Software Showdown on the Healthcare Horizon
Last week, both Microsoft and vendors using the Linux open source operating system released new software designed to support healthcare applications, reports Information Week. Continuing interest in the implementation of electronic health records for patients have driven the market over the past few years. Large IT vendors such as Microsoft and Oracle have an eye on healthcare, anticipating a significant financial opportunity as healthcare providers gain interest in IT tools to streamline care and reduce costs. Health care is well known as a laggard to most other industries as far as implementing information technology is concerned.
Redhat, a prominent Linux provider, is partnering with McKesson, the largest company in healthcare which includes IT support for over half the hospitals across the U.S. This may help foster a more competitive environment and drive down costs of IT applications in healthcare. The move also shows a new direction for Redhat which had shown little interest for vertical applications so far.
The Certification Commission for Healthcare IT is the certifying agency for healthcare applications. Created two years ago, it considers system efficiency and capability of software before certification. At this point, no open source software has certification. As an article from eWeek explained a year ago, EMR software is still mostly proprietary.
OpenVista and Tolven also announced open source healthcare systems last week. OpenVista is based on developments made for the Veterans Health Administration and was modified to run in other hospitals with support from Medsphere. Tolven released details on a partnership with Palm, to link electronic health records to the Treo smartphone.
See also Cerner Streamlines Healthcare Workflows, (Somewhat) Challenged by Open Source.
March 7, 2007 Related topics: Partnerships & Consortia, IT & software