Tag Archives: Medsphere

Response to ZDnet article on Medsphere

Dana Blankenhorn has posted an article regarding my claim that Medsphere has betrayed the community on ZDnet. Is Medsphere taking it back, is a great article overall, but its conclusion is terrible. From the article: Medsphere�s board probably feels it was a Little Red Hen, doing all the work for a lazy community�s profit.

In his defense, Dana is one of many people who do not understand that Medspheres business model relies entirely on the community-built VistA codebase. Given its current actions, this makes Medsphere alot more like a “slimy brown leech” than a “little red hen”. Still I am glad to see that the mainstream blogs are starting the pick this up. It is important for Medspheres board to see that this issue will only get bigger and bigger, as it recieves more publicity.

Fred Trotter

OpenVistA� EHR in Midland

This article has a great write-up on Midland Memorial Hospital’s use of Redhat Linux and Medsphere’s OpenVista�. Quoted from the article: “This year, Midland Memorial Hospital in Midland, Texas, became the first community hospital in the country to adopt Open Source-based electronic health records (EHR). The implementation reflects the emergence of Open Source alternatives in healthcare applications as well as the growing movement to computerize patient medical records to reduce costs and improve patient care.” Editor’s note: 10/19/06 The author of this Case Study is Medsphere’s Vice President of Sales and marketing. Read Dr. Ho’s comment about the article neglecting to mention that OpenVistA� is not Open Source.

Editorial: Is Medsphere an Open Source Company or Not?

After years of publicly saying they are an Open Source company, and the ‘leading provider of Open Source software for the healthcare industry’, Medsphere Corp. has yet to release their core product OpenVista� as Open Source. It is entirely their right to use the Veterans Affairs VistA codebase, modify, rewrite and not release it to the VistA community. However, holding forth as loudly and as publicly as they have that they are an Open Source company while not releasing their core software, makes me question the sincerity of their claim of being the ‘leading provider’ of Open Source. Especially in the face of suing the founders of the company for many millions of dollars because they actually released company developed software as open source on Sourceforge.

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MedSphere is really open source.

Today George Timson (author of FileMan) clarified that Medspheres OpenVistA is open source contrary to the information found in the recent Fortune Magazine VistA Article, already mentioned here. From the post:
“For those interested, I just want to note that Medsphere’s product is NOT proprietary. (“OpenVista” would not be a very appropriate name for a proprietary product!) We’ve installed CUSTOMIZED versions of Vista at several hospitals, and these customized suites of software include proprietary components from a few third-party vendors like Sea Island Systems and Informatix Laboratories Corporation. The basic CPS/VistA product we install and support is open source.

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