October 16th, 2007
Medsphere reboot is complete with Doyle hire
Medsphere completed its re-boot yesterday by announcing the hire of new CEO Michael J. Doyle from AHS, an online billing company.
The hire makes good sense. The weakness of Medsphere, which began with the VA’s public domain VistA software, always lay in the billing area. Since the Veterans’ Administration is a single-payer, getting its funds from the government, there was no need to make that module robust.
AHS is a Software as a Service (SaaS) outfit, and an alliance between the two companies also makes perfect sense. So, for that matter, does a merger, and the emergence of Medsphere as a SaaS offering in its own right.
But all this is for the future. For now, Matt Asay of C|Net notes, Medsphere is closing the book on its troubled past, a past which saw it kick out its founding brothers, the Shreeves, when they did what they had promised they would do, release the company’s software as open source.
While Medsphere eventually released a version of its software to the OpenVista project, its own version uses a proprietary license. A group called WorldVistA now assists those who use the open source version of VistA.
Open source is a great way for hospitals to control their IT departments, and Medsphere was once a promising candidate in that arena, but the company is now only based on an open source project. If you want open source hospital IT, you need OpenVista.
Still, having a base in open source could allow the emergence of truly open standards in hospital IT, rather than the proprietary standards hospitals face now. And without the billing and settling modules, Medsphere had terrible problems gaining much market attention.
Medsphere the company now has some key customers, including a hospital in Midland, Texas and the state of West Virginia. The work of repairing relations with the open source community is an ongoing process, which Doyle can also help move forward.
But he’s starting from way behind. Automation is becoming a mandate in the hospital arena, the cost of switching vendors rises exponentially once the initial install is made, so Medsphere faces a limited window.
It hopes Michael Doyle can jump through.
UPDATE: Fred Trotter of LinuxMedNews has an interview with Doyle.
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.
Subscribe to ZDNet Healthcare via Email alerts or RSS.
