January 8th, 2009
Can VistA overcome?
Change has truly come.
The announcement that DSS is moving to the Eclipse Public License for its wxVistA software means open source has a scaled, solid, unified front in the health IT procurement wars now starting in Washington.
President-elect Obama has stated he wants health IT to be part of his stimulus package, and HIMSS vendors have been waddling up to the trough ever since.
Even if open source isn’t mandated, it’s now very possible that open standards will be embraced in the Obama package, which should cut costs for everyone down the road.
As Fred Trotter noted, DSS’s software was by far the best VistA implementation around, but its commercial license splintered the open source health IT movement and kept it from being taken seriously by policymakers.
No more. Now wxVistA is in the hands of Open Health Tools, a group modeled on the Eclipse Foundation and headed by Eclipse founder Skip McGaughey.
This puts the ball squarely in the new Administration’s court. Will it get the open source message in time? Will its strategy embrace open source and open standards?
Billions of dollars are at stake over the next two years as the U.S. medical establishment is dragged into the 21st century.
I went for a check-up just today and was met by a smiling face holding a pad of papers. The young doctor’s handwriting was worse than mine. I joked with him about it.
That handwriting can be hazardous to my health. What happens when he leaves? Will his successors be able to read that chicken scratching? What if I need to see a specialist — will my history get to them or will they have to take it down again?
The promise of health IT is that we do away with handwriting, that we collect and use that data in improving medical protocols, and that we gain the efficiency needed to cover every American.
That’s an enormous promise. Can it be fulfilled in a proprietary environment, which health IT generally is right now?
I don’t think so. Only open standards, with open source as a standard implementation, has a chance of doing that.
The question is whether that change can be forced before the existing vendors are so gorged with new contracts for their proprietary offerings that it becomes impossible to turn back.
I hope so. Hope is a big improvement over what open source had last week.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist since 1978, and has covered technology since 1982. He launched the Interactive Age Daily, the first daily coverage of the Internet to launch with a magazine, in September 1994. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 01/08/09
