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THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 26, 2009
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Open-Source Software a Cheap Fix for Hospitals

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(Newser) – Hospitals around the country are scrambling to comply with a federal mandate that they digitize their records systems, and one Texas hospital is an example of how to do that virtually for free, the Wall Street Journal reports. Developed with billions of taxpayer dollars, the Veterans Health Administration’s software is open source, meaning anyone can modify or compile it gratis.

Midland Memorial spent just $7 million to upgrade from a system based on pneumatic tubes to one based on the VA software. That included new computers, and hiring a company to modify the software for commercial use. That second step might soon be unnecessary; Sen. Jay Rockefeller has introduced legislation to create a commercial open-source system, and provide it free to safety-net and rural hospitals.

Nurse Jennifer Castagnier works on a bedside workstation of the Pyxis Medstation System as patient Philipp Kohlbacher rests at the Indiana Heart Hospital in Indianapolis.
Nurse Jennifer Castagnier works on a bedside workstation of the Pyxis Medstation System as patient Philipp Kohlbacher rests at the Indiana Heart Hospital in Indianapolis.   (Getty Images)
A laptop computer sits in the Berenson Emergency Department at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.
A laptop computer sits in the Berenson Emergency Department at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.   (Getty Images)
An emergency-room nurse works at a clinical workstation at the newly opened Berenson Emergency Department at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.
An emergency-room nurse works at a clinical workstation at the newly opened Berenson Emergency Department at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.   (Getty Images)
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3 comments
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Mad
Apr 30, 09 12:23 PM CDT
Wow, the circle is now complete. I worked on the very first think tank assembled to create the 'electronic file' for the Bureau of Medicine at Bethesda Regional Medical Center in '82. We wrote it in BASIC and it took almost 10,000 lines of code just to create a standard form (the SF-600, actually, Chronological Record of Medical Care). Ah.... we thought we were so SOTA (State of the Art) LOL Many moons ago Reply
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wwwonderer
Apr 30, 09 12:51 PM CDT
Computers get more powerful by the second. 1982, huh. A little before my time; I had just gotten an Atari 400 with 2 cartridges: BASIC and Pac-Man. Now days, my watch has more memory on it than the mighty machines did. Better hit that Turbo button to go from 4.77MHz to a whopping 10MHz. But this is one of the reasons I don't understand why industries that maintain a lot of paper -medical, insurance/financial, banking financial, educational, etc.- don't benefit from cheaper technology. The y way I see it, many of the reasons technology holds industries back is because of corruption in bureaucracy; public, private and governmental alike.
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Timinator2K
Apr 30, 09 1:47 PM CDT
Viva the Open Source Revolution! Before, somehow, the RIAA, the MPAA, Macrohard and other disparate entities lobby Congress to outlaw it or, force any open source program user to pay them royalties. Reply
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