-bible and sat down and learned about MS Access, databases, interface design and psychology while programming this thing. It became a complicated beast with all kind of diagnostic entries and references and pushed Access and myself to the limits. After about a month, Captair Doctor was jumping around with joy as the project seemed to have a good starting point and lots of potential. He told me that there was nothing good in the market, especially the greek one and that we should develop and market it commercially. We also became friends and even had dinner with his family, a very rare thing to happen, considering I was a drafted private and he a professional officer. I had to abandon the project when my time to leave the hospital came but I found out that it was picked up by another, just like me, drafted soldier who took my position in the hospital office.
Now, isn't that more or less the situation with Open Source? Imagine if I didn't have to use a developing base that sucked (both OS and tool), actually was skilled with coding, had more time and a whole community to take the project from me, instead of letting it die in some dusty box...
Re:Affordable health care (Score:2, Interesting)
Here is an example of how it works....
Dr - I just did open heart surgery and saved that patients life.
Gov't - Wow! That is SUPER AWESOME!!
Dr. - It took 2 surgeons, 3 nurses, several hours in an OR room, lots of blood transfusions, etc...
Gov't - Cool, we pay 1,000 for Open Heart Procedures
Dr. - It cost us 25,000 to do the procedure
Gov't - 1,000 take it or leave it.
Dr. - Ok here are the forms for reimbursement.
Gov't - We're sorry you didn't check box 62 on page 1243
Dr. - Dammit! Ok here is the form with the box checked
Gov't - We're sorry we already processed this
Dr. - I know. You said it was filled out wrong so I corrected it.
Gov't - We're sorry we can't process this twice.
Dr. So how do I get paid?
Gov't - Fill out the forms correctly next time.
Dr. - I was unable to stay in business with the high cost of insurance and low reimbursement from payers like Medicare.
Unemployment Office - Wow that sucks! You have an experience with French Fries?
Re:hmm (Score:2, Interesting)