Switching Hospital Systems to Linux 305
jcatcw writes "Health care software vendor McKesson Provider Technologies is focusing on ways to cut IT costs for customers, including hospitals and medical offices. The cure is moving many of McKesson's medical software applications to Linux, which can then be used on less expensive commodity hardware instead of expensive mainframes. A deal with Red Hat allows McKesson to offer its software in a top-to-bottom package for mission-critical hospital IT systems."
hmm (Score:5, Funny)
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It looks like they're taking a 4 month break from touring, but they'll be back on the road in February!
http://www.thecure.com/events/default.asp?Year=Upcoming [thecure.com]
Re:hmm (Score:5, Funny)
Tuesday, Wednesday, RAID set's broke
Thursday, let out the magic smoke
but on Friday, I patch bugs
Monday, my xorg conf is toast
Tuesday, Wednesday, CPU roasts
Thursday, it won't even POST
but on Friday, I patch bugs
Re:LINUX IS FUCKING SHIT!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
Java is "fully of weird mysteries" regardless of the platform.
Java app servers are plenty prone to crashing and eating up
all available memory. You don't need to run them on Linux for
that. AIX or Solaris will do equally well.
My guess is that they made changes without fully understanding
them or testing them. They disturbed their the little java
house of cards they had going.
Affordable health care (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Affordable health care (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Affordable health care (Score:4, Insightful)
The entire medical biz is a scam to get the poor to finance a few $2,500,000 homes and lots of BMW 7 series cars. Doctors do not deserve to be paid insane rates. Some doctors are sane and charge real rates and tell their clients to avoid the hospital at all costs while helping them with outpaitent surgery in their offices.
IT costs are less than 1/90th the cost of health care.
Re:Affordable health care (Score:5, Interesting)
You would think that after they pay for their equipment, the costs of using it would go down. It just isn't so, Sure there are still costs like maintenance and so on but generally the cost of using it goes up once it is paid off.
Re:Witch Doctors! (Score:2)
I asked what that meant, so he lit an herb smoke;
And then the witch doctor, he gave me this advice -
he said to
Cut Down, on high priced cures,
use prevent-tative measures
Vitamin C, ten cents a pop,
*before* you get the cold and cough
The only time for that doctor-bloke
is somethin' like your leg is broke!
Oo ee, ooh ah ah, ting tang,
walla walla bing bang!
Re:Affordable health care (Score:4, Insightful)
"So, what kind of 'special version' of word should a doctor need? do they come with special medical symbols? "
Oh well... I can not do sarcasm as well as a real Briton would do it... sorry.
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The companies who made that machine need to recover R&D costs over a small number of units.
Those machines are not in everyone's house, ya know.
If the damn ambulance chasers stop with the frivolous lawsuits and concentrated on the actual screwups - the costs should go down. The Dr's unions need to start kicking out the "bad" ones.
MRI machines are mega bucks. Most hospitals I know run tho
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And god Forbid that you have something serious, I was placed inside a 20 year old MRI machine at the cost of $1200 for a lower lumbar set that I walked in for. I was there half an hour and saw one nurse and t
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Re:... and screw the economy (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:... and screw the economy (Score:5, Insightful)
If you ask why, or even worse, try to reduce your consumption, you are directly challenging the personal validation system of the more conformist consumers. If someone measures their self worth on the amount of money they earn, or the expensive toys they have, then you are questioning their status in the social pecking order.
Re:... and screw the economy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:... and screw the economy (Score:5, Interesting)
You get the picture. In fact, in most of health care, that's just what happens already. They spend as little as possible on IT and reapportion the cost to areas of service that will directly benefit their ability to attract doctors and customers and therefore generate greater revenues.
Those reading this might think I'm kidding, but let me tell you this: I once replaced a token ring network with an ethernet network connecting Pentium IIs and IIIs. In 2005.
-- A former healthcare IT worker.
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That said:
1) The machines did perform their alloted tasks adequately, but did not perform the newer tasks that employees were required to perform. For one, email is increasingly becoming an integral part of intercorporation communications. These em
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"If this catches on...." then fucktards like you will have your ball grabbing, jumping off a cliff day. w00t!
Instant gratification just isn't fast enough nowdays it seems. Sheesh, get a frikkin' life, asshat.
Re:Affordable health care (Score:4, Interesting)
But thinking about it, I guess you're right, these socialist countries suck. The game console they carted into my room while I was in the hospital was a stinkin' NES - now, come on. How rinky-dink and Soviet can you get? I wanted an N64, damnit!
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What an incredibly selfish point of view.
The benefit from his spen
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Let's turn this around. Let's say that you live in the US, and
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What the hell is that comment meant to mean:
That KDE and Gnome have low market share compared to Windows? We knew that.
Perhaps it means that there is something wrong with the open source desktops? In that case, what? I far prefer KDE to Windows (I hated having to use Windows at work, I used someone else's Windows laptop recently and found it horrible) and I know plenty of other people w
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Finally someone else I agree with. The slashdot == opensource idea is just a myth. A large percentage of Slashdotters have little to no experience with Linux (based on the content of their comments).
In terms of Gnome vs. KDE vs. Windows, in terms of Window manager+environment, I would rank them in order of preference KDE,Gnome,Windows... I use Windows every day, and I still would rank Gnome above it.
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Lackluster vendor makes incremental, pitiful step (Score:5, Interesting)
I wish our hospital system could dig its way out of it. I don't think running on top of Linux will help much. See if you can get a screenshot of their software on their website - I can't - they don't promote this stuff to the physicians and nurses who use it - it gets sold to the suits. There's a goldmine out their awaiting some entrepreneur who could really take pride in writing good software of this sort, and though I love Linux, I don't really care what it runs on top of.
Re:Lackluster vendor makes incremental, pitiful st (Score:3, Interesting)
RedHat may help though - they might insist on some level of quality / provide some assistance in the creation of software that does not suck quite so much. They have a reputation to maintain, as well as sufficient company-ness to expla
(laughs so hard milk squirts out his nose) (Score:3, Funny)
(laughs so hard milk squirts out his nose)
Red Hat newbie, are we?
Re:(laughs so hard milk squirts out his nose) (Score:5, Funny)
Re:(laughs so hard milk squirts out his nose) (Score:5, Informative)
Re:(laughs so hard milk squirts out his nose) (Score:5, Informative)
Just because a product wasn't plug-and-play in 1997 when you last used it, doesn't mean it still sucks a decade later.
The amount of testing/development that takes place in the fedora community all funnels directly into a more stable and usable product(i.e. RHEL). That subscription to RHN ensures those engineers bust their ass to fix whats wrong and get it delivered to you: it also means that if your the IT staff in said hospitable and something doesn't make 100%, you can call someone who it does make 100% to and get an answer/fix instead of diagnosing it for 45 minutes while a doctor needing to do a simple task breathes down your neck and wastes both their time and yours.
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OBVIOUSLY you haven't been using Windows Vista.
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Snort much milk, PeeWee? (you've obviously been out of touch with RedHat lately, and in touch with only yourself)
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You don't "call" IE, you serve it. And the description poster provided is of the Java server code rewrite that didn't work like the prior "tty" system. That's mainframe terminal software. (I'm an AS/400 System i pro
Re:Lackluster vendor makes incremental, pitiful st (Score:2)
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They want accountability. They want someone to blame/sue if something goes wrong. A bunch of geeks writing software anonymously across the Internet? No hospital manager will go for that, especially with privacy guidelines going rampant. Even if they have the source code, they will not have the time/money to audit that code to make sure that everyone's info is not going to Russia.
They'll talk to Redhat and McKesson... Those companies are taking the responsibility (and liabi
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They want accountability. They want someone to blame/sue if something goes wrong.
IMHO if they went this way the best option would be to hire a couple of really good programmers and get them to do the final QA on the code. Set down guidelines for the anonymous geeks out there and ignore code that breaches this. True this allows for winners of the underhanded C competition to have a crack at sneaking code into the system, but the accountability is there, and is thus no different from hiring a software company. The geeks benefit because at some point the cost of health care would surely d
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Re:Lackluster vendor makes incremental, pitiful st (Score:4, Informative)
Linux at the desk top is so next year.
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Haha, that's a good one, I have to remember that.
Re:Lackluster vendor makes incremental, pitiful st (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Lackluster vendor makes incremental, pitiful st (Score:5, Interesting)
Pay attention here, IT freaks. Notice that the user here (possibly your doctor) says nothing about the OS. This is simply abysmal design and implementation. Unix/Linux/Windows/OSX/Oracle/Postgres/MySQL/MSSQL....ALL could end up thusly. Or all could end up not too bad. Design it right, and build it right. Think about what your user is actually trying to accomplish.
I saw some comments upthread about RedHat this and Linux that...Bullshit. The user interface is (most of) the key. If you screw that, the backend matters little.
Yes, if you start from a stable base, it is easier. But no matter what the base is, if you fuck up the actual program and interface the that user, in this case a doctor or nurse, uses....everything else is irrelevant. They will hate it. And still not care what the base OS is.
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Re:Lackluster vendor makes incremental, pitiful st (Score:4, Insightful)
Think about what your user is actually trying to accomplish.
But you missed the point in the grandparent posting -- this system is sold to the suits who run the hospital, not the poor sods who actually get to use it. As a result there is really no impetus for the management of the software company to spend anything more than the barest minimum they can get away with to actually develop the software or make sure it runs right.
I've been in this sort of situation (as a programmer) and I can say that it's not pleasant, nor conducive to good software development, usability, reliability etc.
Rich.
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Re:Lackluster vendor makes incremental, pitiful st (Score:5, Interesting)
We're in beta testing with actual patients now and my boss is bankrolling us into starting a company to sell the software and other medical-related IT solutions to local doctors (many of whom have horribly inefficient offices and don't fully realize it). I'm hoping we can expand beyond just local doctors, because it is a huge market and the best anyone else seems to be doing (around southern Ontario at least) is holding seminars to talk about how technology could be used to enhance medical practice someday.
Re:Lackluster vendor makes incremental, pitiful st (Score:4, Insightful)
my 2 cents
Re:Lackluster vendor makes incremental, pitiful st (Score:5, Funny)
I remember sitting in on a presentation they once made to one of our directors regarding some new patient records management system they were trying to pitch to us. Not one single screen shot was shown nor were any technical people on hand so that I could ask the difficult questions. In the end, when she asked me my opinion, the conversation went like this:
Me: Remember application X that you used to use at hospital Y?
Her: Uh... yes.
Me: They wrote it.
We didn't buy the software.
Re:Lackluster vendor makes incremental, pitiful st (Score:2)
Re:Lackluster vendor (Score:2)
There's a goldmine out their awaiting some entrepreneur who could really take pride in writing good software of this sort, and though I love Linux, I don't really care what it runs on top of.
I just got a job at a very good clinic (not in IT, but that's another story), and I must say, they are good in spite of their computers. Case in point: I have four computer logins, and two phone logins. All without getting up from my chair. More to the point, after looking at this stuff for six weeks, I keep thinking, "OK, this is pretty sophisticated, but it's still just a front end to a database. It could be a LOT better if there had been an information architect in the building when they put it together
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Just wanna give a shout out to the PR rep... (Score:5, Insightful)
Two points off for the "less expensive commodity hardware instead of expensive mainframes" - that's a Microsoft marketing phrase from the early 1990's for God's sake - but still a pretty good job all around.
Dont make me laugh (Score:3, Interesting)
OpenVista (Score:5, Informative)
OpenVista is the open source version of the VA's VistA program, deployed at over 1500 sites worldwide. You can also grab it for free from http://sourceforge.net/projects/openvista [sourceforge.net].
Yes, you can get professional training, installation and ongoing support for it:
http://medsphere.org/ [medsphere.org]
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OpenVista (Score:3, Funny)
As Michael Bolton once said "No way. Why should I change? He's the one who sucks."
Re:OpenVista (Score:4, Informative)
I'm a pretty hardcore advocate of FOSS solutions, and I was excited by the hype around VistA. But after learning about this system in some detail there's no way I could recommend it as a reasonable alternative to the better commercial systems out there despite the savings on software licenses. MUMPS is a platform without much of a future. There are huge gaps in functionality. And the future of VistA outside the VA is far from certain. I'd encourage anyone looking for an EMR/EHR system to educate themselves about VistA a little, but I suspect most of them will reach the same conclusions we did.
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http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/A_Case_of_the_MUMPS.aspx [thedailywtf.com]
Posting as AC for obvious reasons... (Score:4, Interesting)
We can argue about how much of healthcare costs are sucked up by IT. But whatever percentage you come up with is likely to be not insignificant. And one of the biggest costs of healthcare IT is the amount of money paid to so-called "IT Consultants".
My understanding is that pure healthcare people don't understand much about IT and since they figure IT is the next biggest thing, they are willing to give money hand over fist to people who have decent resumes in this field who present themselves as IT "experts".
They are throwing their money away. It's really awful.
If you don't believe me, look at some of the so-called IT "standards" documents coming out of the healthcare IT community.
Sure, HL7 V3 is a good, robust yet flexible standard definition. But look at some of the abysmal crap that is being built off of it.
I mean, seriously, read some of these "standards" documents coming from non-HL7 sources. Not only are they inconsistent with reality. They have massive internal contradictions, logical inconsistencies and even simple syntax errors. And this is stuff from organizations that have been around for A DECADE.
Believe me, IT consulting has nothing to do with helping the healthcare industry actually make the best use of modern technology and everything to do with lining the pockets of a few contractors who would be thrown out of any other domain for sheer incompetence.
I worked for these guys and can definitely say.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Just make it work (Score:3, Interesting)
In the past Unix (SunOS) was the preferred platform, there are actually many MRI systems running on a 100Mhz Sparc processors today, which still do and excellent job.
We've moved to Windows, it's a common interface for users who can learn it quickly. Windows requires CPU's in the 3Ghz range and higher to be effective. Windows also has major issues with Service Patches and hotfixes in the Medical imaging world, all updates have to be QA'd so there is a delay of months before they get applied. Medical Imaging will probably continue to move away from Windows and it's patches if can make an interface easy for the average user who walks upto a system and start using it.
Recently at Siemens Medical http://www.siemensmedical.com/ [siemensmedical.com] the MRI systems moved from Windows to Linux (Suse) for the image reconstruction computers (Not at the user console). During MRI imaging data is coming in from the scanner at 10MSamples/Sec at 24bit accuracy up to 32 separate channels, that's a significant amount of data to be processed, having a mouse pointer and a GUI interface is just not needed, Linux just more efficient.
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There's an easy fix for that: don't use Vista.
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Modern high-end processors should be able to highly sophisticated real-time processing on the data
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Yes.... that IS a lot of data.
And running a GUI should have nothing to do with it. A reasonably modern computer shouldn't incur all too much of a performance hit by running a GUI layer. Linux + Xfce makes a great lightweight desktop that should be ve
Bad idea (Score:3, Insightful)
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Trash Linux and then mode me up (Score:2)
was Bad idea (Score:5, Interesting)
DB... (Score:2)
...as open-source alternatives such as MySQL and Ingres catch up with features and robustness, they will eventually be brought into the mix.
On a zOS system, you'd run DB/2, but they use Oracle on Linux. I'm still having a bit of a hard time believing that MySQL on linux has the same "features and robustness" as DB/2 on zOS.
Btw, I can run plenty of web front end applications that have a mainframe on the backend. This looks like a case of rewriting crappy applications with more crappy applications. But this time I can make a press release showing I'm tossing out my "5 nines" mainframe for a linux farm (which could, provided the apps are writ
In the middle of a hospital system implementation (Score:2, Insightful)
* The database and reporting layers are Oracle 10g.
* The hospital system application system runs on top of the Oracle 10g Business intelligence suite.
* The system is run on 3 servers per hospital site. Two of the servers are configured to use RHEL and one is running Windows Server 2003. Medium term planning (after the system is stabilized) inc
Re:In the middle of a hospital system implementati (Score:3, Informative)
In your particular case, that would be EnterpriseDB. You didn't say whether you're running SE or EE, and I can't remember whether BI is emulated by EnterpriseDB or if they only emulate AS, but if you want to talk about an open source strategy it is worth at least mentioning. The other big money saver is moving from EE back to SE - partitioning is all well and good, but you can afford about a terabyte of solid-state drive for the saving in licence fees, which would more than m
I'll take medical starts and ends with Alex... (Score:2)
It's Not a Mainframe (Score:5, Interesting)
The original Computerworld article [computerworld.com] cited is confusing, but it refers to UNIX mainframes. The most likely educated guess is they're talking about high-end UNIX servers from Sun, Hewlett-Packard, and/or IBM, not what we would generally think of as true mainframes, notably IBM's System z [wikipedia.org].
Yes, among System z's five popular operating systems z/OS contains a complete and certified UNIX(TM) implementation (called z/OS UNIX System Services). And yes, System z runs 100% GPL open source kernel.org Linux. And yes, OpenSolaris on z will be z's OS #6 before too long, and that's clearly UNIX(TM) too. But I doubt the article is talking about any of these technologies, based on the context of the article. There are not 2,500 U.S. hospital IBM mainframes (the number of McKesson hospital customers cited), for example. Maybe there should be.
Computerworld's editors seem to be on vacation, unfortunately, so their usually good copy editing is suffering, resulting in some gibberish articles. This week they also reported that Steve Jobs and The Woz approached Commodore in 1982 to talk about the latter company selling the Apple II, pointing out that Apple's two founders didn't have enough money to launch the product, worked out of a basement, and the safety and stability of cashing out for a couple hundred Gs was better than the alternative. Unfortunately for Computerworld they got the date wrong: by 1982 Apple was doing just fine, and The Woz was doing Nissan commercials.
mainframe to windows (Score:3, Interesting)
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It's an accountants solution (CHEAP!) not a technical one.
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And I always stay far away from those projects, because I know the amount of overtime that will come when the users starts to complain about the stability that they were used to, are gone.
Potential... (Score:2, Interesting)
Some years ago, when I entered the greek army to do my military duty and after boot camp, I ended up in a military hospital. To make the story short, I worked there for a couple months as an office assistant.
The resident Captain Psychiatrist called me to his office one day to request assistance for some Microsoft Access database he was building. I told him I didn't knew anything about it, but I was going to find out. I had t
I contacted about 40 software providers... (Score:3, Informative)
No!!! (Score:5, Funny)
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1) A domain specific language X is less verbose than a general purpose language Y
2) A language X is significantly less verbose than Java
I think for any X and Y those statemets are true with a 97% probability. It's not really an advantage of this MUMM thing you are speaking of - it's more that if it weren't so, MUMPS would be a disaster of epic dimensions.
Re:No!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
In mathematical terms:
A = {basic set of programming artifacts}
B = {domain-specific structures and computable knowledge elements}
X = {A U B}
and Y = {A}
Re:No!!! (Score:4, Funny)
public class YourWrong {
public static void main(String args[]) {
System.out.println("Hello Asshole. Yeah, this is 50 lines...");
}
}
That's five lines...
$ wc -l YourWrong.java
5 YourWrong.java
$ javac YourWrong.java
$ java YourWrong
Hello Asshole. Yeah, this is 50 lines...
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Re:Just watch (Score:5, Funny)
The janitor will come by, type a few random key strokes into the terminal, and boom, no more linux box. *nix computers are just too easy too kill.
Yeah, that's the major flaw of Unix operating systems, and it still hasn't been solved in the 35 years Unix has been around.
If only there was some sort of system under which some special user with special powers could create user accounts deprived of these special powers so that they wouldn't be able to break everything...
You're right - you're so right (Score:2)
Any advanced server you should be able to kill with a few mouse clicks, [wikipedia.org] so that way your janitor or your cat can kill the system. Killing the system through a root console is so 1970's.
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You can't serious call the medical industry the public sector can you?
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2) I wish you could in the US as well.
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Who exactly the hell are you and who is Jeff Carr? And why do you think your names are recognizable without context?
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