Brad Barclay’s blog has a report about the Canadian EHealth Conference 2005. He concludes that the ‘doers’ (implementers) of EHR’s do not understand FOSS: ‘There are billions of dollars available in Canada to implement IT solutions for health care, but it could all be wasted because the “doers” don’t understand the concept of Open Source…in setting up their information technology, had they considered Open Source as a solution?

The answers were long winded, but boiled down to this: the panellists didn’t feel Open Source was a viable alternative at this time.

The most charitable respondee was Mr. Granger, of the UK’s National Health Service, who admitted that they have several Linux servers, and that eventually, Open Source will take over the field, but that existing efforts aren’t sufficiently evolved to meet current needs.

Least charitable was Ms. Liang of the US’s Kaiser Foundation, who said “We looked at Open Source for all of two minutes, and then dismissed it”…’ Another article on IT business Canada covers the same event and contains a number of um, interesting, comments. Thanks to Benjamin Jung for these links.