Code Red: How software companies could screw up Obama’s health care reform.
By Phillip Longman
This article is worth reading in full.
-Glen Newton
http://zzzoot.blogspot.com/"Why did similar attempts to bring health care into the twenty-first
century lead to triumph at Midland but tragedy at Children’s? While
many factors were no doubt at work, among the most crucial was a
difference in the software installed by the two institutions. The
system that Midland adopted is based on software originally written by
doctors for doctors at the Veterans Health Administration, and it is
what’s called "open source," meaning the code can be read and modified
by anyone and is freely available in the public domain rather than
copyrighted by a corporation. For nearly thirty years, the VA
software’s code has been continuously improved by a large and
ever-growing community of collaborating, computer-minded health care
professionals, at first within the VA and later at medical
institutions around the world. Because the program is open source,
many minds over the years have had the chance to spot bugs and make
improvements. By the time Midland installed it, the core software had
been road-tested at hundred of different hospitals, clinics, and
nursing homes by hundreds of thousands of health care professionals."
--
-
Locked
