Category Archives: get-with-the-program

Europe Far Ahead in Healthcare Open Source

Minoru Development Corp. president Brian Bray on the OpenHealth list writes: ‘…For the benefit of North American readers, you should be aware that many countries in Europe are already far ahead of your wildest dreams in the adoption of open source. For many parts of the public service here, it’s not a matter of “if”, or even a matter of “when”, but a matter of “how”. Health care is closely tied to the public sector in most parts of Europe.

Some concrete examples for our Spirit travels:

Dave [Scott] heard a minister of the economy for one of the smaller member states talk at length about the advantages of Zope for public administrations.

Some specific administrations have entirely switched to open source and are now giving talks on how to do it.

The CIO of a hospital information systems vendor (integration and outsourcing) that Joseph [Dal Molin] and I spoke with indicated that virtually all of her customers (about 20 hospitals) were planning the transition to Linux in two years time. She was worried about how whe could bring her staff up to speed.

My feeling is that a lot of health care system vendors are starting to plan their transition to open source — either proprietary products on Linux or releasing their product line under open source licences.

Some concrete examples of “early adopters” on this list are Nautilus/Odyssee (Page is in French) and GT.M.

One of the big tasks of the Spirit project is to visit vendors, care delivery organizations and policy makers to educate them about open source. Part of the transition is releasing their existing code under open source licences. We offer a seminar from
http://openhealth.com/minoru/testmdc/en/products.html for this. It is our goal to increase the base of open source health care software by this means.

You can help by pointing us at the best opportunities (or pointing them to us). We will be making all the briefing materials public as soon the Spirit site goes live, so that you can use the same information in your presentations if you want.