I chanced upon this article by Charles Babcock of InformationWeek on a California bill that calls for “interoperable records and a full, hospital-running health care IT system that’s open source.”
While the article goes on about an open source health care system provided by Medsphere (if interested, you can read the article here)
My thoughts however, went on a different direction – will mandatory regulations forcing the adoption of Open Source in the healthcare industry really lower cost of health care?
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Are there enough qualified IT professionals available to implement and support it?
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Who will be responsible for correcting any bugs identified
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And will it really be cheaper?
Of course, there are many gray areas, gaps as well as benefits (I’m all for it if it will lower cost of health care) but to quote an old friend “open source is free only if your time is free”.
Food for thought eh 🙂
BinaryHealthCare (BNHC) 